Vera works with government and community partners across the country to advance research, analyze policy, pilot programs, and implement solutions on the ground. Working on nearly 60 projects in 40 states, Vera is committed to developing solutions to the most pressing injustices of our day. This page encompasses all of Vera’s work in Pennsylvania, and any related news coverage.
See our updated report, "People in Jail and Prison in 2020," here. Researchers from the Vera Institute of Justice, with support from Google.org Fellows, collected data on the number of people in local jails at midyear in both 2018 and 2019 to provide timely information on how incarceration is changing in the United States. This report fills a gap u ...
State Financial Aid for Incarcerated Students
Postsecondary education in prison puts people on a path toward a brighter future by disrupting the cycle of poverty and incarceration. But it has not been offered at scale due to the numerous barriers—including the 1994 ban on Pell Grants to people in prison—that prevent students and postsecondary institutions from accessing state and federal fundi ...
Providing zealous, independent, person-centered representation to immigrants with mental health conditions
The National Qualified Representative Program (NQRP) provides appointed legal representation for immigrants who are detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), unrepresented by counsel, and who have been found by an Immigration Judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to be incompetent to represent themselves in their immigration ...
Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Use of Segregation
Since January 2010, Vera’s Segregation Reduction Project (SRP) has partnered with U.S. states’ departments of corrections to safely reduce their reliance on restricted housing and enhance their responses to special needs populations. In summer 2013, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) requested assistance from the Vera Institute of Jus ...
Implications for the United States
The U.S. prison population has increased 700 percent in the last 40 years, and state corrections expenditures reached $53.5 billion in 2012. Despite this massive investment in incarceration, the national recidivism rate remains at a stubborn 40 percent—meaning that four in 10 incarcerated people will return to prison within three years of release. ...
The Use of Segregation in the United States
This article, published in the Federal Sentencing Reporter (Vol. 24, No. 1, October 2011) provides a concise overview of the history and current use of segregation (also known as solitary confinement) in the United States, including disciplinary segregation, administrative segregation, protective custody, temporary confinement, and supermax (or clo ...
The Legal Orientation Program (LOP) educates detained immigrants about their rights and the immigration court process so that they can make informed decisions about their legal cases. Vera works with 18 nonprofit legal service providers to offer orientations about defenses against removal (deportation) and the court process, as well as to assist in ...
