Bill to restore unannounced legislator site visits to MDOC divides witnesses over oversight and safety

The House Government Operations Committee heard testimony on House Bill 4669, which would restore legislators’ statutory authority to perform unannounced site visits to Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) facilities, rescinding a post-2022 72-hour notice requirement for legislators.

Sponsor Representative Pohutsky said the bill simply codifies longstanding practice and is intended to preserve lawmakers’ ability to provide meaningful oversight. “The ability for us to visit facilities that we fund and where our constituents are being housed is a long standing, fundamental, and crucial aspect of our job,” the sponsor said in committee testimony.

Proponents argued unannounced visits reveal conditions that announced inspections can obscure. Eden Kinlock, state legislative affairs associate for FAM, a sentencing and corrections reform organization, said announced inspections allow the department to “hide those problems during visits” and urged lawmakers to speak with incarcerated people and staff during visits. Kinlock provided institutional figures, saying MDOC incarcerates nearly 33,000 people and employs over 10,000 Michiganders to underline the oversight need.

Jim Townsend of the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy and legislative oversight veteran Ben Aike described unannounced visits as a key oversight tool and recounted past uses that led to improved understanding of daily operations and policy implementation.

The MDOC’s legislative liaison, Kyle Kaminski, opposed statutory change and urged that access remain governed by department policy. Kaminski said that, as part of the current fiscal negotiations, the department has agreed to remove the 72-hour notice rule administratively; but he argued embedding unannounced access in statute would restrict the department’s ability to handle emergencies and to enforce reasonable on-site policies intended to protect staff and residents. He cited past incidents — including legislators arriving hours late after staff were put on call, a legislator allegedly staging a surprise protest and attempting to record staff with a phone, and an instance where a legislator tried to bring a non-house staff person into a facility without proper employment status — to illustrate operational disruption that informed the 72-hour policy.

Representative Pohutsky emphasized the bill applies only to elected members, not legislative staff, and said administrative rules would remain permissible unless they directly conflicted with statute. The committee recorded written support and neutral cards (including a written card from the ACLU) but did not take a formal vote on the bill during the hearing.

Witnesses asked for further dialogue on practical safeguards (for example, how wardens could manage group visits or emergencies) while proponents said including scheduling rules in statute risks hampering oversight in genuinely urgent situations.

The hearing left a clear division: advocates called for statutory codification to protect oversight prerogatives; MDOC asked that the department’s evolving policy be allowed to govern operational details.