Word: veras
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...high points of his youthful heroics. On his first assignment in the Philippines, he reports that he was waylaid on a narrow jungle trail by a pair of desperadoes; he dropped them both with his pistol, while a slug tore through his campaign hat. When the Marines were occupying Vera Cruz in 1913, MacArthur went on an unauthorized reconnaissance aboard a railway handcar. Shooting his way out of a series of ambushes, he arrived back in Vera Cruz with four bullet holes in his shirt, but unscathed. As a brigadier general...
Interview Through Bars. It all started 31 years ago when Schweitzer, now 65, met New York City Prison Commissioner Anna Kross, who took him to visit a Brooklyn detention prison. He was shocked by the large number of pre-trial prisoners and donated $70,000 to set up the Vera Foundation, which he named for his mother (because "I thought she would have liked what I was doing"). In cooperation with the New York University Law School, Schweitzer's foundation set up the Manhattan Bail Project, which has been operating for 31 months on a trial basis in Manhattan...
...project's early months, Vera staffers cautiously recommended the release of only 30% of the prisoners interviewed; now they intercede for 60%. At first the judges followed the foundation's advice in only half of the cases, but now they turn loose 70% of the prisoners for whom Vera vouches. This remarkable trend is based on equally remarkable results. Of the 2,300 prisoners-ranging from muggers to embezzlers-that Vera has recommended for release, less than 1% have failed to show up for trial v. a 3% no-show rate in Manhattan for defendants who were free...
Beautiful & Unbutchered. Even Vera's most enthusiastic supporters do not claim that the new system will work in all cases, and Vera itself avoids homicide, sex and narcotics offenses as too risky to handle. But the success of the project strongly suggests that many indigent defendants can be turned loose by sidestepping the old concept of money bail and substituting character checks and supervision (Vera sends special letters and makes telephone calls to remind the defendants to show up for trial). The Vera system would not only greatly reduce the cost of jailing pre-trial prisoners-$10 million annually...
...York City in January decided to adopt Vera procedures for all its criminal courts. Experiments with the system have also been started in eight other major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy is encouraging federal courts to release more prisoners without bail. Reflects Louis Schweitzer: "There is an old saying, 'nothing is so terrible as watching a beautiful theory being butchered by brutal facts.' But this is one time when the facts came out as beautifully as the theory...