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 ...
Ending Mass Incarceration Where It Begins
A little known fact imperils our nation’s collective efforts to end mass incarceration: Major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are no longer bearing the heaviest burden. Instead, thousands of smaller cities and towns are now grappling with the nation’s highest incarceration rates. It is time for criminal justice reformers to take n...
While research is growing on the effects of restrictive housing—more commonly known as solitary confinement—there are still many questions about who is housed in these units and why they are there. Moreover, while many studies have investigated the impact of placement in restrictive housing on incarcerated people, there is very little research on t...
Vera is helping cities and counties around the country reduce their jail populations. Vera works collaboratively with county government, law enforcement, and community organizations to study their jail usage and population growth and to provide recommendations for safely reducing the population while creating more fair and effective local justice ...
Expanding Access for People with Conviction Histories
Vera, which is guiding implementation of the largest public housing reentry pilot program in the country, is launching a national project to assist public housing authorities, community supervision agencies, and reentry service providers to work together to promote family reunification and successful reentry outcomes for formerly incarcerated peopl...
Validating a Bias-Crime Victim Assessment Tool
Vera is studying experiences of hate crime (also known as bias crime) among Latino, immigrant, youth, and LGBT communities in New Jersey and Los Angeles County, California. We aim to develop a practical tool to help communities and law enforcement improve responses to hate crime, with the ultimate goal of ensuring access to equal justice for people...
Reducing the Overuse of Jails
The Safety and Justice Challenge is an initiative of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to reduce mass incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. As part of the initiative, a network of competitively selected local jurisdictions are developing and modeling effective ways to reduce the misuse of jail. Vera...
Medical parole is an option for releasing the increasing number of incarcerated people who are seriously ill or incapacitated. It can be granted to somebody with a medical condition so debilitating that there is a reasonable probability that they no longer present a danger to society. The number granted release through this policy in New York State...
Postsecondary education opportunities for incarcerated people
People involved in the criminal justice system have, on average, much lower education levels than the general population. Research suggests that education is key to improving many long-term outcomes for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities—including reducing recidivism and increasing employability and earnings after release. T...
Shifting the culture of incarceration from retribution to rehabilitation
Our national experiment with mass incarceration has failed to make us safer and protect communities. More than 95 percent of people in our prisons will return home, yet 55 percent will end up back behind bars within five years. There is widespread consensus that we should end mass incarceration and transform the way we treat people who are incarcer...
Video visitation in prison
People in prison are often incarcerated far from their home communities, making visitation with family members difficult or impossible. Yet, studies show that in-person visitation can lead to improved behavior in custody and reduced risk of recidivism post-release. This study aims to explore a new visitation option for people incarcerated far from ...
Data tool providing information on jail and prison populations in every U.S. county
The Incarceration Trends Project aims to inform the public dialogue, advance research, and help guide change by providing easily accessible information on jail and prison populations in every U.S. county. The centerpiece of the project is an interactive data tool, available at trends.vera.org, that can be used for reference and measurement by justi...