Sentencing and Corrections
Vera's Center on Sentencing and Corrections (CSC) works to drive change in the criminal justice system through research, practice innovation, testing new ideas, and policy development assistance to criminal justice practitioners at the local, state, and national level. The Center’s work focuses on developing and supporting balanced, fair and humane sentencing and corrections policies to reduce the overall use of incarceration; to transform the in-custody experience into one that can improve the lives of those incarcerated so that they return home to support their families and communities; and to ensure that prisons and jails are safe for those incarcerated and as well as those who work there. Most recently, CSC has embarked on Reimagining Prison, an ambitious 18-month initiative that aims to drive a national conversation on the purpose of incarceration and arrive at a truly transformative vision for jails and prison in an America that uses these institutions dramatically less than we currently do.
Featured
Out of Sight
The Growth of Jails in Rural America
America’s 3,283 jails are the “front door” to mass incarceration. But for too long, county jail systems have operated and grown outside of public view. Vera’s Incarceration Trends data tool, launched in 2015, illuminated the growth in local jail populations over the last 40 years. This report and accompanying data visualization explores one of the ...
Measuring Public Safety
Responsibly Interpreting Statistics on Violent Crime
For the Record Evidence Brief Series With a few hyper-localized exceptions that require targeted attention, violent crime rates are lower today than they have been at any point over the past four decades. However, this era of public safety has been misrepresented by some media reports and public commentary concluding that violent crime increases in...
The Price of Prisons
Examining State Spending Trends, 2010 - 2015
From the early 1970s into the new millennium, the U.S. prison population experienced unprecedented growth, which had a direct influence on state budgets. In recent years, however, lawmakers in nearly every state and from across the political spectrum have enacted new laws to reduce prison populations and spending. This report, which builds upon the...
Related Work
Investing in Futures
Economic and Fiscal Benefits of Postsecondary Education in Prison
Efforts to build robust postsecondary education programs in prison have accelerated in recent years, with support from a broad range of groups from correctional officers to college administrators. This report describes how lifting the current ban on awarding Pell Grants to incarcerated people would benefit workers, employers, and states. Specifical...
Safe Alternatives to Segregation Initiative
Findings and Recommendations for the Virginia Department of Corrections
In recent years, a diverse range of corrections practitioners, national and international organizations, policymakers, and the public have called for reform of restrictive housing (also known as segregation or solitary confinement) in prisons and jails. They cite the potentially devastating psychological and physiological impacts of spending 22 to ...
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.
Expanding our Knowledge on Local Incarceration Trends
Using the state as the unit of analysis is sufficient for understanding the broad contours of incarceration in the United States, but it does not provide the level of detail necessary to unpack its causes and consequences. This is because it is largely county officials—judges, prosecutors, people who manage jails—that decide how communities use inc...
Blog Post
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Christian Henrichson
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Jacob Kang-Brown
A New Path to Justice
Getting Women Off Rikers Island
New York City has expressed a strong commitment to criminal justice reform—including consensus among policymakers to close the notorious Rikers Island jail and cut the number of people involved in the system by half within a decade. Yet even as the number of people incarcerated in New York City has declined significantly in recent years, this decli...
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
Reimagining Prison Webumentary
Here's How Bail Works
The criminalization of poverty in the justice system
Insha Rahman, program director for the Vera Institute of Justice, explains how the cash bail system criminalizes poverty in the United States. This video was produced in partnership with Global Citizen.
Bail Assessment Pilot
Seventy-eight percent of the people in New York City jails on any given day are there pretrial because they cannot afford bail. The average bail set in New York City is $1,000 for misdemeanors and $5,000 for felonies, yet almost half of the people detained pretrial never make bail. Those who do make bail are often required to pay a 10% premium and ...
Opening Doors
Safely Increasing Access to Public Housing for People with Conviction Histories
For more than 600,000 people leaving prison and the nearly 11 million cycling through jails annually, research shows that safe, affordable housing is essential for them to succeed after they are released. While all public housing authorities (PHAs) must, by law, place lifetime exclusions on people who are lifetime-registered sex offenders or who ha...