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Highlights from Vera's 50 years of innovation

> DEVELOPING responses for people who need help, rather than punishment. By offering detoxification services to people charged with public drunkenness, Vera showed in the 1960s that courts and jails were not always the best answer to problem behavior. The project inspired new thinking about those who come into contact with law enforcement because they are homeless or coping with mental illness or substance use. It continues to serve thousands of vulnerable people today as Project Renewal.
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> FOSTERING new practice within the justice system to support and empower victims of crime. In creating the Victim Services Agency for New York City in the 1970s, Vera set a national precedent for offering comprehensive services to crime victims. This Vera demonstration project is now the nationally recognized nonprofit Safe Horizon.
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> SEEDING sentencing policy reform. In the 1980s, Vera collaborated with scholars to found the Federal Sentencing Reporter, the now-preeminent journal that judges, lawyers, policy makers, and academics turn to when thinking about or looking for ways to improve sentencing and correctional policy.
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> PAVING the way for government-subsidized “supported work” to be adapted to help New Yorkers with developmental disabilities live more easily on their own—an approach later adopted across the United States. A spin-off since 1999, Job Path has expanded to help clients find housing and integrate into the community.
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> ESTABLISHING a response to rape in developing nations that both meets the needs of victims and empowers criminal prosecutors. Vera’s Thuthuzela Care Center, launched in 2000, has been widely replicated throughout South Africa—there were 25 as of 2010—and adapted by other nations in Africa and South America.

In its sixth decade, Vera continues to pursue its mission to improve the systems people rely on for justice and safety. Here are some examples of our current work:

> To improve outcomes for kids, their families, and their communities, Vera is helping juvenile justice agencies across the United States respond to many troubled youth without separating them from their families, which evidence shows is both costly and counterproductive for a promising future and public safety.
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> In partnership with a nationwide network of 30 legal services providers, Vera is making government immigration courts more effective and fairer by providing legal information to detained adults and coordinating pro bono representation for children facing deportation.
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> Recognizing that mass incarceration is expensive, harmful to families and communities, and not always effective at reducing crime, states and localities are turning to Vera to understand why so many are in prison and jail and to seek policy options that can safely reduce prison and jail populations and return more people to productive lives in the community.
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> Vera is working in more than 40 communities across the United States to increase the capacity of social service and criminal justice agencies to serve Deaf women and women with disabilities who are survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
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> To sustain and build confidence in criminal proceedings, Vera is helping district attorneys develop internal management systems that can guard against racial bias influencing prosecutors’ decisions.
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> Having helped establish consensus around an ambitious criminal justice reform agenda for New Orleans, Vera is working with local officials, foundations, and community groups to make the city’s sentencing and corrections policies less onerous and more effective in protecting public safety.