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 ...
The COVID-19 crisis is bringing our world to a standstill. However, our nation's jails, prisons, and detention centers are continuing to operate without proper health precautions, leaving incarcerated people and corrections staff extremely vulnerable to the virus. Vera President and Director, Nicholas Turner, responds to the lack of immediate actio ...
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 ...
The Guardianship Project serves as court-appointed agency guardians to a vulnerable, mostly indigent population—elderly and disabled people who lack family or other supports. The project’s multidisciplinary services provide essential support networks and enable clients to live as independently as possible—regardless of their ability to pay. The COV ...
Public housing authorities are changing their policies to increase access for people with conviction histories—making communities, housing developments, and families safer. The Oklahoma City Housing Authority and the Lafayette Housing Authority recently reexamined their admissions policies to improve access. Both housing authorities are partners in ...
Estimating the Spread of COVID-19 among People in ICE Detention
Seattle Municipal Court Probation Services (Probation Services) asked Vera to review the department’s policies and practices to identify examples of success and areas for improvement. Over the course of the engagement, Vera explored the degree to which Probation Services is in line with best practices in community supervision and positioned to move ...
Protesters are flooding the streets demanding change after the death of George Floyd and so many other Black people at the hands of police. Crowds are echoing the rallying cry to “defund the police.” But what exactly do they mean? Some advocacy groups are calling for the current policing structure to be dismantled and rebuilt, investing more resour ...
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is by far the biggest and most expensive police department in the country: The overall cost of the NYPD is actually more than $11 billion annually. In recent weeks, the call to defund the NYPD has reached fever pitch, with calls to pass a budget on July 1, 2020, that includes $1 billion less for policing. ...
An Evaluation of Student Support During and After Incarceration
California is a national leader in providing higher education to justice-involved people. A key driver of this movement has been the Renewing Communities initiative, a joint project of the Opportunity Institute and the Stanford Criminal Justice Center that sought to expand access to higher education among justice-involved people in California, both ...
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 ...
Findings and Recommendations
Vera’s SAFE (Safety and Fairness for Everyone) Network is a network of 18 jurisdictions committed to universal representation for immigrants facing detention and deportation. In this webinar, the SAFE Network’s Annie Chen leads a discussion with Dr. Homer Venters – a nationally recognized expert on health in correctional settings – about the height ...
Our immigration system is on the threshold of a new crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. People in detention face high risks of infection from the close quarters of facilities, shelters, and courtrooms, and they lack adequate sanitation, health care, and protective measures. The frequent transfer of people throughout the immigration detent ...