Empire State of Incarceration
February 18, 2021
All Research & Analysis
Compassion, Not Confinement
How States and Localities Can Help Ensure Humane Housing for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Awaiting Family Reunification
In the first five months of 2021, about 65,000 children were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after arriving in the United States unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian. These children come to the United States seeking protection, stability, and a chance to reunite with their families, but are instead processed at federa ...
Photo by Lucy Nicholson (REUTERS)
People in Jail and Prison in Spring 2021
Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) researchers collected data on the number of people in local jails and state and federal prisons throughout 2020 and into spring 2021. Vera researchers estimated the incarcerated population using a sample of approximately 1,600 jail jurisdictions, 50 states, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals Service (U ...
Arrest Trends
Interactive data tool on policing trends at the national and local levels
Care First L.A.: Tracking Jail Decarceration
Explore data on the people incarcerated in the Los Angeles County jail system. Track the county's progress in reducing its jail population.
Arrest Trends in Action
What the data tells us about police practices
Data is an important component of the critical examination of police practices. It can be used to understand systemic racism and injustice and to identify places and situations where intervention is urgently needed. In these reports, Vera presents data from Arrest Trends—a tool that collates and visualizes arrest, victimization, and demographic dat ...
How to Use Budget Advocacy to Drive Justice Reform
Every new budget is an opportunity to rethink the public’s spending priorities. And the $350 billion in federal recovery funds provided through the 2021 American Rescue Plan provides a rare opportunity to rethink how we provide community safety. For too long, addressing our toughest problems—whether mental health crises, substance use, homelessness ...
A Look Inside the New York City Correction Budget
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, nationwide calls for reallocation of law enforcement budgets forced elected leaders to consider the values underlying their budgetary choices. But discussions largely remained limited to policing. Few major U.S. cities took a hard look at the billions invested in their increasingly vacant jails. New York C ...
Empire State of Incarceration
For decades, thousands of New Yorkers, primarily people of color, were held in jail pretrial—sometimes for years—simply because they could not afford to pay bail. Bail reform ushered in a period of considerable decarceration across New York State, and the number of people in jail dropped even further as authorities responded to the COVID-19 pandemi ...
Second Chance Pell: Four Years of Expanding Access to Education in Prison
The Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative, launched by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015, provides need-based Pell Grants to people in state and federal prisons. The initiative examines whether expanding access to college financial aid increases incarcerated adults’ participation in postsecondary educational opportunities. This re ...
Eight Ways to Ease the Child Detention Crisis
Immigration Brief
More than a decade after the conditions in northern Central America led to increasing numbers of families and children arriving in the United States without their parents, the federal government has failed to build a humane system to ensure their welfare and safety. As a result, children as young as six are being detained in overcrowded U.S. Border ...
Looking Beyond Conviction History
Recommendations for Public Housing Authority Admissions Policies
Safe, affordable housing is essential for the millions of people released from U.S. jails and prisons each year. But most public housing authorities (PHAs) have admissions policies that prevent formerly incarcerated people from living there. For nearly all types of convictions, housing authorities exercise their individual discretion to set eligibi ...
Implementing the Vision at the Local and State Level Summary
Advancing Universal Representation: A Toolkit for Advocates, Organizers, Legal Service Providers, and Policymakers
Universal representation—a public defender system for all immigrants facing deportation—is based on the fundamental belief that everyone deserves due process under the law. While a growing movement works toward a legally mandated and federally funded representation system, several counties, cities, and states have stepped up to fund deportation def ...
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