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
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...
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
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
Exclusive First Listen: 70 Million, a New Podcast about Justice Reform
Hear the trailer for this 10-part open-source series that looks at how residents are taking action locally.
So, on August 27, 70 Million will premiere after a team of brilliant and dedicated reporters and producers spent the last eight months traveling the country to collect stories about regular folks becoming catalysts for jail and justice reform in their hometowns. A quick shout out to the dream team, so far: Jen Chien, Luis Gil, Mitzi Miller, Kate Kr...
Blog Post
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Juleyka Lantigua Williams
American Jail
The modern tragedy of mass incarceration
For those of us who are lucky enough to be outside the grip of the criminal justice system as we work to change it, it’s possible to forget that how outrageous it really is. This program reminded me to hold on to my outrage – and use it to mobilize action. With that in mind, I am glad that American Jail is the sort of program that makes us outraged...
Blog Post
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Nancy Fishman
San Francisco's New Jail Unit for TGN People
The San Francisco Sheriff's Office is pushing forward with reforms to make their jails more inclusive to the transgender community. In this video, Assistant Sheriff Katherine Johnson details the intent of the reforms and two incarcerated transgender people housed on the new unit describe the impact of the reforms.
Janetta Johnson
Transgender Advocate and Formerly Incarcerated Person
Janetta Johnson, executive director of the Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) discusses the struggles transgender people face in the criminal justice system.