Promoting Racial Equity in Prosecution
Prosecutors have enormous discretion to influence the outcome of a criminal case and, as a result, the course of someone’s life. The role that prosecutors have and continue to play in fueling mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on minorities is receiving closer scrutiny nationally.
For roughly a decade, beginning in 2005, district attorneys in Charlotte, Milwaukee, San Diego, Lincoln, Nebraska, and more recently Manhattan worked with us to take a step back and look at whether charging and plea decisions are influenced by race, leading black people, Latino people and other people from minority backgrounds to be punished more severely than white people for the same crimes. The method and lessons from these cities are captured in a detailed guide designed to help any district attorney’s office engage in the same type of self-reflection and reform.
Related Work
Reshaping Prosecution in St. Louis
Lessons from the Field
Prosecutors wield tremendous power. They decide whom to charge—and with what offense—whether to ask for bail, when to provide evidence to the defense, and what plea offer to make. For decades, prosecutors have used their discretion in ways that contribute to mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal legal system. However, communiti ...
Dignity, Racial Justice, and Prosecution
Embracing human dignity; Correcting racial injustice; Reimagining prosecution
As the gatekeepers of the justice system, prosecutors wield a tremendous amount of power and are uniquely situated to stem the tide of mass incarceration and to ensure justice and fairness. While a wave of reform-minded district attorneys across the country are bringing increased awareness on both the need and potential for reform, true progress ca ...
Project
Jamila Hodge
Unlocking the Black Box of Prosecution
An Unjust Burden
The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System
The evidence for racial disparities in the criminal justice system is well documented. The disproportionate racial impact of certain laws and policies, as well as biased decision making by justice system actors, leads to higher rates of arrest and incarceration in low-income communities of color. However, there is no evidence that these widely disp ...
New Orleans Tricentennial
Visions of Justice
What should justice look like in New Orleans for the next three hundred years? The criminal justice system in New Orleans absorbs the lion’s share of the city’s operating budget. With new and renewed leadership in this important year in our city’s history, it is time to dig deep into what it means to build a system that delivers on the promise of ...
New Orleans: Who's in Jail and Why?
Quarterly data analysis of incarceration in NewOrleans
Until recently, New Orleans was the longtime nationwide leader in urban jail incarceration rate, which today remains at nearly double the national average. Although the population of the city’s jail has been declining since 2009, there is still much room for improvement, including addressing the considerable and persistent racial disparities in arr ...
Jim Parsons on Race and Prosecution in Manhattan
Vera partnered with the District Attorney of New York to examine whether prosecutorial discretion contributes to racially and ethnically disparate outcomes in New York County criminal cases. In this video, Vera Research Director Jim Parsons discusses Race and Prosecution in New York County and its findings.
Anatomy of Discretion
An Analysis of Prosecutorial Decision Making
Prosecuting attorneys enjoy exceptionally broad discretion in making decisions that influence criminal case outcomes. They make pivotal decisions throughout the life of a case with little public or judicial scrutiny. With support from the National Institute of Justice, the Vera Institute of Justice undertook research to better understand how prosec ...