Herbert Jay Sturz (December 31, 1930 – June 10, 2021) was an American social justice advocate, nonprofit executive, and political appointee. Sturz had a broad impact on public policy, especially in New York City. He was: chairman of the New York City Planning Commission; New York City deputy mayor for criminal justice; and a New York Times editorial board member. He was the founding director of the Vera Institute of Justice and a 12-year board member for George Soros's Open Society Foundations. In 1976 Sturz received the Rockefeller Public Service Award at the White House.
Early life and education Sturz was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the youngest of three sons. His parents were Ida (née Meirowitz), a travel agency owner, and Jacob Sturcz (also Sturz), an insurance agency owner. Jacob was born on December 18, 1889 in Hrabkov, Slovakia and immigrated to America on July 8, 1908. Ida was born in Manhattan, New York in May 1900. They were both of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Sturz was the youngest of three sons. The oldest was Robert (Bob) Sturz, a New York lawyer. The middle son was Melvin (Mel) Sturz, who was an insurance broker in Bayonne and New York. One of his nieces was Lisa Sturz.
Sturz attended Horace Mann Elementary School in Bayonne and graduated from Bayonne High School in 1948. Before graduating, he was a newspaper boy, worked at his father's bar, and was a soda jerk. Sturz was the tennis team captain in high school. During his senior year, he started dropping his tennis racket and had difficulty scooping ice cream. Sturz soon learned he had polio, which permanently weakened and disfigured his hands. Sturz enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where his two older brothers went to college. Sturz majored in philosophy, was a political activist, and graduated in 1952.
Early career as a writer After graduating from college, Sturz returned to the New York area, worked various odd jobs and wrote a screenplay with Natalie d'Arbeloff called The Peacemaker. The script was optioned by Louis de Rochemont but the film was never produced. Sturz then enrolled at Columbia Teachers College, where he earned a master's degree in English. In 1954, Sturz went to Italy in further pursuit of a writing career. He was a news correspondent in Positano, Italy and met his future wife Elizabeth Lyttleton. Sturz and Lyttleton moved to Malaga, Spain to research and write a book about life in Francoist Spain. Fearing reprisals, they smuggled the text out in small booklets to Gibraltar and made their way back to Princeton. Their book, Reapers of the Storm, was published in 1958.
Sturz and Lyttleton returned to the United States in 1958, married, and Sturz became an editor at Boy's Life magazine. While there he wrote a comic book supplement: America's Heritage: The Bill of Rights, which received the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association in 1962. The gap between the assurances in the Bill of Rights and actual practice, especially as they relate to the criminal justice system, was a theme throughout Sturz's career.
Vera Institute of Justice (1961 to 1977) In 1960 (at age 29) while working at Boy's Life, Sturz used his company connections to create a foundation to improve youth pretrial detention. Sturz sought funding from prominent philanthropists, including Louis Schweitzer, the industrialist and philanthropist with a keen interest in civil rights. Sturz secured $500 ($5,500 in 2025 dollars) for exploratory work from Schweitzer, but did not produce a tangible result. Sturz set another appointment with Schweitzer, but to Schweitzer's surprise, Sturz was not asking for more money; he was returning $250.
Schweitzer was impressed by Sturz's integrity and passion and decided to employ him in February 1961. Sturz's starting salary was $8,000 a year ($86,700 in 2025 dollars). This was the start of the Vera Institute of Justice.
Sixteen years later, on December 1, 1976 (age 45), Sturz went to the White House Oval Office and received the Rockefeller Public Service Award from President Gerald Ford for his outstanding work in the area of the Administration of Justice and the Reduction of Crime.
Sturz's projects during his 17 years at Vera are documented in Vera's online archives, websites, government publications, journals, and newspaper articles. Many Sturz/Vera programs and studies have become standards against which similar efforts are compared in mission, experimental design, and results.
Manhattan Bail Project (1961) Sturz's first Vera project was to investigate and find practical ways to reform Manhattan's pretrial services program (bail). Sturz gained access to the judicial system through Schweitzer's connections with and contributions to NYU School of Law and Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. Sturz interviewed arrestees and attended bail hearings. He noted that bail decisions were heavily influenced by independent bail bondsmen, and that biographical information about the accused and their ties to the community were seldom presented to the magistrate or judge.
Sturz designed a study to test increased use of release on their own recognizance (ROR, or release without bail). NYU law students supervised by Vera conducted, verified, and scored defendant surveys to assess appropriateness for ROR. Based on the defendant's score, Vera could recommend ROR to the Legal Aid Society and the District Attorney's Office. If they agreed, Vera's ROR recommendation would be presented to the magistrate or judge at the bail hearing. A control group was part of the test, where half of Vera's positive ROR recommendations were randomly withheld. Sturz's bail project showed initial signs of effectiveness, and won the support of Chief City Magistrate Abraham M. Bloch and Chief Justice John M. Murtagh of Special Sessions. In October 1961, Mayor Wagner approved Vera's proposed one-year bail study.
Enthusiasm for the project built quickly. In January and December 1962, it was described in two criminal justice journals. In August, it was reported in the New York Times that 99% of defendants on ROR returned for trial. In January 1963, it was reported that 98% of ROR defendants appeared in court. In March 1993 US Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach urged federal judges to broaden the use of the personal recognizance procedure.
Katzenbach issued his policy statement based on a set of personal recognizance recommendations in the Attorney General's Committee on Poverty and the Administration of Federal Criminal Justice Report (chaired by Francis A. Allen). Those recommendations were based on Vera's Manhattan findings and a gratis Vera study of the federal courts in the Southern District of New York. Sturz and Vera are frequently referenced the Allen Committee report. Sturz met Burke Marshall when Vera's findings and recommendations were presented to the Allen Committee. Marshall later became Vera's first board chairman in 1966.
Under the co-sponsorship of the US Department of Justice and Vera, a working paper was written: Bail in the United States: 1964. It was presented at the National Conference on Bail and Criminal Justice, May 27–29, 1964. The Conference's advisory committee had Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Schweitzer as ex-officio members. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. was on the advisory committee. The keynote address, which Sturz helped write, was delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Conference was attended by eight of the nine Supreme Court justices.
Sturz is highlighted in the Conference report Acknowledgement: "Herbert J. Sturz, the Director of the Manhattan Bail Project and the Co-Director of this Conference, contributed enormously to our knowledge about alternatives to the present bail system." Another person recognized in the Acknowledgement was Jack Rosenthal, assistant to RFK at the time, and eventual winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 1982. Sturz and Rosenthal remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
The Manhattan Bail Project evolved into the Pretrial Services Agency (PTSA) in 1973, and then into the New York City Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) in 1977. A June 1980 study found that defendants with community ties appeared for court more often than defendants who did not. Community ties information also increased the court's confidence and speed in making release decisions.
Manhattan Bowery Project (1965) The next Sturz/Vera project focused on the Bowery, a neighborhood in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Bowery was a major statistical outlier in the Manhattan Bail Project; these arrestees often did not appear for court despite qualifying for release without bail. Sturz did a preliminary investigation and found that the neighborhood had an overwhelming level of public drunkenness, and derelicts were often in a cycle of arrest, detention, release, and rearrest. In 1965, Sturz asked Rosemary Masters, a new Vera hire and Harvard Law graduate, to research the problem further and write a project plan and budget. When she asked who should be project administrator, Sturz said, "Well, you of course."
Vera obtained approval for a pilot program from New York Mayor John Lindsay in November 1966. It was funded as part of a $1.1 million, five-year grant from the Ford Foundation. Sturz, Masters, a plainclothes policeman, and a Vera recovering alcoholic drove around the Bowery in an unmarked patrol wagon. When they found a drunk person on the sidewalk, the foursome asked if they would like to sleep it off in a clean, safe place. If they said yes, they were taken to a 12-bed Men's Shelter operated by New York's Department of Social Services. If they sobered up by day three, they were eligible for a bed in the Bowery Mission, a nonprofit shelter. The test easily filled the beds in half a day and the test was viewed as a more humane way to address public drunkenness.
After the Bowery pilot success, a full-scale alcohol treatment and diversion effort started in late 1967 as the Manhattan Bowery Corporation. It worked with multiple city agencies and St. Vincent's Hospital. Two-man teams, one officer and one Rescue Aid/recovering alcoholic, would find a drunk person on the sidewalk and invite them to the treatment infirmary as an alternative to arrest for public drunkenness. They went through detoxification and were offered therapeutic and rehabilitative services. In a 1972 project evaluation, it was found that 68% of patients were placed in after care programs and Bowery arrests for public intoxication decreased 96%.
Eventually, the Manhattan Bowery Corporation became Project Renewal. Its scope expanded from alcohol detoxification into a comprehensive program to: "... end the cycle of homelessness by empowering individuals and families to renew their lives with health, homes, and jobs." Now, Project Renewal: "... has grown into one of the city's largest social services agencies, reaching over 10,000 people each year."
Manhattan Court Employment Project (1968) The Manhattan Court Employment Project (MCEP) created by Sturz and Vera was the nation's first formal pretrial diversion program for juvenile offenders. The MCEP screening and assessment tools were designed to detect narcotics addicts and anyone not seriously motivated to find better employment.
In the first year of operation, the project found that it was failing to detect and screen out drug addicts: 23% of approved program participants were addicts, especially to heroin, despite no prior drug arrests and no signs of addiction during their screening interview. Further, participants who were already charged with minor violations had light penalties and hence low motivation to participate enthusiastically in the jobs program. For these and other reasons, only 39% of participants found employment during the program's first year. While MCEP helped some participants, its overall success rate was disappointing.