Research, policy solutions, and what counts as sufficient evidence in transforming the criminal legal system.

At the Vera Institute of Justice, we drive policy change to advance safety and justice and to measurably improve communities and people’s lives. We work to transform the United States’ excessively punitive criminal legal system and to challenge the country’s long-standing complacency with the harms of mass incarceration. This involves piloting sol ...

How are people dying? Los Angeles County has not yet publicly issued causes of deaths for 11 people who have died in county jails this year. However, even once autopsy reports are finalized, they don’t tell the whole story: when the coroner rules that a death is the result of “natural causes,” jail conditions can still be to blame. Researchers have ...

The harms of mass incarceration extend far beyond courtrooms, jail cells, and prison beds.

During a search of Penelope Harris’s Bronx apartment in 2010, police found 10 grams of cannabis. Even in the days before cannabis legalization in New York, that tiny amount fell below the legal threshold for a misdemeanor, according to The New York Times. But that brief interaction with the police, which resulted in no criminal charges against Har ...