In partnership with sentencing and corrections officials, Vera works to promote fairness and consistency in sentencing, enhance community-based supervision, and reduce jail and prison overcrowding.
Close to Home seeks to improve reentry outcomes when people return to the community from jail. Program staff will partner with jails, community-corrections agencies, and community-based organizations in two jurisdictions to help them apply a family-focused approach to reentry planning. The project's lessons are expected to be applicable to jurisdictions throughout the country.
Vera established the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons in 2005 to identify and recommend solutions to the most serious challenges facing America’s jails and prisons. The commission was co-chaired by former United States Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach and the Honorable John Gibbons.
Common Justice offers an alternative to the traditional court process for youth charged with felonies such as assault, robbery, and burglary. Project staff bring together people immediately affected by a crime to acknowledge the harm done, address the needs of the harmed party, and agree on sanctions other than incarceration to hold the responsible party accountable. The project, which is based in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, seeks to repair harm, break cycles of violence, and decrease the system’s heavy reliance on incarceration. It operates with the generous support of the Blue Ridge Foundation, the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Viola W. Bernard Foundation, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, the Stoneleigh Center, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Vera’s Washington DC Office is partnering with four jurisdictions around the country—two states and two large counties—to help them improve oversight of their prisons and jails. The project draws on lessons from the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons regarding the importance of strong oversight of correctional facilities.
Vera’s Washington DC Office is working with the congressionally mandated National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC) to develop standards to detect, prevent, and respond to sexual assault in jails, prisons, lock-ups, and immigration, juvenile, and community-corrections facilities.
Vera’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections (CSC) is working with the New York State Division of Parole to provide supervision officers with additional tools to help people complete conditional releases from prison. The project seeks to improve parole oversight so that fewer people return to prison solely for violating the conditions of their release.
Vera’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections is working to help Alabama officials meet their goals of reducing the prison population and controlling corrections costs, while ensuring public safety.
Los Angeles County has asked the Vera Institute to study its criminal justice system, identify inefficiencies, and recommend strategies to make better use of jail space. Vera staff will analyze the county’s jail data, examine policies and processes that impact the jail’s population size, and recommend steps the county can take to alleviate jail overcrowding.
The Family Justice Program’s Reentry Is Relational initiative is training staff at two prisons in New Mexico and Oklahoma, and at their corresponding probation and parole offices, to help incarcerated people draw on their social networks as they transition from prison to parole. By enhancing case management practices at the facilities and promoting more collaboration between prison and parole staff, it seeks to improve reentry outcomes for people coming home from prison. To sustain changes in practices and policies, the initiative also provides these institutions with technical assistance and evaluation support.
Staff from the Center on Sentencing & Corrections (CSC) are working with a Chicago-based nonprofit, Chicago Metropolis 2020 (CM2020) and the independent, bipartisan Criminal Law Edit, Alignment and Reform (CLEAR) Commission, to improve criminal justice policies in Illinois. This work is part of an ongoing project funded by the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States.
Vera researchers conducted a study for the Department of Community Justice (DCJ) in Multnomah County (Portland), Oregon, on how the county was using intermediate sanctions—drug treatment, community service, day reporting, and jail—in lieu of prison when people on probation, parole, and post-prison supervision violated the conditions of their release. The findings led to changes in policy that quickly resulted in better outcomes.
Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) is an innovative approach to community supervision that uses short, swift, and certain jail sentences as sanctions for violations. Vera’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections produced this policy brief to discuss HOPE and emphasize that programs hoping to duplicate its efforts should apply all of its key elements. (Hawaii First Circuit Judge Steven Alm started HOPE in 2004 and has written about this brief for Vera’s website as a guest blogger.)
Vera’s policy brief about the HOPE program emphasizes an important point: HOPE is based on a simple idea that is a challenge to actually put into practice—and that means following all of the program’s features and bringing all of the players in the system together to operate differently—and most important, faster.
Vera’s policy brief about the HOPE program emphasizes an important point: HOPE is based on a simple idea that is a challenge to actually put into practice—and that means following all of the program’s features and bringing all of the players in the system together to operate differently—and most important, faster.
A 2008 Vera study recommended that the Department of Community Justice (DCJ) in Multnomah County (Portland), Oregon, change the way it sanctions people on probation and parole.
