Vera Institute of Justice 60th Anniversary Gala
Join us on November 16, 2021, as we celebrate 60 years of advancing fairness, safety, and racial justice in the criminal legal system.
Vera’s mission is to end the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.
Vera is committed to
Featured Work
The Chains of Slavery Still Exist in Mass Incarceration
The 13th Amendment may have outlawed the enslavement of Black people, but the United States continues to devise new ways to uphold the racist hierarchies that slavery was founded on and to restrict the freedom of the descendants of enslaved people. Today, we see alarming echoes of the Reconstruction Era, when unjust laws prevented emancipated ensl ...
Blog Post
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Kica Matos
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Jamila Hodge
Fifty Years Ago Today, President Nixon Declared the War on Drugs
Today, police make more than 1.5 million drug arrests each year, and about 550,000 of those are for cannabis offenses alone. Almost 500,000 people are incarcerated for nothing more than a drug law violation, and Black and brown people are disproportionately impacted by drug enforcement and sentencing practices. Rates of drug use and sales are simil ...
Blog Post
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Jamila Hodge
Four Ways the Pandemic Made Us Rethink Our Criminal Legal System
As state and local governments scrambled to contain the virus, the punitive policies and practices that have characterized the nation’s criminal legal system became untenable. And as a result, some policymakers enacted measures that advocates have long urged. They released people from jails and prisons, reduced admissions, and took steps to make fa ...
Blog Post
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Nazish Dholakia
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Insha Rahman
