Herb’s Vera story may be familiar to many here. In 1961, he was asked by Louis Schweitzer—the philanthropist who started this eponymous organization and the son of Vera Schweitzer—to find a solution to New York City’s overcrowded jails. Herb visited the Tombs, the notorious jail in downtown Manhattan, and went cell by cell asking people why they we ...
Herb was a listener. He spent time with people incarcerated on Rikers Island and advocated for what they actually needed—aid and access to employment, education, and housing—to keep them out of the system. Even in his last few years, he continued to attend monthly meetings to close Rikers, leading to the historic city council vote in 2019 to do jus ...
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 ...
Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) researchers collected data on the number of people in local jails and state and federal prisons throughout 2020 and into spring 2021. Vera researchers estimated the incarcerated population using a sample of approximately 1,600 jail jurisdictions, 50 states, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals Service (U ...
Mr. Smith spent two decades of his professional life at Vera, serving as director of the London office, deputy director, and then as president from 1978 to 1994. Known to be intellectually creative, unusually persuasive, and a skilled teacher, Mr. Smith took the helm of Vera from our founder, Herb Sturz, and solidified the Institute’s reputation fo ...
For Daniel Prude, Patrick Warren Sr., and Ricardo Muñoz, 911 calls led to tragedy. They are three of at least 97 people killed just last year after police responded to reports of someone behaving erratically or having a mental health crisis, according to Mapping Police Violence. A person experiencing a mental health crisis is more likely to have co ...
Interactive data tool on policing trends at the national and local levels
Explore data on the people incarcerated in the Los Angeles County jail system. Track the county's progress in reducing its jail population.
What the data tells us about police practices
Data is an important component of the critical examination of police practices. It can be used to understand systemic racism and injustice and to identify places and situations where intervention is urgently needed. In these reports, Vera presents data from Arrest Trends—a tool that collates and visualizes arrest, victimization, and demographic dat ...
The crime against Mr. Floyd sharpened public focus on a policing system infected with violence, which has devalued and destroyed Black lives, and has imposed its heavy hand on millions of people of all races and ethnicities (10.5 million people are arrested every year in the United States). There is widespread commitment to finally uprooting the ra ...
Every new budget is an opportunity to rethink the public’s spending priorities. And the $350 billion in federal recovery funds provided through the 2021 American Rescue Plan provides a rare opportunity to rethink how we provide community safety. For too long, addressing our toughest problems—whether mental health crises, substance use, homelessness ...
Series: Women's Voices