To max out is to serve every day of a sentence and walk out with no parole and no one watching. Michigan last reported how often that happens in 2003 — at 13%. It has published nothing since. So we measured it again, from the State’s own public records, and we’ll tell you exactly how little we’re yet sure of.
So we followed everyone who left.
Left of the gate: the 32,075 people held in prison, drawn to scale. Right of the gate: the 162 status changes we actually observed this window — too few to even register against that wall, so the gate magnifies them. Ribbon thickness is strictly proportional to count.
Of the prison exits we recorded this window — about 156 people — the large majority were released to parole (126): released to community supervision, not held to the end of their sentence. A smaller number were discharged from the system (30). Among those 30 discharges, our snapshots happen to show none with a parole in between — which would naively read as “everyone maxed out.” We don’t report it that way: seeing each person only a few times means a parole that began and ended between two snapshots is invisible to us. The honest takeaway is that release to parole, not maxing out, dominates what we observed— and we won’t put a current max-out rate here until the census is dense enough to measure one, against all prison releases rather than discharges alone. Michigan last published a max-out rate — 13% — in 2003.
People, not throughput.
The ledger behind the flow above — what the churn costs, and how often people cycle back through the system. Cited, provisional, and aggregate. (The max-out figure and its caveats are above.)
Sources & model — 12 citations
- movement_costs aggregate table — data/offenders.db (Aggregated SQL only; person-level movement_costs columns are not selected.)
- Corrections officer loaded wage — https://www.michigan.gov/corrections/careers/salary-and-benefits
- Corrections officer loaded wage — https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes_mi.htm
- Corrections officer loaded wage — https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.htm
- Officers per move — https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/documents/policies/700/DO%20705%20-%20AL%20-%203-18-24.pdf (Arizona DOC Dept Order 705 — MDOC publishes no ratio)
- Processing time assumption — service/data/cost_model.yaml:labor.processing_hours_per_move (ASSUMPTION — intake/outtake/property/medical-clearance time; item 7 not verified)
- IRS/GSA per-mile proxy — https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-sets-2026-business-standard-mileage-rate-at-725-cents-per-mile-up-25-cents
- IRS/GSA per-mile proxy — https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-a-trip/transportation-airfare-rates-pov-rates/privately-owned-vehicle-pov-mileage-reimbursement
- EIA gasoline price — https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_gnd_dcus_r20_w.htm (Tracked in cost_model.yaml; current payload uses IRS all-in mileage rather than a separate fuel term.)
- EIA diesel price — https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/ (Tracked in cost_model.yaml; current payload uses IRS all-in mileage rather than a separate fuel term.)
- Administrative overhead assumption — service/data/cost_model.yaml:overhead.fixed_admin_per_move (ASSUMPTION — no verified source)
- Security multiplier assumption — service/data/cost_model.yaml:security_multiplier (Applied on top; high tier reflects extra officers/special vehicles for max custody.)
- Aggregate-only public payload: no MDOC numbers, names, DOBs, or per-person rows.
- Flow and max-out figures are low-n groundwork until at least two full census passes and frontier discovery are available.
- Max-out is an upper bound while sparse snapshots can miss intermediate parole.
- What we can and cannot say about max-outs yet: observed prison exits this window are dominated by parole (early release), not max-outs. The ~100% figure is a debunked upper-bound artifact, retained only to show the data gap honestly — not a measurement.
- A max-out rate must be measured against ALL prison releases (parole + discharge), not discharges alone; we do not publish a current rate until the census is denser and a true discharge-date source is available.
- Source caveat: Michigan OTIS rewrites a person's maximum-sentence date at discharge, so the at-discharge value cannot be used to infer time served; we use the original sentence-of-record date where available.
- Flow and max-out rates are low-n groundwork; render warnings and basis before any percentage.
- Flow edge prison_to_max_out is a synthetic Sankey sink split from prison_to_discharge; max-out is not an OTIS stock bucket.
View all observed transitions (accessible table)
| From | To | Count | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| prison | parole | 126 | prison_to_parole |
| supervision | absconder | 5 | absconded |
| prison | probation | 1 | prison_to_probation |
| prison | max-out | 30 | prison_to_max_out |
| prison | discharged | 0 | prison_to_discharge |
162 status-change events observed in window · Data is aggregate only · A soft-block is never recorded as a discharge.