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Advancing Universal Representation
A Tool Kit for Advocates, Organizers, Legal Service Providers, and Policymakers
Sharing Behavioral Health Information across Justice and Health Systems
Opportunities in the District of Columbia
People with mental health and substance use problems are overrepresented at all stages of the criminal justice system in the United States. However, decision makers, health care providers, and staff often work with only a fraction of the behavioral health information that exists about their clients. Expanding the availability of behavioral health d...
Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office Case Study
Sheriff’s Office Hires Formerly Incarcerated Community Members to Promote Alternatives to Enforcement
Since 2009, the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) in Michigan has been successfully implementing an innovative community outreach program that employs formerly incarcerated individuals as outreach workers (OWs). OWs assist with proactive policing strategies such as referring community members to resources, applying system expertise to help i...
A New Path to Justice
Getting Women Off Rikers Island
New York City has expressed a strong commitment to criminal justice reform—including consensus among policymakers to close the notorious Rikers Island jail and cut the number of people involved in the system by half within a decade. Yet even as the number of people incarcerated in New York City has declined significantly in recent years, this decli...
A Year of Being SAFE
Insights from the SAFE Network’s First Year
The SAFE (Safety and Fairness for Everyone) Network is a group of 12 diverse local jurisdictions, convened by the Vera Institute of Justice, that have committed public taxpayer dollars toward legal representation for immigrants in their communities facing deportation. During its first year, the SAFE Network represented hundreds of clients with deep...
Why Does Representation Matter?
The Impact of Legal Representation in Immigration Court
Representation before any court of law is a matter of fundamental fairness. However, immigrants facing deportation are entitled to representation paid for by the government only in extremely limited circumstances, despite the high stakes involved in these proceedings. A growing body of research demonstrates the need for representation and its signi...
SAFE in Less than 60 Seconds
Annie Chen, program director of the SAFE Network, explains the need for representation in immigration court. Additional photography by: Elvert Barnes, Jonathan Mcintosh, Christopher Sessums and Jim McDougall via Creative Commons.
Reimagining Prison Event
On October 10, 2018, the Vera Institute of Justice and staff and residents of the T.R.U.E. unit at Cheshire Correctional Institution in Connecticut convened to Reimagine Prison in the United States. The event, and coinciding report release, culminated the work of Vera’s Reimagining Prison project, launched in June 2016 at historic Eastern State Pe...
How New Orleans Funds Justice
The principal agencies of the New Orleans local criminal justice system—the state and municipal criminal courts, the district attorney’s office, the public defender’s office, and the sheriff’s office—rely significantly on revenues from fees imposed on people who are arrested. This funding structure is the product of state law, state and local budge...
Unlocking the Black Box of Prosecution
Building on Family Strengths for Better Outcomes
Juvenile justice agencies are increasingly aware of the benefits to partnering with families whose youth are in their care and custody. The research, albeit limited, is conclusive: youth who have more family support are more likely to succeed. In 2015, the Sedgwick County, Kansas Division of Corrections (DOC) turned their attention to family partne...
Reimagining Prison Report
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...
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