Vera Institute of Justice

Overview

This is Vera's 1972-73 annual report on the Court Employment (CEP). This report discusses CEP activities in that year such as undergoing an intensive evaluation, launching a remedial education program, and enlarging the CEP's pool of community resources. The CEP was an experimental attempt to intervene in the usual court process just after a defendant's arrest ("pretrial diversion"). It offered defendants counseling and job opportunities and, if the defendant cooperated and showed promise of permanent change, recommended that the prosecutor and the judge dismiss the charges against him without ever deciding whether he was guilty. Thus, the MCEP attempted to convert a participant's arrest from a losing to a winning experience.