System Analysis
Featured
Greater Oklahoma City Chamber Criminal Justice Reform Task Force
Report and Recommendations
For years, Oklahoma County has been grappling with an overcrowded and run-down jail. With discussions abounding about whether to replace it with a larger facility, the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce convened a task force to examine the county’s local justice system and needs. Chaired by Clayton Bennett, chairman of the Oklahoma City Thun ...
The Price of Prisons
What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers
State corrections budgets have nearly quadrupled in the past two decades—yet the true taxpayer cost of prison reaches far beyond these numbers. State corrections budgets often fail to reflect certain costs— such as employee benefits, capital costs, in-prison education services, or hospital care for inmates—covered by other government agencies. In p ...
Final Report to the Tennessee Governor’s Task Force on Sentencing and Recidivism
This is the final report of the Governor’s Task Force on Sentencing and Recidivism issued in September 2015. It contains consensus recommendations of the Task Force for the consideration of Governor Haslam.
Related Work
A New Way of 911 Call Taking: Criteria Based Dispatching
A Review of the Literature
As a movement across the country has begun demanding changes to policing and public safety, the need to revisit 911 call-taking and dispatching methods has become urgent. The scope of 911 has expanded and technological infrastructure has evolved, but there have been few advances in the call-taking and dispatching aspects of the system over the last ...
Tracking COVID-19 in Immigration Detention
A Dashboard of ICE Data
In the Shadows
A Review of the Research on Plea Bargaining
Most criminal cases that result in conviction—97 percent in large urban state courts in 2009, and 90 percent in federal court in 2014—are adjudicated through guilty pleas. Of these, researchers estimate that more than 90 percent are the result of plea bargaining—an informal and unregulated process by which prosecutors and defense counsel negotiate ...
Floyd’s Death Emblematic of a Fundamentally Brutal Criminal Justice System
Even if encounters with police do not result in extrajudicial execution, Black Americans can reasonably fear that the criminal justice system will deliver wildly disproportionate punishment and disregard for our humanity. Even when operating “correctly,” it is fundamentally brutal towards people of color. The true extent of the horror that the U.S. ...
Blog Post
Erica Bryant
Justice Fines and Fees
People trapped in the criminal justice system are typically poor and struggling to provide basic necessities for themselves and their families. Yet an arrest can lead to many and varied fines, fees, and court costs resulting in a bill of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Vera’s Justice Fines and Fees Project will explore just how much fine and ...
Project
Chris Mai
The 911 Call Processing System
A Review of the Literature as it Relates to Policing
Police spend an inordinate amount of time responding to 911 calls for service. While most of these calls are unrelated to crimes in progress, police often respond with the tool that is most familiar and expedient to them: enforcement. This exhausts police resources and exposes countless people to avoidable criminal justice system contacts. There i ...
People in Prison in 2018
Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) researchers collected year-end 2017 and 2018 prison population data directly from state departments of corrections and the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on the number of people in state and federal prisons on December 31, 2018, in order to provide timely information on how prison incarceration is changing in the U ...
Arrest Trends
Interactive data tool on policing trends at the national and local levels
Arrest Trends: Data Sources and Methodology
This report provides detailed information on why and how the Arrest Trends tool was developed, including data sources and methodology, available year ranges and geographic levels, differences between reported and estimated data, and offense definitions. Read the report to learn more, and explore the interactive Arrest Trends tool at http://arresttr ...
Embracing Human Dignity
Annual Report 2018
The Vera Institute of Justice is working to radically transform incarceration in America by replacing punishing practices with an approach that prioritizes compassion, true accountability, healing, restoration, opportunity, and hope. Learn more about our commitment to human dignity in our annual report 2018.
Reimagining Prison
Report to Tulsa County Stakeholders on Jail Reduction Strategies
Like many counties across the country, Tulsa County, Oklahoma has experienced a dramatic increase in its jail population over the past five decades, with the per capita jail incarceration rate growing nearly 200 percent between 1970 and 2016. In response to concerns about the continued growth of the jail population, its costs to taxpayers, and impa ...