Stories and Data
County jails are not folksy institutions, the stuff of stereotypes. In communities throughout the country, the experience of being jailed or working in a jail is anything but benign, and many local jails—especially those in small counties, surprisingly—are becoming bigger and more costly to operate.
To help Americans get real about their local jail, Vera launched the Human Toll of Jail, a web-based platform for true stories about the uses and abuses of jail, supplemented with links to relevant research, good practice, and other resources. Vera built the first-ever website where people can track incarceration trends in their own county, or in any country nationwide, and also published The Price of Jails. Already, small and mid-sized communities are waking up to the fact that bloated jails and their costs, both human and financial, are not just a big-city problem.
Related Work
Expanding our Knowledge on Local Incarceration Trends
Using the state as the unit of analysis is sufficient for understanding the broad contours of incarceration in the United States, but it does not provide the level of detail necessary to unpack its causes and consequences. This is because it is largely county officials—judges, prosecutors, people who manage jails—that decide how communities use inc...
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Christian Henrichson
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Jacob Kang-Brown
Keeping Women Out of Jail, One Mother at a Time
A special public defenders office set up to help women is keeping families together.
Kami could have walked out of the jail that day if only she could afford the $5,000 bond prescribed by the judge. But without the money, she was stuck behind bars, waiting for the court to decide whether she was guilty. Nationally, women are less likely than men to be able to bond out of jail. Women behind bars are also more likely to have a histo...
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Nissa Rhee
Exclusive First Listen: 70 Million, a New Podcast about Justice Reform
Hear the trailer for this 10-part open-source series that looks at how residents are taking action locally.
So, on August 27, 70 Million will premiere after a team of brilliant and dedicated reporters and producers spent the last eight months traveling the country to collect stories about regular folks becoming catalysts for jail and justice reform in their hometowns. A quick shout out to the dream team, so far: Jen Chien, Luis Gil, Mitzi Miller, Kate Kr...
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Juleyka Lantigua Williams
In Our Backyards Stories
United Toward Justice
Urban and Rural Communities Share Concerns about Incarceration, Fairness of the Justice System, and Public Spending Priorities
Research by the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) has demonstrated rising incarceration rates in small, rural counties and declining rates in large, urban counties—so we wondered: is this the product of a country divided on issues of incarceration and justice? In a moment shaped by narratives of bitter partisan and geographic divisions, one might ex...
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Jasmine Heiss
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Jack Norton
In Our Backyards
Ending Mass Incarceration Where It Begins
A little known fact imperils our nation’s collective efforts to end mass incarceration: Major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are no longer bearing the heaviest burden. Instead, thousands of smaller cities and towns are now grappling with the nation’s highest incarceration rates. It is time for criminal justice reformers to take n...
Project
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Christian Henrichson
Large Cities Drive Nationwide Jail Population Decline; Jails in Most Rural Counties Still Growing
The source of this data, the Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ), does not cover every jail in the United States. Its main purpose is to estimate the national jail population. The survey covers all large jails, but only a sample of smaller jails. For example, though rural counties have the highest incarceration rates, the ASJ collects data in only 14 perc...
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Olive Lu
In Our Backyards
Ending Mass Incarceration Where It Begins
Out of Sight
The Growth of Jails in Rural America
America’s 3,283 jails are the “front door” to mass incarceration. But for too long, county jail systems have operated and grown outside of public view. Vera’s Incarceration Trends data tool, launched in 2015, illuminated the growth in local jail populations over the last 40 years. This report and accompanying data visualization explores one of the ...
Series: Gender and Justice in America
Breaking the silence about women in prison
We like to think incarcerated women are so different from the general population. But that’s simply not true. I often say: If you want to understand sexism in America, go to a women’s prison. Gender bias for incarcerated women is the same bias that forces free women to have to choose between career and becoming a homemaker, accept less pay for doin...
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Taylar Nuevelle
Series: Gender and Justice in America
Mass Incarceration and its Impact Are Devastating to Women
9to5, National Association of Working Women—of which I am the Georgia chapter director—understands the devastating impact mass incarceration has on women. The rate of growth for female imprisonment has outpaced men by more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2014. Now there are more than 1 million women behind bars or under some form of correctional ...
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Charmaine Davis
Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform
Since 1970, there has been a nearly five-fold increase in the number of people in U.S. jails—the approximately 3,000 county or municipality-run detention facilities that primarily hold people arrested but not yet convicted of a crime. Despite recent scrutiny from policymakers and the public, one aspect of this growth has received little attention: ...