Youth Justice
Vera’s Center on Youth Justice (CYJ) works with policymakers and practitioners who want juvenile justice to be rooted in the community, more effective, and smaller in scale, touching the lives of fewer children.
Featured
Restoring Promise
An Initiative to Disrupt the American Prison System
Restoring Promise, an initiative of the Vera Institute of Justice and MILPA, works with prisons and jails to address the root causes and consequences of mass incarceration in how it manifests in prisons and jails. We work directly with prisons and jails to transform the culture, climate, rhythms and routines that define the prison system, starting ...
Project
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Alex Frank
The Initiative to End Girls’ Incarceration
The end of girls’ incarceration in the United States is within reach, and Vera is leading a national initiative to make it happen in 10 years. The number of youth in the girls’ side of the juvenile justice system is small, most girls are unjustly locked up to protect their safety or to address unmet needs, and jurisdictions across the country are f...
Project
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Lindsay Rosenthal
Girls Matter
Centering Gender in Status Offense Reform Efforts
Related Work
Anchoring Reform in Community Partnership
MILPA’s work has contributed to an 89 percent drop in homicides in Salinas, California, where the organization is based. Their staff brings talent and skills, honed over decades, to connect with people who are incarcerated and with corrections agencies, guiding a healing process that allows prison culture to change more quickly in Restoring Promise...
Blog Post
Alex Frank
Ryan Shanahan
Restoring Promise
An initiative to disrupt the American prison system.
Embracing Human Dignity
Gala 2019 event video
Vera Institute of Justice's 13th Annual Gala event video, featuring Restoring Promise, SAFE Network, and College in Prison initiatives.
Embracing Human Dignity
Highlights from Vera's 13th Annual Gala
Vera's 10-Year Strategy to End Girls' Incarceration
To ensure freedom and justice for all kids, systems must be responsive to how gender and sexism intersect with racism to drive youth incarceration. The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) believes that we can end the incarceration of youth on the girls’ side of the juvenile justice system by building stronger, safer, and more equitable communities w...
Cultivating Change
How the Middlesex Sheriff’s Office and the Restoring Promise Initiative Are Transforming Incarceration for Young Men
Traditional criminal justice responses have fallen short on meeting the needs of young adults involved in the justice system. Across the country, policymakers are starting to address the legacy of unbalanced policies and practices that have resulted in the uniquely American phenomenon of 2.2 million people being incarcerated—a legacy that dispropor...
Embracing Human Dignity
Annual Report 2018
The Vera Institute of Justice is working to radically transform incarceration in America by replacing punishing practices with an approach that prioritizes compassion, true accountability, healing, restoration, opportunity, and hope. Learn more about our commitment to human dignity in our annual report 2018.
Series: Dispatches from T.R.U.E.
Dream Chasers
Former TRUE mentee reflects on life behind and beyond bars
I’ve never seen a correctional officer who loved coming to work and interacting with incarcerated people. That’s different—I don’t care what anybody says. That alone speaks volumes about his character; In general population, it always seemed dull and full of bad energy. A lot of the times the officers came off miserable and took their frustrations ...
Blog Post
Shyquinn Dix
Reimagining Prison Event
On October 10, 2018, the Vera Institute of Justice and staff and residents of the T.R.U.E. unit at Cheshire Correctional Institution in Connecticut convened to Reimagine Prison in the United States. The event, and coinciding report release, culminated the work of Vera’s Reimagining Prison project, launched in June 2016 at historic Eastern State Pe...
Reimagining Prison in Germany and Norway
Reimagining Prison
Series: Dispatches from Germany
Can We Learn from Our Past?
The Holocaust forced Germany to fundamentally change how it incarcerates people. In America, slavery morphed into mass incarceration.
The 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime—a loophole that has continued the wide-scale persecution of black and brown people through the criminal justice system. The result is a U.S. prison system designed to warehouse and dehumanize people. From the length of sentences ...
Blog Post
Alex Frank