But I confess that I’d worried that this difference would not be well received in Herb’s eyes. Vera’s evolution to what it is today was necessary. But we are-in essence and in our DNA-still Herb’s Vera: empirical, independent, fierce, insistent, and endowed with entrepreneurial spirit. We have equipped ourselves with the tools-campaigns and advocacy to power our research-we need to end overcriminalization and mass incarceration, phenomena and terms that did not exist in 1961 as they do now. Where Vera once incubated organizations across New York City, we now strive for national change in policy and practice across state capitals and in Washington, DC, alongside partners from communities and allies in government. And we aspire to change at scale: to transform the field of prosecution to one that pursues justice, not jails to make sure that every single immigrant facing deportation has a government-funded lawyer and a chance to stay with their family and be part of our communities and to ensure that any incarcerated student can receive a quality college education, something increasingly necessary to thrive in this country. We focus explicitly and assiduously on eradicating racial injustice as our central tenet. He was focused on justice and making individual New Yorkers’ lives better. Yet, the Vera of today looks quite different than Herb’s. These organizations still exist to, among other things, help people find work after incarceration, provide counseling and treatment to people with criminal legal system involvement, treat survivors of crime with dignity and care, offer healing alternatives to prison, and provide guardianship to incapacitated people in desperate need of protection. The Vera he built and the empirical, fierce, insistent, and entrepreneurial spirit he fostered within its walls led to the incubation of almost 20 nonprofit organizations in New York. It would be enough if Herb had ended his work there. It is fair to say they have Herb to thank. Although the money bail system persists across the country-and has frankly become even worse after five decades of our stratospheric, unstoppable ascent into mass incarceration-at least in New York City, the home of the Manhattan Bail Project, more than 70 percent of people going through the courts are released back to their families, their jobs, and their homes, with a chance to fight their cases and preserve the stability and dignity of their lives. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and eventually shaped the federal Bail Reform Act of 1966. criminal justice system the concept of “release on recognizance.” This concept, in turn, captured the imagination of then-U.S. The Manhattan Bail Project, which emerged from Herb’s hunch that money bail wasn’t necessary to get people to return to court, introduced to the U.S. Herb enlisted court representatives to advocate to criminal court judges for release without bail and hired researchers to study the impact of these judicial decisions. Out of that empirical investigation was born the commonsense, yet radical, notion that if the courts were worried that people wouldn’t return to court-so much so that they would impose bail as collateral-they could instead look at a person’s community ties as a better indicator. To the person, it was because they couldn’t pay for their liberty. Herb visited the Tombs, the notorious jail in downtown Manhattan, and went cell by cell asking people why they were incarcerated. In 1961, he was asked by Louis Schweitzer-the philanthropist who started this eponymous organization and the son of Vera Schweitzer-to find a solution to New York City’s overcrowded jails. Herb’s Vera story may be familiar to many here.
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