Vera Institute of Justice

Jacob Denney is the associate director of research for Vera California, leading research team efforts to advance statewide criminal legal system reform and contributing impactful research on alternatives to incarceration.

Before joining Vera, Jacob was the economic justice policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area think tank, SPUR. There, his original research and advocacy helped lead to the dismissal of $100 million in fines and fees and the adoption of the country’s most progressive pretext stop ban. Jacob, who also worked at the Insight Center and The Pew Charitable Trusts, co-founded the Economic Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which confronts debtors' prisons and private probation practices in the American South. He began his career working in the Massachusetts State Senate.

Jacob holds a BA in political philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and an MPP from the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California.