LANSING — Another inmate jumped from an upper level at Parnall Correctional Facility near Jackson on Oct. 22, a spokeswoman confirmed, three weeks after the Legislature axed $15 million the state Senate approved to improve the safety of upper railings at Parnall and two other Michigan prisons.
The inmate, who Michigan Department of Corrections officials would not immediately identify, survived the fall and is in the hospital, spokeswoman Jenni Riehle said.
“I can confirm that a prisoner at Parnall Correctional Facility engaged in an act of … self-harm by intentionally falling from an upper gallery yesterday,” Riehle said in an email on Oct. 23.
He is at least the seventh Michigan prisoner to jump or fall from the upper levels of two Michigan prisons since 2020. Five of those falls were fatal. The Detroit Free Press has documented five of the six earlier incidents with records obtained under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act.
Railings that are too low to meet current workplace health standards are all the MDOC has in place to prevent falls or jumps from the upper-level walkways to ground levels, three or four levels below.
In May, the Michigan Senate passed a 2026 budget that included $15 million to improve the safety of the railings at Parnall and another Jackson-area prison, the Charles E. Egeler Reception & Guidance Center, each of which has four levels of prisoner housing, as well as the Marquette Branch Prison, which has three levels of housing.
That action followed the most recent fatal incident — the April 12 death of 42-year-old Ervin Robinson II, who fell from an upper gallery at Egeler in an incident the MDOC described as an accident.
But the state House never approved the funding to improve safety. And when the Legislature reached a budget impasse at the end of September, a bipartisan conference committee with members from both chambers also did not include the funding in the final 2026 budget that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law.
For years, Riehle and other spokespersons for MDOC Director Heidi Washington have refused to acknowledge a safety problem with the railings or say what, if anything, the department intended to do to address the repeated jumps and falls.
That changed Oct. 23, when Riehle said that in September the MDOC submitted a request to redirect $10 million appropriated for other purposes in the Corrections Department to improve the safety of railings at Parnall and Egeler. “That request is pending,” Riehle said when asked what, if anything the MDOC had done to address the rail safety issue. She did not say whether the transfer request had been submitted to the State Budget Office, or the Legislature.
In August 2023, a prison employee complained to Whitmer’s office that gallery railings at the two prisons were too low, putting workers at risk of falling or being pushed to their deaths several floors below, records the Free Press obtained under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act show.
Whitmer’s office referred the complaint, which also cited concerns about prisoner safety, to the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But nothing changed.
“No hazard exists,” a Michigan Department of Corrections official said in a Sept. 20, 2023, letter to a manager at MIOSHA. The agency closed its investigation less than three weeks later, without physically inspecting the two Jackson-area prisons, despite concerns raised by one MIOSHA official that improvements were needed, records show.
Since then, three more men have died by jumping or falling over or under the railings.
Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 7th inmate falls from upper prison level after Mich. lawmakers ax funds to improve safety
Reporting by Paul Egan, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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