Research & Analysis

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...