Besiki Kutateladze, associate research director of the Prosecution and Racial Justice Program at the Vera Institute of Justice, discusses his book "Is America Really So Punitive?: Exploring a Continuum of U.S. State Criminal Justice Policies," published in December 2009.
To understand how the United States became one of the most incarcerated nations in the world, it is critical to understand the role that excessive and harsh sentencing has played. In this report, Vera addresses a main driver of mass incarceration: our sentencing system. Dismantling our system of mass incarceration in favor of a narrowly tailored se ...
A laundry list of minor traffic violations can lead to tickets and even jail time. In the worst cases, police stops for trivial infractions turn deadly. But stops for those offenses—tinted windows, a missing inspection sticker, an air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror—don’t make us safer. They do, however, drive racial disparities: study ...
Restorative justice is a framework that views crime, conflict, and wrongdoing as harm to relationships and not merely violation of the law by focusing on people who have been harmed and their needs, while also holding people who have caused harm directly accountable for those needs. Restorative justice successes include reduced recidivism, high sat ...