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 ...

Sitting with death as a hospice worker in a maximum-security prison.

I work in hospice at a maximum-security prison. The question I get the most is, “How can you do that?” Honestly, it’s not easy. We are literally sitting with death. Hospice is a program that we sign up for, where we sit with another prisoner while he dies. That’s not all we do; there’s far more to it than that. But for now, that’s what I’ll say. W ...

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 ...