Pathways from Prison to Postsecondary Education
College in prison communicates a simple, transformative idea: people leaving prison have futures we should value and great potential we should encourage and tap. The Vera Institute of Justice launched Unlocking Potential: Pathways from Prison to Postsecondary Education in 2012. Supported by five national foundations, the demonstration project gave ...
12 New Orleans Neighbors on Ending Money Injustice
Prison in America causes individual, community, and generational pain and deprivation. Built on a system of racist policies and practices that has disproportionately impacted people of color, mass incarceration has decimated communities and families. But the harsh conditions within prisons neither ensure safety behind the walls nor prevent crime an ...
Moving from Punishment to Harm Reduction and Health
Drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, and communities across the country are struggling to respond. But the punitive approach exemplified by the “war on drugs” has driven mass incarceration, exacerbated racial disparities within the criminal justice system, and devastated communities of color. The United State ...
A Guide to 911 Open-Datasets
The 911 system offers an initial look into the problems communities face and the resulting responses that police departments supply. There is a growing demand across the country for greater transparency in policing—and access to data is a key way to increase this transparency. 911 open databases are a prime example of accessible data that communiti ...
Reaching and Serving Crime Victims Who Have a History of Incarceration
More than 2 million people are locked up in U.S. jails and prisons. Most were victims of crime before they were incarcerated, and many experience victimization during their incarceration or once they return home. But regardless of when their victimization occurred, the vast majority of survivors who have previously been incarcerated do not get the ...
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.
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 ...
The geography of mass incarceration has shifted dramatically. Small counties across the country now account for more than half of America's jail population. This untold story calls for ending mass incarceration where it begins–in all our backyards.
A Vision for Change
Assessing the Ability to Pay Bail
Research shows that money bail is unfair, ineffective, and disproportionately burdens people of color and those with low incomes; jurisdictions that no longer rely on money bail have excellent court appearance rates, fewer people in jail, and strong public safety outcomes. In April 2018, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) developed and launched t ...
Researchers from the Vera Institute of Justice, with support from Google.org Fellows, collected data on the number of people in local jails at midyear in both 2018 and 2019 to provide timely information on how incarceration is changing in the United States. This report fills a gap until the Bureau of Justice Statistics releases its report on jail p ...
Why America Keeps Building More Jails and What It Can Do Instead
Jail construction has vastly expanded America’s capacity to incarcerate people. In 1970, there were 243,000 jail beds in the United States, but by 2017, there were 915,100. This report explores the persistence of jail expansion by examining a convenience sample of 77 counties in 31 states that considered or pursued jail expansion between 2000 and 2 ...