Incarceration Statistics

Mass Incarceration’s Complex Statistics

How to Stop Misreading Homicide Statistics

The Missing Statistics of Criminal Justice

Looking beyond the stop and frisk statistics

Search online for “stop and frisk.” You’ll quickly amass a mountain of news articles, blog posts, editorials, opinion pieces, and other evidence that there are a lot of strong feelings about this policing practice. In New York City, the police department uses...

Beyond the Statistics and into the Hearts of Incarcerated Students

Vera Institute of Justice on newly released FBI national crime statistics

About the Vera Institute of Justice The Vera Institute of Justice is powered by hundreds of advocates, researchers, and policy experts working to transform the criminal legal and immigration systems until they’re fair for all. Founded in 1961 to advocate for a...

Proposed change in the FBI's definition of rape highlights underreporting in federal statistics

On December 6, the FBI’s Criminal Justice Advisory Board voted to update the definition it uses for rape, last modified in 1929. The existing definition excludes drug- and alcohol-facilitated assaults, leaves out male victims, and does not take into account a...

Measuring Public Safety — Responsibly Interpreting Statistics on Violent Crime

For the Record Evidence Brief Series With a few hyper-localized exceptions that require targeted attention, violent crime rates are lower today than they have been at any point over the past four decades. However, this era of public safety has been misrepresen...

Supplement to Measuring Public Safety — Expanded to include final 2016 data for 294 cities with populations of 100,000 or greater

In Measuring Public Safety: Responsibly Interpreting Statistics on Violent Crime, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) used historical crime trend data to illustrate some common pitfalls when interpreting statistical data on crime. This supplement expands Vera...

The Number of Women in Jail Is Up 1,260%—What Are They Doing Wrong?

Jennifer Hill

Jennifer Hill works on development of methods that help us to answer the causal questions that are so vital to policy research and scientific development. In particular she focuses on situations in which it is difficult or impossible to perform traditional ran...