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 32,213 people held in prison, drawn to scale. Right of the gate: the 25 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.
We observed 10 people discharged from prison this window. Every one of them — 10 of 10 — maxed out: released with no parole and no supervision. That is not a rate. It is too few people, over too short a window, and our snapshots cannot see a parole that began and ended between two of them. Read it as an upper bound: the true share is at most this, and we’ll say so until the count is large enough to mean more.
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.)
- Aggregate-only. No named individuals.
- Flow/max-out figures are low-n groundwork until ≥2 full censuses + discovery exist.
- 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 | 14 | prison_to_parole |
| prison | prison | 1 | prison_to_prison |
| prison | max-out | 10 | prison_to_max_out |
| prison | discharged | 0 | prison_to_discharge |
25 status-change events observed in window · Data is aggregate only · A soft-block is never recorded as a discharge.