Nicholas Turner joined the Vera Institute of Justice as its fifth president in 2013. Under his leadership, Vera has identified core priorities of ending the misuse of jails, transforming conditions of confinement, and ensuring that justice systems more effectively serve America’s growing minority communities.
Nicholas Turner joined the Vera Institute of Justice as its fifth president in 2013. Under his leadership, Vera has identified core priorities of ending the misuse of jails, transforming conditions of confinement, and ensuring that justice systems more effectively serve America’s growing minority communities. Recent major initiatives at Vera include leading a delegation of policymakers on a tour of German prisons to learn from a system rooted in human dignity, working with corrections officials to shrink the number of people held in solitary confinement, and defining the role local jails play in mass incarceration through a first-in-kind data tool and related publications. Mr. Turner is the author of several op-eds, including “Finding A Home After Prison” in the New York Times; “What We Learned from German Prisons” with Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in the New York Times; and “The Steep Cost of America’s High Incarceration Rate” with Robert Rubin, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. Treasury secretary, in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Turner came to Vera from the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was a managing director. He previously served as vice president and chief program officer at Vera. Prior to his work with Vera, he was an associate in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and a judicial clerk for the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein, Senior United States District Judge in Brooklyn. He is a member of the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and the Advisory Board to New York City’s Children’s Cabinet, and has served on the boards of National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Living Cities, and the Center for Working Families. He received his BA and JD from Yale.
