- Mike Rogers and fellow Republicans claim Democrat Abdul El-Sayed wants to abolish prisons, release violent criminals
- Opponents reference comments El-Sayed made in 2018 and 2020 but leave out context
- El-Sayed and Mike Rogers are running to replace retiring US Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat
In advertisements and campaign materials, Republicans have claimed that Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed supports abolishing prisons and the release of violent criminals.
They’ve pointed to stances that El-Sayed, a former Wayne County public health official, took during his 2018 run for governor and a 2020 panel discussion on incarceration during the pandemic.
While El-Sayed has supported policies to reduce prison populations, he has not called for abolishing prisons and in his failed gubernatorial campaign specified he’d try to commute sentences for “low risk” people convicted as minors.
El-Sayed has championed a progressive view of criminal justice and continues to criticize policies like cash bail.
GOP rival Mike Rogers, who has touted his own law enforcement background, has used El-Sayed’s past comments to frame his opponent as soft-on-crime.
Bridge Michigan is diving into the facts as part of our coverage of the fiercely competitive US Senate race between El-Sayed and Rogers. They’re competing in the Nov. 3 election to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
The claims
A 30-second TV ad claims that El-Sayed thinks 4,000 people in Michigan prisons “just like” Marc Osborn, who was convicted of murder as a minor, should “walk free.”
The ad further claims that this is part of El-Sayed’s campaign plan, but the plan shown in the ad is from El-Sayed’s 2018 run for governor.
The commercial was paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund, an organization that says it’s “solely dedicated to protecting and expanding the Republican Senate Majority.”
Rogers makes similar claims on his campaign website, saying El-Sayed “supports abolishing prisons and releasing violent criminals onto the streets. He participated in an abolish-prison webinar with a convicted sex offender and murderer and argued that we should release dangerous criminals from prison.”
The webinar appears to reference a virtual panel that El-Sayed joined in August 2020, months into the pandemic. Titled “I Don’t Want to Die in Prison,” the panel was described as a “public health conversation with Abdul El-Sayed & people who survived living in Michigan’s prisons before & during COVID-19.”
The other panelists included a man who was sentenced to prison on a criminal sexual conduct charge and a woman convicted of second-degree murder. Both were sentenced as juveniles and spent decades in prison but had been released prior to the virtual panel. This summer, the man told Fox News he didn’t know El-Sayed at the time of the panel and isn’t connected to his campaign.
In a statement to Bridge, Cole Wozniak, a spokesperson for El-Sayed, said it’s “laughable” to claim that El-Sayed wants to abolish prisons, and that he “has never called for the blanket release” of people in prison or jail.
“Instead, he believes we need to fund law enforcement to identify, prosecute, and protect communities from violent criminals,” Wozniak added, saying El-Sayed is “committed to keeping Michiganders safe.”
El-Sayed’s 2018 campaign plan
The Senate Leadership Fund’s attack ad against El-Sayed references Osborn’s 1999 conviction for the rape and murder of 18-year-old Jessica Ledford. Osborn was convicted as a juvenile and later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The US Supreme Court later ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of parole was unconstitutional. In 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court issued several opinions requiring resentencing hearings across the state. Osborne was resentenced in 2025 to 40 to 60 years in prison, meaning he’s eligible for release in 2039.
The ad references a part of El-Sayed’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign plan to address juvenile lifers in the wake of the Supreme Court decisions.
El-Sayed proposed setting the highest possible minimum sentence for juveniles to 10 years in prison, and the maximum at 25 years, a change lawmakers would have had to approve. If El-Sayed’s gubernatorial proposal had been enacted, Osborne’s sentence from the 1999 case could have ended in 2024.
Another El-Sayed proposal to lower the state’s population of former juvenile defendants could have been put into action without lawmakers. He said that in his first term as governor, he would review “all prisoners sentenced before age 18 (nearly 4,000 as of March 2013) with the aim of commuting sentences for all prisoners deemed low risk, with credit for time served.”
The ad portrays Osborne as one of the 4,000 people whose sentences El-Sayed wanted to commute, but leaves out the context that El-Sayed only proposed releasing “low risk” individuals. The state’s parole board and prison staff would have made those decisions, an El-Sayed spokesperson told The Detroit News.
El-Sayed on the virtual panel
El-Sayed was one of three panelists on the 2020 “I Don’t Want to Die in Prison,” webinar, which was a moderated discussion following the release of a research paper that presented “an evidence-based case for decarceration as the only humane and meaningful response to the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons.”
In response to a question about recommendations in the report, El-Sayed agreed with a panelist that “the infirmed and the elderly” housed in prisons should be released due to the difficulty in limiting the virus’ transmission in prisons and jails.
“But I would also say that decarceration generally is really, really critical here,” he added. “There are so many ways that society has failed to deal with real problems and has used policing and jails as a stopgap for all of these failures. This pandemic has shown us what a folly that is.”
El-Sayed said reforms should be considered for policies like Michigan’s Truth in Sentencing law, which requires people to serve their entire minimum sentence before being considered for parole.
“We’ve got to think about all of them systematically,” El-Sayed said. “But any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons and to keep people out of jails and prisons is policy that we need to be investing in, particularly right now.”
In a statement to Bridge, Alyssa Brouillet, a spokesperson for the Rogers campaign, pointed to that specific comment from El-Sayed. “Someone who wants to release murderers and rapists onto our streets shouldn’t come within a mile’s radius of the U.S. Senate,” she wrote.
The bottom line
During a virtual panel in August 2020 and in his 2018 gubernatorial campaign platform, El-Sayed advocated for policies that would have resulted in some people being released from prison before the end of their original sentence.
But he did not call for abolishing prisons, or specifically releasing violent criminals, and important context is missing from Republican claims.
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