Vera and MILPA cut prison violence by housing young inmates with mentors

Young adults aged 18 to 25 in US prisons have the system's highest rates of violent incidents and solitary-confinement placements. The standard institutional response to that risk profile is more control: tighter restriction, more surveillance, and separation from the general population — the security apparatus doing exactly what it is designed to do when a group is flagged as dangerous.

That approach hadn't reduced the underlying violence; it mostly documented and punished it after the fact, while doing nothing to change the conditions — isolation, absence of structure, lack of any positive adult relationship — that made violent conflict likely in the first place. Tighter control could occupy a correctional system's entire response to a group's risk profile without ever addressing why the risk existed.

Starting in 2016-17, the Vera Institute of Justice and the MILPA Collective partnered with corrections agencies in Connecticut and South Carolina to redesign specific housing units for 18-to-25-year-olds around dignity rather than restriction: private living space, group dialogue, restorative-justice practices, and — the central mechanism — housing young adults alongside older 'mentor' incarcerated men serving long sentences, who coach them on conflict resolution, family relationships and life skills.

Housed young adults with older long-serving mentors who had credibility staff lacked, converting a solitary wing into community space to replace surveillance.

Mentors have credibility staff lack, so young adults accept their guidance.

Dignity-based routines remove idle time and lack of privacy that fuel conflict.

Restorative practices give inmates a nonviolent framework for resolving disputes.

Reducing solitary placements breaks the cycle of isolation and violence.

When control fails, test whether the problem is lack of status and structure; redesign for dignity and mentorship.

A randomized controlled trial of the South Carolina units found residents were 73 percent less likely to receive a violent disciplinary infraction and 83 percent less likely to be placed in solitary confinement than young adults housed under standard conditions in the same facilities. The program has since expanded to seven housing units across five states.