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Overview
The Vera Institute of Justice, a private nonprofit organization based in New York City, is dedicated to making public policies and practices more fair, humane, and efficient. In New York and throughout the world, Vera works with government leaders to improve the services individual citizens rely on for safety and justice. The Institute has more than 40 years of experience helping public officials negotiate competing political, economic, and substantive pressures and turn good ideas into effective, practical solutions.
What exactly makes Vera an unusual and a valuable resource for public officials?
First and most important: the way we approach our work. Collaboration and partnership with government are the hallmarks of Vera's method. We work closely with leaders of agencies to improve the public systems they manage and oversee. We do this in many different ways. We develop and test new programs. We provide unbiased advice and practical assistance. We conduct social science research. And we provide all these services in ways that support whatever reforms our government partners seek to advance. Additionally, we can be trusted to work in confidence whenever necessary. We do not issue press releases unless our government partners think the public attention will benefit their agencies' work. And we do not release reports until our partners review them.
Second: We work with officials in jurisdictions of all sizes—local, state, and national. Vera got its start in 1961 by developing a project to reform the bail system in New York City. That local project helped to change how the entire nation, and later on other countries, handled pretrial release. Just a few years later, Vera started working in other states and countries. The Institute continues to design and implement innovative programs in New York City and in places as far away and different from New York as Cape Town, South Africa, Santiago, Chile, and Moscow, Russia. We also provide practical advice and assistance to state and local officials from Washtenaw County, Michigan, to Boise, Idaho, and Montgomery, Alabama. And we conduct research around the globe.
Vera's track record of work with the United States government recently led the General Services Administration to designate the Institute an approved provider of Management, Organizational, and Business Improvement Services (MOBIS) to federal agencies seeking consulting, facilitation, and survey support
Third: Our expertise spans five wide-ranging areas of the justice system: crime and victimization, policing, the judicial process, sentencing and corrections, and institutions for youth.
You can explore in detail how Vera works and the content of our current and past work in other sections of this web site. These pages offer a brief overview of the type of services we provide and how government officials contract with and pay for Vera's work. You can also see lists of our current local, state, federal, and foreign government partners by clicking on the headings to the right.
[ last modified 11/7/2003 8:30:33 AM ]
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::: View a short film about Vera. [Go]
