Reducing the Use of Jails
Conversations about mass incarceration tend to focus on prison, but local jails admit 20 times more people annually. The long-term trend is shocking: In 1982, for every 100 arrests, 51 people were booked into jail. By 2012, even after crime rates plummeted, that ratio had swelled to 95 out of 100, reflecting a knee-jerk use of jail out of step with threats to public safety. Today, jails log a staggering 12 million admissions a year—mostly poor people arrested for minor offenses who can’t post bail, and for whom even a few days behind bars exact a high toll.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, our own office in New Orleans, and direct partnerships with jurisdictions nationwide, we’re helping officials use jails as they were intended: to protect communities from dangerous people. There’s no simple fix, so the work includes using alternatives to arrest and prosecution for minor offenses, recalibrating the use of bail, and addressing fines and fees that also trap people in jail.
Featured
Visualizing Arrest Trends
American policing is over-reliant on punitive enforcement—that is, issuing someone an arrest or citation. This has significantly contributed to two of society’s most pressing ailments: mass incarceration and acrimonious community-police relations. To drive policy change and new policing practices, the Arrest Trends tool—available at http://arresttr...
Project
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Rebecca Neusteter
Safety and Justice Challenge
An initiative to reduce over-incarceration in America's jails
The Safety and Justice Challenge is an initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. The initiative—an initial five-year, $75 million investment by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation—features a competition to help jurisdictions across the country create fairer, more effective local j...
In Our Backyards
Ending Mass Incarceration Where It Begins
Related Work
The State of Justice Reform 2018
Arrest Trends
Data Tool Demonstration Video
The Vera Institute of Justice has created an interactive data tool for unlocking decades of police data on arrests at the national and local levels. In this video, Vera's Policing Program Director, Rebecca Neusteter, introduces the Arrest Trends data tool and its basic features.
Embracing Human Dignity
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...
How New Orleans Funds Justice
The principal agencies of the New Orleans local criminal justice system—the state and municipal criminal courts, the district attorney’s office, the public defender’s office, and the sheriff’s office—rely significantly on revenues from fees imposed on people who are arrested. This funding structure is the product of state law, state and local budge...
Unlocking the Black Box of Prosecution
Vera President Nick Turner Speaks at the 2018 Global Citizen Festival
Vera President Nick Turner speaks to thousands of Global Citizens at the 2018 Global Citizen Festival about ending mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty.
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.
Keeping Women Out of Jail, One Mother at a Time
A special public defenders office set up to help women is keeping families together.
Kami could have walked out of the jail that day if only she could afford the $5,000 bond prescribed by the judge. But without the money, she was stuck behind bars, waiting for the court to decide whether she was guilty. Nationally, women are less likely than men to be able to bond out of jail. Women behind bars are also more likely to have a histo...
Blog Post
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Nissa Rhee
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 ...
A Different Type of Night Court Is Keeping People Out of Jail
Instead, the day I met him in late April, Carlos had just pled guilty to a misdemeanor, was ordered to see a drug diversion counselor, and could walk away a free man. More importantly, Carlos didn’t have to miss a day of work. His court session took place in the evening. Two years ago, Pima’s jailhouse was near capacity. Local politicians were con...
Blog Post
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Jesse Alejandro Cottrell