Vera Institute of Justice

Overview

The Vera Institute of Justice and the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice have developed a model of portable drug treatment designed to begin treating the most serious drug abusers as soon as they enter detention and provide care without interruption. By identifying heavy users and giving detention authorities a new treatment option, Vera hopes to overcome obstacles to starting treatment at the earliest possible moment. And by creating a treatment provider with authority to follow adolescents from agency to agency and into the community, we hope to eliminate the breaks in treatment that usually coincide with these transitions.