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AMERICANALMANAC (Alan Benson) - Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed pushed mass prisoner releases, bail elimination, and 'disinvestment' from jails Thu Sep 10 18:21:32 2026

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, spent years calling for emptying prisons, scrapping cash bail, and dismantling what he calls America's "carceral state", positions now under fresh scrutiny in a tight general election. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who won the Democratic primary to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters, built a paper […] The post Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed pushed mass prisoner releases, bail elimination, and 'disinvestment' from jails appeared first on American Almanac .

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, spent years calling for emptying prisons, scrapping cash bail, and dismantling what he calls America's "carceral state", positions now under fresh scrutiny in a tight general election. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who won the Democratic primary to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters, built a paper trail of decarceration advocacy stretching from April 2020 through at least October 2024. Substack posts, podcast transcripts, a co-authored study in The Lancet, a magazine article demanding the CDC adopt "decarceration" as public health policy, and a webinar appearance alongside a convicted murderer and a registered sex offender all document the same consistent position: fewer people behind bars, by design, permanently. The Washington Free Beacon reported on the full scope of those positions this week. El-Sayed's campaign has not publicly responded to the reporting. But the record he left behind speaks clearly enough. From COVID emergency to permanent policy El-Sayed's earliest documented advocacy came in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. On April 6, 2020, he appeared on the Decarceration Nation podcast, hosted by Joshua Hoe, a former University of Michigan debate coach, and laid out his vision plainly: "We really need to think about what it looks like to [do] decarceration you know, at scale right now." A month later, in May 2020, El-Sayed published an article in Filter magazine under the headline "The CDC Must Adopt Decarceration as a Matter of Public Health." He warned that unless jails were emptied, 100,000 people would die. The article approvingly cited a letter signed by 117 organizations and nearly 600 public health-affiliated individuals that called for releasing anyone within 18 months of their release date and the "automatic release of all people serving a misdemeanor sentence." That letter has since been taken offline. The pandemic was the stated justification. But El-Sayed made clear the goal was not temporary. At a 2020 webinar titled "I Don't Want To Die In Prison", billed as a forum "to discuss the report findings and the road to decarceration and abolition", El-Sayed said the quiet part out loud: "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... this doesn't end when the pandemic is over." That webinar featured panelists with serious criminal histories. Martin Vargas, described as a registered sex offender convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl, appeared alongside LaWanda Hollister, who served 34 years in prison for second-degree murder. Fox News reported the event was hosted by the University of Michigan's Carceral State Project. El-Sayed's choice of company matters. He was not simply lending his medical credentials to a policy debate. He was sitting on a panel organized around the explicit goal of abolition, the permanent elimination of prisons, alongside people whose own crimes would test any voter's appetite for leniency. El-Sayed used a prestigious medical journal to argue for 'disinvestment' from jails The advocacy did not stop at podcasts and webinars. In April 2021, El-Sayed co-authored a study in The Lancet, a prestigious, 200-year-old medical journal, examining the "association between county jail incarceration and cause-specific county mortality." The study's conclusion carried a policy recommendation that went well beyond epidemiology: "Our findings suggest important points of intervention, including disinvestment from carceral systems." "Disinvestment from carceral systems" is academic language for pulling money out of jails and prisons. El-Sayed embedded that recommendation inside peer-reviewed research, giving a radical policy position the veneer of scientific consensus. That same year, in March 2021, El-Sayed published a Substack post calling for "de-jailing the criminal legal system." He argued for eliminating cash bail, claiming the system disproportionately impacted Black people "in our structurally racist society." The framing was consistent: racism built the system, and the system had to come down. El-Sayed's primary victory gave Republicans the general-election opponent they preferred. His record on criminal justice is one reason why. Prisons as 'counterinsurgent warfare', even after the pandemic ended COVID provided the original pretext. But El-Sayed kept going long after the emergency passed. In October 2024, on his own podcast, he offered a statement that dropped any pretense of public health justification: "What if we understood prisons weren't meant to protect people from 'evil-doers,' but were designed as a form of counterinsurgent warfare waged by the state and wielded as a weapon against the very possibility of radical social transformation?" That is not a public health argument. It is a political argument, and a radical one. El-Sayed was not saying the prison system needed reform. He was saying prisons exist to suppress political movements. The word for that worldview is not "progressive." It is abolitionist, in the most literal sense: he wants the institution gone. The trajectory is worth tracing. In April 2020, El-Sayed framed decarceration as an emergency COVID measure. By May 2020, he was demanding the CDC make it permanent policy. By 2021, he was publishing academic papers and blog posts calling for "disinvestment" and "de-jailing." By October 2024, he had dropped the public health framing entirely and was describing prisons as instruments of state warfare against social change. Each step moved further from the mainstream. None moved back. A pattern of controversial associations dogs the campaign El-Sayed's decarceration record is not the only liability weighing on his Senate bid. His ties to commentator Hasan Piker have drawn bipartisan criticism and dominated headlines in the race. Piker's public statements have made the association a recurring flashpoint. The podcast host who gave El-Sayed one of his earliest decarceration platforms carried his own baggage. Joshua Hoe pleaded guilty in 2010 to soliciting a 14-year-old girl for sex in an online chatroom. El-Sayed appeared on Hoe's show to discuss releasing prisoners at scale. Meanwhile, Jewish Democrats in Michigan have signaled defections that could prove decisive in a close race. And El-Sayed faced additional scrutiny over his scheduled appearance at an Islamic convention alongside 9/11 conspiracy promoters, compounding questions about his judgment and associations. Fox News reported that El-Sayed also deleted social media posts endorsing the defunding of police after announcing his Senate candidacy. A longtime Democratic strategist told the outlet bluntly: "Abdul El-Sayed cannot win a general election in Michigan, full stop." El-Sayed now faces former GOP congressman Mike Rogers in what observers describe as a tight race for one of the most closely watched Senate seats in the country. The decarceration record gives Rogers and Republican groups a deep well of opposition research, written, recorded, and published by El-Sayed himself. The letter that disappeared One detail stands out. The open letter El-Sayed approvingly cited in his May 2020 Filter magazine article, the one signed by 117 organizations and nearly 600 individuals, calling for automatic release of misdemeanor inmates and early release for anyone within 18 months of their sentence's end, has been taken offline. The original URL no longer works. An archived version exists, but someone decided the document was no longer worth hosting. That decision suggests even the letter's own backers recognized how the proposal would look outside the bubble of 2020's defund-the-police moment. El-Sayed, by contrast, kept building on the same foundation for four more years. Michigan voters heading into a general election now have a clear picture of what El-Sayed meant when he talked about criminal justice. He did not mean ankle monitors or drug courts. He meant releasing prisoners at scale, pulling funding from jails, eliminating cash bail, and treating the entire system as a racist instrument of state control. He said so repeatedly, in his own words, across multiple platforms, over multiple years. Voters who value safe streets and a justice system that holds offenders accountable deserve to know exactly what their Senate candidate has been advocating, and for how long. Now they do. The post Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed pushed mass prisoner releases, bail elimination, and 'disinvestment' from jails appeared first on American Almanac .