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
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...
Incarceration's Front Door
The Misuse of Jails in America
Local jails exist in nearly every town and city in America. Intended to house only people deemed to be a danger to society or a flight risk, jails have become massive warehouses primarily for those too poor to post even low bail or too sick for existing community resources to help. And the burden of jail incarceration doesn’t fall on everyone equal...
Incarceration Trends
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...
Project
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Christian Henrichson
Related Work
Politics, Ambition, and the Hard Work of Making the Closure of Rikers Island a Reality
Last month, Mayor de Blasio released “Smaller, Safer, Fairer: A Roadmap to Closing Rikers Island,” a report that laid out several concrete steps on the path to closure of the ten jails on the Island. In the preface to the report, the mayor acknowledged that the recommendations within are not a “quick fix.” Nobody is under the impression that closin...
Blog Post
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Insha Rahman
Understanding Jail Growth in Rural America
If You Build It, They Will Come
Private prisons—which hold fewer than 9 percent of state and federal prisoners—are economically incentivized to fill their jail beds, a fact that has understandably fueled public outrage, investigative journalism, and even airtime in last year’s presidential debates. But jails confront similar financial incentives when they are reimbursed for peopl...
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Scarlet Neath
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 ...
We Already Tried a War on Drugs. It Failed.
We’re in the middle of a public health crisis: overdose deaths have overtaken motor-vehicle accidents as the leading cause of injury-related death in our country. Research shows that a public health response is in order—something that’s already successfully practiced in many places around the country where the justice system coordinates with the c...
Blog Post
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Scarlet Neath
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Jim Parsons
Shrinking the Financial—and Human—Cost of Jail in New York City
Many jurisdictions find it challenging to downsize their operations despite a decrease in the number of people held in the jail. The aging infrastructure of Rikers Island, as well as persistently high rates of violence in the jail, may have made the city hesitant to downsize in lockstep with the decline in the jail population. But the proposed clos...
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Chris Mai
Reimagine Justice
Vera Institute Eleventh Annual Gala
On Thursday, April 20, 2017, justice reform leaders and supporters joined the Vera Institute of Justice for Vera’s 11th Annual Gala, Reimagine Justice. Honorees discussed approaches to criminal justice reform and the future of the movement in a very different federal climate. Samuel David Flores Murillo, a client of Vera’s recently expanded New Yo...
How Should Probation and Parole Define Success?
For over a decade, Vera has worked with the city of New Orleans to reduce their jail population. As a program associate with Vera New Orleans, I’m proud to be a part of this effort. Before joining Vera’s New Orleans team, I was a probation and parole officer with the State of Louisiana’s Department of Corrections. During this time, I amassed countl...
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Jonathan Varnado
New York City's Pretrial Supervised Release Program
An Alternative to Bail
Policymakers and practitioners are increasingly raising concerns about the large number of people being held in jails pretrial across the US. The supervised release program (SR) in NYC is an example of a new approach to handling cases pretrial. SR gives judges the option to release some defendants who would otherwise be detained due to their inabil...
Closing Rikers
Eradicating a Stain on Our City
“A stain on human dignity and decency.” - Melissa Mark-Viverito, Speaker, NYC Council “A mass incarceration model that stains everything and everyone it touches.” - Honorable Jonathan Lippman, Former New York State Chief Judge and Of Counsel, Latham & Watkins LLP At a time when the streets of New York City are as safe as they’ve ever been...
Blog Post
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Nicholas Turner
Series: Gender and Justice in America
Why We’re Working to Reduce the Number of Women Incarcerated at Rikers Island
There’s no doubt that the advisory group’s aims are ambitious. NYC’s overall decline in the use of jail means that many women charged with low-level offenses or first-time charges have their cases resolved without spending any time at Rikers—of the 57,119 women arrested across the five boroughs in 2014, less than 12 percent were detained. The women...
Blog Post
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Kaitlin Kall
Jail in New York City
Evidence-Based Opportunities for Reform
Jail in New York City: Evidence-Based Opportunities for Reform examines the key decision points within New York City’s criminal justice system that drive people into the jail. The report uses rich data on case processing, pretrial decision-making, bail decisions, and case disposition to understand how decision makers can impact the size of the jail...
Past Due
Examining the Costs and Consequences of Charging for Justice in New Orleans
In New Orleans, as in many cities around the country, nearly every phase of the criminal justice system imposes a financial cost on the “users” of that system, even before they are convicted of a crime. These bail, fines, and fees take a steep toll on the people who face them and their families. They also affect taxpayers, who bear the cost of exc...