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.
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Coronavirus Guidance for the Criminal and Immigration Legal Systems
The coronavirus, or COVID-19, has been declared by the World Health Organization to be a global pandemic. As the number of people infected in the United States grows exponentially, we must focus on prevention and containment in the criminal and immigration legal systems. Vera and Community Oriented Correctional Health Services have created a series ...
In Our Backyards
Ending Mass Incarceration Where It Begins
Series: Covid-19
Law Enforcement Best Practices Can Help Halt the Spread of COVID-19 by Keeping People Out of Jail
Jurisdictions adopt best practices A few jurisdictions, including several of the largest police forces in the country, have already adopted some of these best practices. These departments provide examples for law enforcement agencies nationwide. Some jurisdictions are taking steps to change enforcement patterns. Miami-Dade Police Department has ...
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Aaron Stagoff-Belfort
Related Work
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 ...
Justice & Humanity in a Time of Pandemic Webinar
Facing a crisis no one was prepared for, Vera's New Orleans office swiftly executed a three-part COVID strategy—including statewide education, data analysis, and communication with judges—to assist local and statewide actors in their understanding of what they should know and what they could do, and follow up to help where needed. Vera's New Orlean ...
Series: Covid-19
Two Years in Jail, Never Convicted of a Crime, Now Vulnerable to Coronavirus
Shonday also contracted the disease. Whenever she took a breath, she said she felt pain in her chest. She was dizzy, her head pounded, and she soaked her bed in sweat. Seeing what the disease did to her fiancé and her daughter makes Lisa Williams terrified of what will happen if the virus hits the jail where her son is confined. “This virus is ver ...
Blog Post
Erica Bryant
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
Series: Covid-19
In a Precarious Economy, Governments and Courts Must Take Immediate Action to Reduce Criminal Justice Fines and Fees
Fines and fees exist at every stage of the criminal justice process, from arrest and booking to conviction and sentencing. People can be ticketed for even minor infractions, charged to enter a jail, and then charged additional fees for each day they remain there. Even those serving non-jail sentences like probation or community service can be charg ...
Blog Post
Maria Rafael
Series: Addressing the Overuse of Segregation in U.S. Prisons and Jails
Looking to Norway for Inspiration on Reducing the Use of Solitary Confinement
Recognized as a leader in progressive incarceration, Norway’s system is based on the idea that courts are for punishment and correctional facilities are for creating better neighbors. Correctional policies and practices center around respect for the human dignity of incarcerated people and staff. They focus primarily on rehabilitation, resocializat ...
Series: Addressing the Overuse of Segregation in U.S. Prisons and Jails
Corrections at a Crossroads
Ironically, prisons began as 19th century reforms—a movement away from the barbarism of public humiliation, corporal punishment, and executions. Practices like solitary confinement—pioneered at Eastern State Penitentiary and in Auburn Prison’s regime of silent, forced labor—were meant to rehabilitate incarcerated people. They reflected moralistic a ...
Blog Post
Sebastian Johnson
On Bail Reform We Need Less Fear-Based Speculation—and More Data
Bail reform is working. But in a moment when many are questioning the impact of the new law, a lack of publicly available data in real time about other critical metrics—including crime and arrest rates—leaves open the door for bail reform opponents to highlight outlier cases and anecdotal information to claim that bail reform makes us less safe. We ...
Blog Post
Lauren Jones
Don't Let Fearmongering Drive Bail Policy
Crime in New York is at historic lows. Yet critics of bail reform, which went into effect on January 1, 2020, have been hard at work warning that bail reform endangers public safety—claiming that the law has led to a surge in crime. But, as these fact sheets demonstrates, it is far too early to reach any conclusion about the impact of bail reform.
Sticking with Bail Reform in New York
On January 1, 2020, New York ushered in a new bail law that delivers justice, fairness, and public safety. As a result, thousands of New Yorkers who otherwise would not have been able to afford bail, or only do so at great personal expense, have been able to keep their jobs, stay with their families, remain in school, and return to their communitie ...
Series: Target 2020
Getting Rid of Private Prisons Isn’t Enough
Vera has committed to a 10-year strategy to end the incarceration of girls. To accomplish this by 2029, we have created a three-pronged approach: Target the top incarcerators. Together, the top eight states—California, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas—account for more than 50 percent of the nation’s incarceration ...
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Logan Schmidt