Senior Program Associate at Vera

Location
​New York, NY; District of Columbia; or Remote

Salary
$75,000 - $90,000

Link to More Information

​The Center on Sentencing and Corrections seeks a Senior Program Associate to support its work. You will be a part of the team focused on reducing the use of segregation/restrictive housing/solitary confinement. This position reports to the project director for the current Safe Alternatives to Segregation Initiative. Initially you will be assigned one agency to focus on, with an opportunity to expand to other systems as the project grows and evolves.

The project: Since the 1980s, U.S. prisons and jails have increasingly relied on the use of segregation—also known as restrictive housing, isolation, or solitary confinement—to maintain order and manage their populations. The use of segregation remains a mainstay of prison management and control despite evidence pointing to potentially devastating psychological effects, the increased expense of housing people in restrictive housing, and the lack of evidence that the use of restrictive housing leads to greater institutional safety or public safety of the communities to which those who have been held under such severe conditions will return. That said, the tide is turning and corrections officials across the country are motivated to reform this practice.

Vera has partnered with corrections agencies since 2010 to safely reduce their reliance on segregation and develop alternative strategies. Since that time, we have worked in 16 jurisdictions across the country, helping systems achieve segregation population reductions as high as 85 percent. Vera is moving into a new phase of the work, which will involve working intensively in states to implement reforms that will drive down the use of solitary even further than has already been achieved, engage external stakeholders to support reform efforts, and disseminate new promising practices being implemented in Vera’s jurisdictions and in other systems to the field.