Vera Institute of Justice Current Thinking Feed

Justice in New Orleans: Progress and challenges five years after Hurricane Katrina

jwool — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:01:56 -0500

Note: This is drawn from a related blog post Jon Wool wrote for the Open Society Foundations.
Read a related article in The Crime Report.

Déjà vu all over again?

tchiu — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:04:02 -0500

On Thursday I attended a discussion convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which just released the summer issue of Daedalus on the subject of mass incarceration. The journal’s guest editors, Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Brown University economist Glenn Loury, issued a warning.

What does a family-focused approach look like in corrections?

mdizerega — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:10:17 -0500

The short answer? Watch this video.

When exploring with corrections departments whether the time is right for them to focus on the family and other social supports of incarcerated individuals, I often find that we are in philosophical agreement: Enhancing pro-social support makes sense. But corrections staff are often unsure about how this idea could work within the culture of their organization.

Ensuring equal access in the courts

chope — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:57:17 -0500

Could you imagine being the victim of a violent crime and not being allowed to testify, even though you wanted to?

Through Vera's work on the Accessing Safety Initiative, we have learned that this is an all-too-common scenario for people with disabilities and Deaf people who have experienced a violent crime.

Involving families in reentry policy and practice

dwilhelm — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 10:19:40 -0500

Two national organizations are featuring reentry-focused work by Vera’s Family Justice Program on their web sites. The Center for Effective Public Policy recently published 11 coaching packets as part of its Prison Reentry Initiative Training and Technical Assistance Program. The series offers concrete steps for enhancing reentry-related practice, covering topics such as evaluation, case management, and motivating positive behavior change.

How to help public-sector innovation take root

mgolden — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:45:51 -0500

The Center for American Progress and the Young Foundation recently released an important report on public-sector innovation titled “Capital Ideas: How to Generate Innovation in the Public Sector” that presents five ways to generate great ideas for addressing public problems, giving useful examples of where they have been implemented by government.

This is your brain on logic

ashames — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:05:22 -0500

“Just say no.”
“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.”

Celebrating 15 years of the Violence Against Women Act

sharrell — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:34:42 -0500

Last week, staff of Vera’s Accessing Safety Initiative (ASI) were in Boston to conduct a training for grantees titled “Applying the Principles of Universal Design to Serving Survivors with Disabilities and Deaf Survivors” for recipients of the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) Disability Grant.

Rounding out the picture of juvenile justice

melliott — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:07:06 -0500

In a July 12 ABC News.com article, “Life in Prison: Should Juvenile Offenders Be Tried in Adult Courts?” Huma Khan discusses the pervasive issue of young people—particularly those who are accused of committing serious offenses or have long histories of delinquency—getting tried in adult courts rather than being tried as juveniles. According to Khan, this trend results at least in part from a spike in serious juvenile crime in 2003, following nearly a decade of steady decline.

What Time didn't tell about teen treatment programs

eelkin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:41:10 -0500

Time.com’s recent feature story, “Does Teen Drug Rehab Cure Addiction or Create it?” by Maia Szalavitz is a fascinating and disturbing report about drug-involved teens who fare poorly in treatment programs. It is also disturbing for the story it fails to tell—the advent over the past decade of innovative programs to address adolescents with substance-use problems that have not made it into mainstream practice.