Vera @ Chicago Ideas - Part III
The Vera Institute of Justice teamed up with Chicago Ideas to reenvision the American prison system and imagine a society in which prisons serve as rehabilitation facilities for communities and citizens, rather than as crippling institutions. The conversations combined performance, first-person testimony, and compelling dialogue that looked into no...
Vera @ Chicago Ideas - Part II
The Vera Institute of Justice teamed up with Chicago Ideas to reenvision the American prison system, and imagine a society in which prisons serve as rehabilitation facilities for communities and citizens, rather than as crippling institutions. The conversation combined performance, first-person testimony, and compelling dialogue that all looked int...
Vera @ Chicago Ideas - Part I
The Vera Institute of Justice teamed up with Chicago Ideas to reenvision the American prison system, and imagine a society in which prisons serve as rehabilitation facilities for communities and citizens, rather than as crippling institutions. The event combined performance, first-person testimony, and compelling dialogue that all looked into not o...
The Health Consequences of Mass Imprisonment for (Black) Women
Prof. Hedy Lee discusses how mass incarceration affects the health and wellbeing of the predominantly poor and minority women who routinely deal with the absence of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Poor and minority women, particularly African American women, face markedly higher rates of chronic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes, and po...
Launched as part of Prison Visiting Week for Vera’s Reimagining Prison initiative, this explainer video focuses on alternative approaches to incarceration in use by countries such as Germany. Comparatively, “tough on crime” practices in the U.S. have been ineffective. We spend $80 billion on incarceration per year, yet more than half the people who...
It is not even 72 hours after the election, and the entire world is trying to assess the impact of an election result that will surely produce a dramatic restructuring across a broad array of issues and geographies—including justice reform, which we struggle and fight for along with you. As in any election and assumption of power, there will be a ...
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The United States’ incarcerated population stands at more than 2.2 million. Nearly 1.6 million Americans are behind prison bars—only 22,000 of whom reside in privately managed federal facilities. So why are there headlines about Thursday’s Department of Justice (DOJ) memorandum, which announced that the Federal Bureau of Prisons should begin “the p...
Launch event at Eastern State Penitentiary
"Reimagining Prison: The Journey Begins" launch event at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia on June 20, 2016.
A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons
The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons—a national group of civic leaders, corrections administrators, scholars, advocates, police officers, religious community members, and former prisoners—authored this report following a year-long study of jail and prison conditions in the U.S. The Commission, finding high volumes of violence and...
