Arrest

Everyone in Vera’s Story Is a Victim — Except the Victim

A $150-million-a-year operation, most of it taxpayer-funded, has built its entire argument around the accused. The person actually harmed by crime never makes the page.

Read enough of the Vera Institute of Justice, and you begin to notice who is missing. Not the defendant — the defendant is everywhere, rendered in careful, sympathetic detail: the mother behind bars, the teenager swept up by an overzealous system, the immigrant child facing a courtroom alone. What you will search for and rarely find is the person on the other side of the crime. In Vera’s telling, the justice system has a victim, and it is almost always the person accused of committing the offense.

That inversion is not an accident of tone. It is the organization’s stated purpose. Vera describes its mission as ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.” Read that sentence again and count the people it promises to protect. There are three. The person whose car was stolen, whose home was broken into, whose family buried someone is not among them.

The Missing Person

Vera’s defenders will point out, correctly, that the phrase “those harmed by crime and violence” does appear in the organization’s boilerplate. It does — once, in the mission language, and then it disappears. Look past the sentence and into the work, and the victim is nowhere. Vera’s four core priorities, in its own words, are eliminating money bail, ending mass incarceration, improving life behind bars, and securing counsel for immigrants facing deportation. Every one of them serves the accused, the convicted, or the detained. Not one of them funds a victim, staffs a victim program, or measures success by whether fewer people are harmed. The victim is invoked once as a courtesy and then written out of the script.

This is the difference between saying a word and building around it. A guide to crime that names the victim once, in the throat-clearing, and then spends every subsequent paragraph on the humanity of the offender has not included the victim. It has used him.

Follow the Money

The scale of the operation makes the omission harder to forgive. Vera is not a scrappy advocacy shop. In its fiscal year ending June 2024 it reported roughly $154 million in revenue against $155 million in expenses, and sits on assets north of $167 million. Under its current president the budget has tripled. This is a large, permanent institution, and it runs largely on public money.

How largely? In the one year the accounting is cleanest — July 2020 through June 2021 — roughly $152 million of Vera’s $191 million in revenue came from government sources, according to its own audit. That is about four dollars in five, drawn from taxpayers, funding an organization whose first stated priority is to abolish money bail and shrink the jails. Separately, the federal government awarded Vera a single contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied migrant children with a ceiling of $983 million — of which more than $832 million has already been obligated. Whatever one thinks of that mission, it is worth being clear about the arrangement: the public is paying, at a scale most charities never see, for advocacy aimed squarely at dismantling the tools that hold offenders accountable.

There is an irony worth naming. Vera was founded in 1961 as a bail project — an experiment in releasing New York defendants without money bail. Six decades and a nine-figure budget later, the same organization is still fighting money bail, only now with the full weight of federal contracting behind it. What began as a narrow reform has become a permanent, publicly funded campaign against a tool that exists to protect the very people Vera never names.

Vera resents being asked about any of it. When the current administration moved to attach conditions to federal grant money and terminated several of Vera’s awards, the organization’s response was not to explain its outcomes but to frame the scrutiny itself as persecution. An organization that takes four of every five dollars from the public should expect the public to ask what it bought.

What the Policy Actually Produces

And what it bought is worth examining, because Vera’s central promise is that less incarceration makes communities safer. The place to test that is not a Vera white paper but the ground where its favored policy was actually tried. When California imposed emergency “zero bail” during the pandemic — the practical version of the reform Vera exists to advance — the Yolo County District Attorney’s office studied the results against a matched group released on traditional bail. People released on zero bail were rearrested for 163 percent more crimes. They committed new violent offenses 200 percent more often. Their recidivism rate ran 78 percent over eighteen months, against 46 percent for those released on bail.

Every one of those additional crimes has a victim — a real one, the kind that does not appear in Vera’s literature. That is the missing person, made concrete. When you remove the tool, you do not liberate the innocent; you release the same people to harm the same neighborhoods, and the bill comes due in emergency rooms and funeral homes, not in policy footnotes.

What Vera Gets Right

None of this means Vera has never done anything defensible. Its campaign to restore Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students was a genuine, evidence-backed reform, and educated prisoners do reoffend less. Unaccompanied children really do end up in immigration court without counsel, and that is a real problem worth solving. Targeted diversion for genuinely low-level, first-time offenders has a legitimate record. A serious organization can hold those positions honestly.

But a strategic concession is not an absolution. That Vera does some defensible work at the edges does not change the structural fact at the center of everything it publishes: the victim is not in the mission, not in the priorities, and not in the budget. Good works around the margins do not repair a foundation built on looking away from the person who was harmed.

The Accounting

Here, then, is the reckoning. An institution running north of $150 million a year, most of it public money, has spent a decade teaching the country to see the accused as the only casualty of the justice system — and has done it well enough to move law, elect prosecutors, and shape the language of the debate. Its mission statement protects three groups of people. The one it leaves out is the one who called 911.

Taxpayers are entitled to ask whether that is the work they meant to fund. A justice institute that cannot find room in its mission, its priorities, or its budget for the victim of the crime is not fighting for justice. It is fighting for everyone in the story except the person justice is supposed to be for.

About the Author

Mike Morrison is the 2026 PBUS National Bail Agent of the Year and owner of Mike Morrison Bail Bonding Company in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, established in 1994. He serves as President of the Mississippi Bail Agents Association and as a national representative with the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, bringing 35 years of hands-on experience in the surety bail profession. His writing on surety bail, pretrial accountability, and public safety has earned more than one million social media views in 2026.

Independent, plain-spoken, and grounded in real-world results, not grant-funded theory.

Everyone in Vera’s Story Is a Victim — Except the Victim

Read more

Take the Cameras Down

The Caricature Never Matched the Job

Profit Over People? They Have Never Met a Bail Agent

Eight Years Later, the Record Speaks for Itself