The Vera Institute of Justice has been partnering with leaders in government and civil society for 50 years. This video provides an overview of its work, along with highlights of some of the current projects extending Vera's remarkable record of accomplishments.

Sudhir Venkatesh, William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, talks with Vera director Michael Jacobson about his 18 months advising the FBI on working with local law enforcement agencies to deal with gang-related crime and his current research on informal justice systems in urban communities. This podcast is part of the 2011-2012 Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series.

Professor Venkatesh is author most recently of Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. He is completing an ethnographic study of policing in the Department of Justice, where he served as a senior research advisor from 2010-2011.

Professor Faye Taxman of George Mason University talks with Vera director Michael Jacobson about how U.S. corrections systems can adopt practices to help reduce recidivism—a shift that will require substantive and cultural changes. This podcast is part of the 2011 Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series.

Professor Taxman is the director of the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence at George Mason and has published more than 125 articles. In 2008, the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Corrections and Sentencing recognized her as a Distinguished Scholar.

Professor Paul Light of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, talks with Michael Jacobson about the promise—and limits—of effecting social change in troubled economic times, in the first podcast from the 2011 season of the Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series.

In this podcast, part of the 2010-2011 Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series, Rob Smith discusses a 15-year ethnographic research project following more than 100 children of Mexican immigrants to the United States. Although he found that almost 40 percent of these individuals attended college and had other positive outcomes, undocumented children lose legal protections as they move into early adulthood and their opportunities become severely limited, prompting what Smith calls “profound and serious moral and ethical questions.”
Smith is a professor of sociology at Baruch College and CUNY Graduate Center.

In this podcast, part of the 2010-2011 Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series, Jeffrey A. Fagan discusses racial profiling by police and suggests reforms in court-mandated consent decrees that would ensure better outcomes for minority communities as well as policing practices overall.

In this podcast—part of The Vera Institute of Justice Research Speaker Series—psychologist Chitra Raghavan explains the concepts of "coercive sex" and "sexual assault" as they apply to people who know one another. Operating from the assumption that all sexual relationships are about negotiation, and that the rules of negotiation may differ across cultures and gender roles, Raghavan outlines how unwanted sex is acquired through a variety of emotionally coercive dynamics in heterosexual couples and posits that different rules apply in same-sex couples.

In this podcast, Rodolfo Estrada, senior program associate of Vera's Center on Immigration and Justice, discusses law enforcement use of the U-visa. The U-visa provides temporary legal status to immigrant crime victims who cooperate with law enforcement. Joining Rodolfo are Edna Yang, legal counsel at American Gateways and consultant with Legal Momentum, Deputy Chief Pete Helein of the Appleton Police Department in Wisconsin, and Lieutenant Chris Cole of the Storm Lake Police Department in Iowa.

In this podcast New York University sociologist David W. Garland discusses his book, "Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition." Garland presents evidence that the death penalty in the United States fails to realize its stated goals. Yet it persists here—alone among developed nations—because it serves social and political ends.

In this podcast from the Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series, David Weisburd, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University discusses his groundbreaking study of micro-geographic units or “hot spots” in predicting and preventing crime.

Weisburd is the director of George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. He also serves as director of the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University. In 2010 Weisburd won the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology for this work.