On my group’s first fieldwork, we met with a man named Saadiq Bey, who works for the Vera Institute. We met at LREI and interviewed him about the Vera Institute and what is does. The Vera Institute is an organization that try to help create justice in the Judicial System. Saadiq told us that a lot of what the Vera Institute strives to do is to try to have fewer people go to jail and make rehabilitation more community based. What he means by this is that people will be given to their communities so that they can help, instead of putting them in jail and not helping the people who committed crimes by finding out why they did it.

He went on to say that especially for children, police were putting children in jail as a punishment for doing minor crimes, which was not legal. He said that in the part of the Vera Institute that he works with, he is trying to find ways for children to get help and people to talk to close to home, instead of just seeing them to jail. He also said that the Vera Institute has multiple section in it that do different things. Saadiq said that his section was for helping juvenile incarceration but there are many other sections, such as the Guardian Project, which finds helps for those incarcerated due to mental illness. In the end, this made me feel really confident and motivated that there were things that we can do to help people that are incarcerated. It made me really want to see a future where there are no prisons and that is most of the what the Vera Institute is trying to do. I was really happy that we were able to meet with Saadiq Bey to learn about the Vera Institute and I hope that we can do more work with Vera in the future.

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