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History
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Vera has been planning and demonstrating solutions to persistent public problems since the Institute helped to make conditional release an alternative to bail in courts across the country. (For more information about Vera’s origins, click here.) Since 2000, Vera has completed four demonstration projects.
To address overcrowding in Immigration and Naturalization Service detention centers, Vera collaborated with the INS to develop and test a program of supervised release. The Appearance Assistance Program used proven selection criteria and supervision techniques to encourage noncitizens to voluntarily comply with immigration laws and procedures. Noncitizens involved in the program lived with their relatives or friends in the New York City area while their court cases were pending. By March 2000 when the demonstration ended, 91 percent of people who received the program’s most intensive form of supervision had appeared for all their required court hearings. Only 71 percent of people who were not involved in the program and who faced no threat of detention attended all their hearings. In the summer of 2003, the Department of Homeland Security announced a plan to pilot a similar project in eight cities across the United States. To learn more about the results and implications of the Appearance Assistance Program, read Vera’s evaluation.
In 1995 Vera created the Citizens Jury Project to help advance improvements to the jury system. The project’s most significant and lasting contribution was an OmbudService located inside courthouses to record jurors’ complaints and provide help whenever possible. The OmbudService opened initially in New York City’s main civil courthouse and later expanded to other Manhattan courts and to courts in Brooklyn. By documenting complaints, the OmbudService both spurred needed changes and measured the impact of those reforms. In April 2000, Vera transferred the Jury Project to the Fund for Modern Courts. Julia Vitullo-Martin, former director of the Citizens Jury Project, is currently writing a book about the American jury system as a resident Vera fellow.
In 1996, Vera launched La Bodega de La Familia, a drug crisis center unique because it counsels and supports entire families rather than focusing services on individual drug users. Vera’s evaluation of La Bodega suggests that a family-based approach to treatment and services can help people control their intake of drugs and reduce the use of jail and prison to punish relapse. As the end of La Bodega’s demonstration period neared, its director decided to create an independent organization, Family Justice Inc., that would do more than just run the center. Family Justice Inc. helps government officials around the country learn how to tap the strengths and respond to the needs of families with a member involved in the criminal justice system. It also conducts research on family-based services.
Before Vera and its New York City government partners launched Project Confirm in 1998, the arrest of a foster child, even for a minor offense, often mean a stay in detention. Police and juvenile probation officers and detention staff struggled to identify kids in foster care, reach the adults responsible for them, and get them to come to the station or courthouse. As a result, many foster children not only spent time in locked facilities unnecessarily, many also lost their beds in foster homes and had to go through a lengthy replacement process. For three years, Project Confirm helped the New York City child welfare and juvenile justice systems work together to nearly eliminate the detention bias against foster children. When kids are arrested, the project’s staff check child welfare records to confirm which of them are in foster care, notify the appropriate agencies, and, if necessary, guide caretakers through the court process. On September 30th, 2001, Vera transferred responsibility for operating Confirm to the New York City Administration for Children's Services. Following the institutionalization of Confirm, Vera's research staff released its final impact evaluation of the project.
In addition to developing demonstration projects, Vera’s planning staff engage in projects for government that are designed to illuminate key issues and stimulate ideas for demonstration projects. For example, Vera worked with the education and police officials in New York City to document and understand safety in city schools. This work included assessing the results of the 1998 transfer of responsibility for managing school security personnel from the Board of Education to the Police Department. Vera’s survey of school principals, commissioned by the Mayor’s Office and conducted in the spring of 2000, showed that most principals believed safety had either increased or remained the same following the transfer. Vera also analyzed reported safety incidents before and after the transfer. That work showed that criminal incidents had declined while low-level acts of misconduct had increased. The New York City Mayor’s Office issues the First Annual Joint Committee on School Safety Report in December 2000.
Vera also explored school safety polices and practices in select cities around the country, Approaches to School Safety in America's Largest Cities, produced for the New York State Governor's Task Force on School Safety, surveys methods used to ensure school safety in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City. The report also describes innovative programs in Austin, Boston, and Charlotte. The Nuts and Bolts of Implementing School Safety Programs is a resource guide for teachers, principals, and school administrators who are trying to find the right safety program for their school. The manual identifies programs operating around the country, describes the resources needed for each program, and outlines steps to implement the programs.
This body of work generated a project to help communities create local teams that were focused on making schools and communities safer. Vera successfully piloted the project in two communities and then expanded it to nine other New York City neighborhoods in the fall of 2001. Next, Vera created Project Affirm to enhance the role of school safety agents. Vera tested this demonstration project for just over a year, beginning in January 2002. In August 2003 officials at the NYPD's School Safety Training Unit incorporated Affirm’s curriculum into the training they provide to all new school safety agent recruits, and Affirm's approach continues to generate interest nationally.
[ last modified 1/10/2007 ]
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::: View a short film about Vera. [Go]
