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 ...
Blog Post
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Aaron Stagoff-Belfort
Related Work
No Access to Justice
Breaking the Cycle of Homelessness and Jail
On any given night in the United States, more than 550,000 people experience homelessness. The U.S. legal system criminalizes survival behaviors associated with homelessness and fails to acknowledge that people who are homeless face impossible odds within the legal process. Black people, who already face a disproportionate risk of homelessness, are ...
The Scale of the COVID-19-Related Jail Population Decline
From mid-March to mid-April 2020—the first month of rapid spread of COVID-19 in the United States—there was an unprecedented reduction in the number of people held in local jails. Vera’s analysis of the most comprehensive jail data available shows that the number of people in jail in the United States fell by one quarter, mainly over the course of ...
Series: Covid-19
A New Vision for Justice in New Orleans
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, 25 percent of the people in jail have been safely released in Orleans Parish without an increase in crime. Before the coronavirus crisis, the criminal legal system assumed these people had to be locked up—despite being incarcerated on low bail amounts and nonviolent charges. But we’ve seen these assumptions—long c ...
Blog Post
William Snowden
A First Step in Mississippi toward Sentencing Reform and Fewer People in Prison
Under Mississippi’s current parole eligibility laws, two-thirds of people in prison cannot be released early; instead, they must serve every day of their long sentences behind bars. Not coincidentally, most people serving these inhumane sentences are Black Mississippians—disproportionately impacted by sentencing laws put into place at the height of ...
Blog Post
Marta Nelson
Two Ways to Show Up for Black Lives in the Wake of George Floyd’s Murder
Bail fund donations and overhauling the money bail system
As police respond to the current protests with more violence and arrests, bail funds have seen an outpouring of support—collectively raising upwards of $30 million from tens of thousands of donors across the country in a matter of days. Some bail funds, like the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund and the Minneapolis Freedom Fund, have received so many do ...
Blog Post
Insha Rahman
Series: Covid-19
Vera’s New Prevalence Model Suggests COVID-19 is Spreading through ICE Detention at Much Higher Rates than Publicized
As of May 31, 2020, ICE reported testing 2,781 people in its custody; 1,461 positive cases were disclosed at just 61 of the more than 200 facilities it uses to detain people. ICE has not clarified whether the remaining tests are confirmed negative or still pending, meaning a minimum of 52 percent of people tested have received positive test results ...
Blog Post
Nina Siulc
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 ...
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