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
Reimagining Prison Report
Prison in America causes individual, community, and generational pain and deprivation. Built on a system of racist policies and practices that has disproportionately impacted people of color, mass incarceration has decimated communities and families. But the harsh conditions within prisons neither ensure safety behind the walls nor prevent crime an ...
Rethinking Restrictive Housing
Lessons from Five U.S. Jail and Prison Systems
In recent years, the practice of restrictive housing (otherwise known as solitary confinement or segregation) in U.S. prisons and jails has been the subject of increased scrutiny from researchers, advocates, policymakers, media, and the government agencies responsible for people who are incarcerated. Originally intended to manage people who committ ...
In Our Backyards
Ending Mass Incarceration Where It Begins
Related Work
From Corrections to College in California
An Evaluation of Student Support During and After Incarceration
California is a national leader in providing higher education to justice-involved people. A key driver of this movement has been the Renewing Communities initiative, a joint project of the Opportunity Institute and the Stanford Criminal Justice Center that sought to expand access to higher education among justice-involved people in California, both ...
Wayne County Jail – Report and Recommendations
For years, Wayne County has been working to resolve longstanding problems of overcrowding and poor conditions in the Wayne County Jail. Vera was engaged by the Hudson-Webber Foundation to conduct a study of Wayne County’s jail population in partnership with a working group of local justice-system stakeholders. The study involved analyzing quantitat ...
Jail Incarceration in Wayne County, Michigan, 2018–2019
Findings and Recommendations
Photo by Karl Soderstrom
People in Prison in 2019
Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) researchers collected data on the number of people who were incarcerated in state and federal prisons as of December 31, 2019, to provide timely information on how prison incarceration is changing in the United States. This report fills a gap until the Bureau of Justice Statistics releases its next annual report—lik ...
Coronavirus Guidance - Crisis Behind Bars
Prisons and jails have become significant clusters of COVID-19 in America, putting thousands of lives at risk. As part of our efforts to protect people most at risk of contracting COVID-19, the Vera Institute of Justice issued this guidance brief providing leaders at all levels of federal, state, and local government with recommendations to address ...
Criminal Justice and the COVID-19 Pandemic
New Data: Second Chance Pell Continues to Open Doors for More Students
This means that students participating in Second Chance Pell programs are learning the skills necessary to play all types of roles in their communities when they return home. For example, Milwaukee Area Technical College is offering career-specific training in areas like welding. Glenville State College in West Virginia offers an array of programs, ...
Blog Post
Margaret diZerega
Ruth Delaney
Second Chance Pell
A Snapshot of the First Three Years
The Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative, launched by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015, provides need-based Pell Grants to people in state and federal prisons. Second Chance Pell has active partnerships with 64 colleges that teach in 28 states. The schools were selected in June 2016 for the initiative, which examines whether exp ...
COVID-19 and Jail Releases Webinar
This webinar explores how counties are working to release people from their jails during the COVID-19 pandemic and how they can support the people coming out of jail. County justice system representatives and community partners also discuss the mechanisms counties are using to reduce the number of people in jail in order to prevent the spread of in ...
Series: Covid-19
Use this Data to Hold Your Local Jail Accountable During the Pandemic
Jails are places where people, even during ordinary times, are at greater risk of death. It’s clear that the best way to keep people safe is to let them return home. Although there have been some efforts to decarcerate, they have been too small. Now, using a new tool from Vera, you can hold policymakers accountable by monitoring jail populations ac ...
Blog Post
Christian Henrichson
Oliver Hinds
Series: Covid-19
Albany, Georgia Reduces Jail Population by 27 Percent in Response to Coronavirus
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the country, high incarceration rates in small cities and rural counties—often overlooked in discussions of mass incarceration—threaten to compound a mounting crisis. Decades of investment in carceral infrastructure, and disinvestment in public health, have brought us to a moment in which rural U.S. landsc ...
Blog Post
Jack Norton
Lessons from Second Chance Pell
A Toolkit for Helping Incarcerated Students Complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education announced the Second Chance Pell (SCP) experiment under the Experimental Sites Initiative, which allows incarcerated students who would be eligible for Pell Grants—a form of federal financial aid—if they were not incarcerated to access them while attending an eligible academic program offered by one of the ...