Defendants accused of home invasion and assault with intent to do great bodily harm in Washtenaw County, Michigan can now be considered for an alternative to jail, under a restorative justice program co-founded by Democrat Christina Hines.
The program is a formal diversion track, not a back-room favor. Prosecutors and program staff screen certain felony cases and, in cases the program accepts, offer a path built around mediation, community service, treatment and negotiated agreements in place of a traditional sentence. Participation is generally voluntary, and the charges are typically dismissed or reduced upon completion under an arrangement worked out with the county prosecutor's office.
According to Breitbart, Hines helped establish the program. She has spent years in Washtenaw County—home to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan—working on criminal justice issues there.
The offense list attached to the program is the part that should stop voters cold. Home invasion is a Michigan statutory felony carrying up to 20 years. Assault with intent to do great bodily harm is punishable by up to 10 years. These are not shoplifting cases or minor drug possession charges. These are offenses in which a person is accused of entering someone's home uninvited or of inflicting serious injury on another human being.
Supporters of restorative justice argue that the standard court process does little for victims and less for defendants, and that structured programs hold offenders accountable through supervised agreements rather than cell blocks. That is the argument. The counter is that the victims in these cases did not consent to participating in a social experiment designed in a county that votes overwhelmingly Democratic.
The mechanics matter more than the slogan. In most restorative justice programs, a defendant enters only if the prosecutor screens the case as eligible — which means a human being with discretion is deciding which home invaders get a shot at walking away without a record. That discretion is where the reform agenda lives or dies. Get the screening wrong, and the program stops being an alternative to incarceration and starts looking like a fast lane out of one.
Washtenaw County prosecutors have not published a full public accounting of which cases have entered the program, which have completed it and which have ended in dismissal. Under Michigan court rules, certain diversion records can be kept off the public docket — which is precisely the kind of secrecy that has voters in other parts of the state asking hard questions about similar experiments in their own backyards.
What is publicly known is narrower: the program exists, it accepts felony cases that include home invasion and assault with intent to do great bodily harm, and Hines helped build it. Everything else — the accept-or-reject rate, the recidivism figures, the victim consent requirement, the total cost to county taxpayers — is not in the headlines. That absence is itself a data point.
Law enforcement in Washtenaw County has not been silent about diversion generally. Officers who make the arrests in these cases are routinely not in the room when the charging decision gets made. A wrong-door home invasion arrest that would have been a felony prosecution in a neighboring county can be a mediation appointment in Ann Arbor, depending on the county prosecutor's posture on that case. County voters elect that prosecutor. They do not elect the program staff.
There is a national context here as well. Restorative justice pilots have proliferated in left-leaning counties over the past decade, frequently funded by foundations and grants that come with completion milestones. Those milestones reward programs for the number of cases they take in and complete—not for the number of offenders they keep off the streets or the number of victims who finish the process whole. That is a structural incentive to expand eligibility. It is not a conspiracy; it is a design flaw, and it is the reason these programs tend to grow well past their original scope.
Republicans in the Michigan legislature have started taking notice of county-level diversion programs. So far, however, Lansing has not moved to impose uniform reporting standards that would force counties to publish what crimes are entering these alternatives and what happens to the people who enter them.
Our Take
Call it what it is. In Washtenaw County, a Democrat-linked program tells people accused of forcing their way into a home or beating someone badly that there may be a way around a jail cell. That sentence is the entire debate. The people who wrote the check on public safety in that county should have to explain it to the family that wakes up to a screen door hanging off its hinges.
Restorative justice has a place—low-level, first-offense, non-violent cases, with victim consent and real supervision. Home invasion and great-bodily-harm assault are not that place. Those are the cases where the state's job is simple: hold the accused accountable and stand with the people who live on the street where it happened.
Michigan voters should be demanding three numbers from every county that runs one of these programs: how many felony cases went in, how many walked out with a dismissal, and where those people are now. Get the numbers. Then decide. Anything less is governance by press release—and it is not working.
