Herbert Sturz, a public policy giant and pioneer in criminal justice reform both in New York City and across the country, has died, friends and colleagues confirmed on Thursday. He was 90.
Sturz — the former deputy mayor under Mayor Koch, one-time chairman of the New York City Planning Commission, and later the subject of the biography, “A Kind of Genius” — founded or played a pivotal role in the creation of over 20 nonprofit organizations starting with the Vera Institute of Justice, a national leader in reshaping justice policy.
The one-time magazine editor teamed up with philanthropist Louis Schweitzer in 1961 to tackle the city’s broken bail system that penalized the poor. Together, they founded the Manhattan Bail project — an initiative to show people accused of committing a crimes could and would come back to court without posting bail.
The experiment led to the founding of the institute and similar robust reforms nationwide, so much so that Sturz’s work caught the attention of Robert Kennedy and led to the Department of Justice co-sponsoring a national conference on bail and criminal justice with his infant nonprofit.
“He was a New York landmark, a treasure, a behind-the-scenes powerbroker guy. All roads lead back to Herb,” Sturz’s colleague and long-time friend Greg Berman told the Daily News. “It’s a personal loss, but it’s more of a loss to the city and our field of justice reform.”
“I was always trying to [figure out] what the secret of his success was — and in my analysis, one of the secrets is that he was not someone who needed to have his name in the headlines,” added Berman. “He was willing to work behind the scenes and he was willing to give other people credit.”
Sturz’s creation of the Vera Institute led to the formation of other nonprofits like the Center for Court Innovation, the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, Project Renewal, which provides homeless individuals with affordable housing, and Safe Horizon, which supports victims of abuse.
He eventually left Vera to join the Koch administration, said Berman, playing an integral role in the rebirth of Times Square, before joining the New York Times editorial board, becoming a real estate developer and joining George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
“It was a career that is just kind of unique for having touched on nonprofit government, journalism, for-profit philanthropy,” he said. “Herb had developed this bulletproof rolodex; he knew everybody.”
While working for Koch in the late 1970s, Sturz also pushed to shutter the sprawling Rikers Island jail complex — a decades-long dream he later helped realize as a member of the Lippman Commission with the passage of the borough-based jails plan in 2019. The jails are slated to close by 2027.
“He was very in involved closing down Rikers and turning it into something much better,” his long-time friend and Robin Hood Foundation executive Michael Weinstein told The News. “And it’s sad, sad that he won’t see that happen — but it will happen. And it will be due in no small part to him.”
