The House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on House Bill 4396, a measure sponsored by Representative Lightner that would allow researchers to access juvenile and other criminal justice data through contracts or memoranda of understanding so the records can be linked and analyzed for policy evaluation.

Supporters told the committee the bill is intended to fill a gap created by state law that makes some justice-system data legally inaccessible to researchers and some government partners, preventing measurement of whether recent youth-justice reforms and diversion programs achieve intended outcomes.

Dr. Mark Kubiak, Dean of the School of Social Work at Wayne State University and Director of the Center for Behavioral Health and Justice, told the committee the Center acts as an evaluative arm for the state diversion council and that a “dearth of data” prevents assessment of which interventions reduce recidivism. “Right now, we can't do that because the data is legally inaccessible,” Dr. Kubiak said. He described the bill as creating a contract or memorandum of understanding pathway to share data with researchers so outcomes can be linked across systems and analyzed in aggregate.

Dr. Kubiak explained why limited personal identifiers are necessary for linkage: without items such as a name, birth date, gender, race or the last four digits of a Social Security number, it is difficult to determine whether records in different systems refer to the same individual. “But once that data is linked between systems, then you remove the identifiers, and no one can know who that individual is,” he said, and added that researchers would analyze outcomes at county or state aggregate levels.

Representative Lightner, who introduced the bill, said the lack of accessible data has been a longstanding barrier to making evidence-based policy in the House. “We found that we had a significant lack of access to data. And in order for us to make good policy here in the House, we kinda need to know what's going on in our system,” Lightner said, and asked the committee to anticipate bringing the bill up for a vote next week.

Committee members had no substantive questions for Dr. Kubiak during the hearing. The committee clerk read letters of support submitted for the record from Nathan Triplett of the State Bar of Michigan, the Michigan League for Public Policy, and Jen Peacock of the Michigan Center for Youth Justice; those supporters did not take the podium.

If enacted, the bill would create a pathway for authorized researchers—internal and external—to link juvenile diversion and other justice data with program and child-welfare records, then strip identifiers for aggregate analysis. Proponents said that approach would allow the state to answer policy questions such as which interventions reduce detention length, which community programs are associated with lower recidivism and how outcomes vary by county.

Next steps: Representative Lightner said she expects to bring the bill back for a committee vote next week. The measure’s specific contractual and privacy safeguards, and precisely which agencies or datasets would be included, were discussed at a high level during testimony but were not specified in detail during the hearing.