Vera’s Washington DC Office is partnering with five jurisdictions around the country—two states and three large counties—to help them improve oversight of their jails and prisons. The project draws on lessons from the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons regarding the importance of strong oversight of correctional facilities.

Justice reinvestment is a data-driven approach to corrections policy that seeks to cut spending and reinvest savings in practices that have been empirically shown to improve safety and hold offenders accountable. As part of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, Vera provides technical assistance to states seeking to apply the approach to their local prison and supervision systems.

Vera staff are working with the New Orleans City Council, local criminal justice agencies, judiciary, civic, and community organizations, and foundation partners to address long-standing problems in the city’s criminal justice system. These stakeholders are working together as the Criminal Justice Leadership Alliance (CJLA), an unprecedented coalition focused on resolving systemic justice challenges.

Vera’s New Orleans Office is collaborating with government, community, and civic organizations to develop the city’s first comprehensive pretrial services system. The demonstration project, launched with funding from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), is integrating good practices into the criminal justice system, with the goal of yielding greater public safety and fairness. New Orleans Pretrial Services is Vera’s first demonstration project outside of New York City.

Vera’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections (CSC) is working with the New York State Division of Parole to provide supervision officers with additional tools to help people complete conditional releases from prison. The project seeks to improve parole oversight so that fewer people return to prison solely for violating the conditions of their release.

The Ohio Green Prison Project designs and implements green vocational training and reentry programs that benefit incarcerated individuals and reduce the environmental impact and operating costs of prison systems.

Vera is working with the Pew Center on the States and the Chicago-based civic organization Metropolis Strategies to publish a report about the benefits and challenges of performance incentive funding (PIF), a fiscal innovation that rewards adult and juvenile corrections agencies for improving public safety by reducing recidivism.

Vera's Center on Sentencing and Corrections is working to help Alabama officials meet their goals of reducing the prison population and controlling corrections costs, while ensuring public safety.

Los Angeles County asked the Vera Institute to study its criminal justice system, identify inefficiencies, and recommend strategies to make better use of jail space. Vera staff analyzed the county’s jail data, examined policies and processes that affect the jail’s population size, and recommended steps the county can take to alleviate jail overcrowding.

Many corrections systems isolate certain prisoners from the general prison population—a practice also known as segregation. Vera's Segregation Reduction Project (SRP) is helping states decrease the number of people they hold in segregation, transition prisoners out of segregation, and improve conditions for those who remain. The project draws on methods Ohio and Mississippi used to reduce their segregated populations by 85 to 89 percent.

Staff from the Center on Sentencing & Corrections (CSC) are working with a Chicago-based nonprofit, Chicago Metropolis 2020 (CM2020), and the independent, bipartisan Criminal Law Edit, Alignment and Reform (CLEAR) Commission, to improve criminal justice policies in Illinois. This is part of ongoing work funded by the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States.

Vera’s Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit and Center on Sentencing and Corrections, in collaboration with the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States, have developed a methodology to guide a complete accounting of the cost of prisons.