A new study, "Criminal Justice Involvement of Armed Force Veterans in Two Systems of Care," compared criminal justice involvement of veterans before and after receiving services from community-based programs of the Veterans Health Administration or a state Department of Mental Health. The study found veterans who received mental health services had a reduction in criminal justice charges.
Read the study here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on veterans in the criminal justice system.
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The Crime Report is proud to introduce a special feature that begins today in Inside Criminal Justice. Over the next two weeks we will be publishing in this space the work of journalists selected as 2010 John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellows.
Their original reports, many of which have also been published or broadcast in their own news outlets, demonstrate the best of of contemporary U.S. criminal justice reporting. We welcome your comments. The special reports begin with a piece by Matthew D. LaPlante of the The Salt Lake Tribune: From combat to lockdown: Troubled Veterans Trade Military Uniforms for Prison Attire.
John Pace stumbled to his car, slipped Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" into the compact disc player and turned the key.
From half a century away, one Air Force veteran crooned to another:
When I was just a baby, my mama told me, 'Son,
Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns.'
Five years as a military police officer, including a stint in South Korea, a tour of duty in Afghanistan and multiple deployments in Iraq, had all come to this: a drunken 23-year-old combat vet behind the wheel, determined to find another bottle to empty onto his pain.
Pace pulled into the dark parking lot of a TGI Friday's restaurant in Riverdale, broke a window and crawled inside. He took one bottle, then another. Then he decided to empty out the entire bar.
More than 2 million American military members have served in the nation's ongoing conflicts, and many are returning home deeply troubled by their experiences. About a third suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury, depression or other mental illness. At least a fifth struggle with drug or alcohol dependency.
Mental illness and substance abuse are the greatest predictive factors for incarceration in America. And that has put thousands of veterans on a collision course with the nation's criminal justice system.
But no one has a handle on the extent of the problem because most police agencies, prosecutors and prisons aren't tracking who, among the accused and the convicted, has served in the military.
That lack of information is hampering criminal justice officials and social workers who are making an initial push to help veterans in Utah get the support they need before they wind up behind bars - especially if, like Pace, they have not committed a violent crime. But most vets in trouble with the law today will complete their sentences before help arrives.
'I let it get to this point'
Pace, who grew up in Atlanta, yearns for home. But he blames himself for where he is instead: the Central Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison.
"I let it get to this point," he said. "I made the decisions that resulted in my being here."
Still, he adds, "I've got to give the military some credit, too. I can say with 100 percent certainty that I wouldn't be here if I hadn't gone to war."
Pace knew when he joined the Air Force, right after high school, that he was likely to be called into the fights in Afghanistan or Iraq. But his first tour of duty involved far less action. "In Korea, when we weren't working, we were drinking," he said. "That's just the way it is there."
Ultimately, Pace did deploy to Iraq -- where he manned combat checkpoints, stood watch on guard towers and ran convoys on bomb-laden roads, he said. Among his duty stations: Balad Air Base, not-so-fondly known as "Mortaritaville" for the frequency of mortar and rocket attacks, and Camp Bucca, where U.S. military police keep watch over thousands of Iraqi prisoners suspected of terrorist acts and other crimes.
He still has a hard time talking about his experiences, which left him troubled, confused and angry. "I started hitting the bottle as soon as I got out," Pace said.
Pace contends a desire to "feel a rush" -- like being at war -- drove his Oct. 3, 2008, restaurant break-in. He thinks medication for PTSD might have influenced his "stupid" decision. And alcohol did the rest.
For reasons he can't fully explain, most of the stolen bottles were at the bottom of a ravine near the Pineview Dam in Ogden Canyon within hours of the burglary.
'To see him like this is sad.'
It was Pace's first crime, and records show he cooperated with investigators who arrived on his doorstep the next morning. "I just wanted to avoid going to jail," he said.
"You've got to feel bad for the guy," said Riverdale Police Chief Dave Hansen. Pace had "a drinking problem -- and that certainly could be related to his time in the war," he said.
But charges were up to prosecutors, who filed two felonies against Pace in 2nd District Court. Five weeks later, Judge Ernie Jones - a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves - sentenced Pace to 36 months of probation for the theft.
A month later, Pace was back before Jones for hitting a parked car while driving drunk. Jones sent him to jail for 90 days with the admonition to use the time to sober up.
A few months after he got out of jail, police were called to an altercation between Pace and a female roommate. Pace wasn't charged in the incident, but he admitted he had been drinking -- a violation of the terms of his probation. On Feb. 11, Jones ordered Pace to prison for up to five years.
Pace said he's still trying to figure out how he went from being a military policeman to being an inmate in the Utah State Prison. "It boggles my mind," he said.
His younger brother, U.S. Marine Miller Pace, also struggles with his brother's downfall. "John was one of the major reasons I joined the military," he said. "To see him like this is sad for me."
But after two combat tours in Iraq's volatile Anbar province, Miller Pace believes he recognizes his brother's pain in the lives of some of his brothers in arms. "I've seen alcohol ruin a lot of these guys' lives," he said. "I've lost a lot of good buddies to this same thing."
'The services they need'
A pilot program in Utah's capital city will offer a different path to some veterans who, like Pace, are accused of crimes related to addiction or mental health.
Starting this month, Salt Lake City prosecutor Sim Gill will allow some vets to stay out of jail or reduce their sentences if they access treatment and other services through the Department of Veterans Affairs.
While all offenders must be held accountable, Gill said, "we also have to get them the underlying help they need. And there really isn't another entity that has a better understanding of what these men and women have been through, and what they need to get better, than the VA."
U.S. District Judge Paul Warner agrees. The retired Army colonel in the National Guard was saddened by the stream of veterans, charged with minor violations, he saw cycling through his courtroom. "I was seeing people who were veterans who were being picked up for being drunk or disorderly," Warner said. "Some of them were in their 80s. Others were from Vietnam. And I was starting to see some from Iraq and Afghanistan."
He asked other judges in Salt Lake City's federal courthouse to watch for vets and send them to his court. Once Warner has them, he works with the VA to arrange housing, mental health services and addiction counseling.
The beauty of both solutions, Gill and Warner agree: "We're not reinventing anything," Gill said, "we're just connecting veterans to the services they need."
But the two programs will help only a small number of veterans -- those who find themselves in trouble in Salt Lake City or who commit violations on federal land in Utah. It could be years before similar programs are implemented to help veterans statewide.
Gill's initiative was inspired by his volunteer work with the "Homeless Veterans Stand-down," an outreach event at the Salt Lake VA Medical Center, where he met veterans who had spent decades moving in and out of incarceration. When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, Gill said, he wanted to prevent others from falling into the same cycle.
One major obstacle: No one was asking accused criminals whether they were veterans.
'I started using right away'
On the battlefields of southern Iraq on Feb. 27, 1991, two groups of American M-1A1 Abrams tanks mistook each other for the enemy. Before the fog of war had cleared, six soldiers from Ray Lara's unit, the 2nd Armored Division, were dead.
"It wasn't easy for me to deal with," the heavily tattooed former soldier said.
Lara left the service three years later, ending a 16-year commitment to the Army in a haze of alcohol and drug abuse. "I started using right away, and I just never stopped," he said.
After years of trouble in California, Lara moved to Utah -- but didn't leave his problems behind. In 2004, he was cited for misdemeanor assault. In 2006, he was arrested for possessing drugs. And in 2009, he was picked up for dealing meth near a school while carrying a gun. He's serving up to 15 years in Gunnison.
These days, Lara said, he doesn't feel worthy of the uniform he once wore, but he wonders what his life might look like today if his service had been a ticket to help. Once he'd fallen into addiction and crime, he said, no one ever asked if he was a veteran.
"I went from hero to zero in no time at all," he said.
Veterans are less likely to be incarcerated in the United States than non-vets. But in a nation with the largest prison population in the world, federal researchers believe nearly a quarter-million veterans are locked up. About 400,000 are on probation and 75,000 or more are on parole, according to estimates from Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on surveys done early in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But most individual veterans, advocates say, are invisible in the justice system.
"Most jails don't even ask whether someone has served in the military," said Amy Earle, a VA justice outreach coordinator in Salt Lake City. "And even if it is a question in the intake process, nobody is keeping the data."
Earle is helping to change that in Salt Lake County, where new inmates are now asked whether they have served in the United States military. Veterans' names are sent to Earle, who evaluates what services they might receive -- after release.
Under federal law, veterans aren't permitted to access VA services while they are incarcerated. Those suffering from PTSD and other combat-related mental health issues must make do with the care that jails and prisons can provide.
'I ask God to help me'
Utah Department of Corrections therapist Ross Williams runs a support group every Thursday for veterans in Gunnison. He can include no more than 20 inmates at a time -- and it's the only program of its sort for more than 500 veterans in the state prison system. There is no similar program at the state's main prison in Draper.
The department does not offer effective treatment for PTSD, said Williams, a former Navy chaplain.
"The priority here is safety and security, not treatment,'' Williams said. "We do enough to keep people stable and healthy enough to do their time. We don't do enough to get people healed and well."
Veterans advocate Tom Tarantino believes prison is "the absolute worst place" for veterans with PTSD. "Combat would actually be a better situation for a lot of these guys," said the Iraq war veteran from Washington, D.C., who frequently testifies about veterans' health issues before Congress.
Lara agrees. The slamming doors, uniformed guards, shouting prisoners and seething hostility -- all bring back unwanted memories. "I just go to my higher power," he said. "I ask God to help me get through it."
Tarantino, a legislative liaison for the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said there's one relatively easy and immediate way to help incarcerated vets: Allow them to get VA treatment.
But so far, he said, no one has stepped up to lift the ban.
Lynn Jorgensen, an incarcerated veterans re-entry specialist with the VA, said the ban means "all I can do is send them some information -- and wait."
Since the state parole board decides when convicts will be released, "I have to put the responsibility on the inmate," Jorgensen said. "I say, 'Mr. Inmate, you have to let me know when you are six months shy of being released.'"
Many do, but some are released suddenly due to overcrowding and have little time for correspondence. "Some will get lost in the system," Jorgensen acknowledged. "But we're trying very hard to make sure that everyone has a chance to access our help."
'If someone ... had intervened ...'
Walter Smith was loading a shotgun, apparently intent on killing himself, when Pleasant Grove police confronted him in 2004.
Friends say it was a cry for help that should have propelled the former Marine, recently returned from Iraq, into intense treatment for PTSD. Instead, Smith was released after two days in a mental health facility with instructions "to find counseling," they say.
A year and a half later, Nicole Speirs, the mother of Smith's infant twins, drowned in a bathtub at her Tooele home. The death remained a mystery until Smith confessed eight months later. Prosecutors charged Smith with murder, but later agreed he could plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter -- - reasoning that jurors might have found he was suffering from extreme emotional distress during the slaying. He'll serve up to 15 years at the prison in Draper.
Tarantino believes the Smith case is one of an epidemic of missed chances.
"If someone had deduced what was going on with him and intervened," he said, "you might not have seen the horrible consequences that happened."
Darin Farr, an outreach specialist for the Utah Department of Veterans Affairs, said officials have "learned a lot" since Smith's first encounter with police and are less likely to miss warning signs.
Troubled vets often cross paths with police many times before they commit a crime serious enough to draw a jail sentence, Farr said, "and every one of those instances is an opportunity."
Ron Bruno wants officers to make the most of those opportunities. As a crisis intervention instructor, the Salt Lake City police detective teaches officers statewide how to deal with people who are mentally ill.
He wants to increase the veteran-specific section of the training, which is limited to a few hours. For now, officers talk with a veteran who has PTSD, and they work through a scenario in which they encounter a veteran suffering a flashback.
Bruno said about 11 percent of Utah's public safety officers have taken the course. He'd like to double that rate.
But Tarantino would like every police officer to be trained to deal with veterans. With tens of thousands of new combat veterans created every year, he believes the criminal justice system needs to be better prepared to confront the consequences of war.
"In a lot of cases, these aren't people who chose to live a life of crime," he said. "A lot of these individuals are in the situation they're in as a result of their service to this country. Their inability to cope within the norms of society, the lack of treatment, the lack of understanding, the self-medication -- it all leads them to where they are."
Contact Matthew D. LaPlante at mlaplante@sltrib.com
Read related article:Sex offenses common among incarcerated vets.
Read The Crime Report's special series on Veterans.
Read full entry »Executive Director
Veterans for Common Sense
Post Office Box 77304
Washington, DC 20013
(202) 558-4553
Paul@VeteransForCommonSense.org
www.VeteransForCommonSense.org
Read full entry »VA Program Manager, Healthcare for Reentry Veterans Program
VA West Los Angeles Healthcare Center (10H-5)
Bldg. 206, Room 109
11301 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90073
Tel: (310) 478-3711 ext. 41450
Cell: (310) 597-5010
FAX: (310) 268-4946
E-mail: James.McGuire@va.gov
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In the third and final part of our Veterans Day investigation of how the U.S. justice system interacts with veterans, we look at innovative programs designed to help police understand the traumas afflicting soldiers in the transition to civilian life.
Last August, in the hallway outside a classroom at the Oklahoma City Police Training Academy, Sergeant Cory Nooner was playing dress-up. Instead of his gray uniform and black boots, he was sporting old Army fatigues and beat-up sneakers. He pulled a dingy wool blanket around himself, took a moment to get into character, and waited for the signal.
“We’re ready,” said social worker Vicki Downing, poking her head out from behind a metal door.
Nooner nodded and stepped inside. He was no longer the department’s Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) trainer: for the next half hour, Nooner was a homeless vet.
He shuffled into the classroom mumbling nonsense, his eyes darting around the room like spun marbles. Two of the student officers approached him and began a 10-minute role-play where the officers tried their best to communicate with the troubled man, determine whether he was dangerous, and finally assess whether he needed to be taken to jail or to the city’s mental health crisis center.
Nooner had played this role before. A veteran of the Gulf War, he was instrumental in creating the department’s 40-hour CIT program, which, like a growing number of similar programs around the country, now includes a section on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and discussion of how officers can better spot, approach and interact with veterans.
“We’re trying to create an empathetic response,” says Darin Farr, a former marine who fought in Desert Storm and now works as the outreach and research director for the Utah Department of Veterans Affairs. “The PTSD soldiers suffer from is different from that endured by rape victims or car accident survivors. There are so many circumstances that can trigger a reaction, from driving to crossing beneath bridges to crowds.”
Farr explains that after reading about an incident near Las Vegas during which police responded to a troubled vet in what he considered to be an over-aggressive manner, he concluded that with the proper instruction they might have been able to talk the vet down. He decided to use his college training as a filmmaker to create a video that would give police an “awareness and sensitivity” to the psychological issues faced by returning veterans.
“We as a society have created this problem,” says Farr. “We took these kids who were basically innocent , and subjected them to horrific circumstances. To expect them to rationally integrate, it’s hard.”
The problem of veterans who struggle with the psychological scars of war is not new. Tom Schumacher, the PTSD Director at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington State, helped police interact with troubled Vietnam veterans in the 1980s, and says that although law enforcement had relationships with VA counselors back then, there was never any formal training provided to officers.
Farr wanted to change this. He sought permission and support from his bosses at the VA for the video, and in late 2008 received $5,000 from his outreach budget. He consulted with Utah’s CIT program director, hired some friends to help him, and in March 2009 began presenting the 18-minute video entitled “Walking Wounded,” to law enforcement leadership in Utah.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, and Farr says the video is now being used by law enforcement in at least 28 states and by three federal agencies. Further information about the number of law enforcement agencies who are training officers on veterans issues is hard to get. The International Association of Chiefs of Police told The Crime Report that it did not collect such data.
"It's all been word of mouth," says Farr. "CIT officers started talking to each other, saying, 'You gotta use this for training.'"
Trouble on the Road
Because much of the fighting (and dying) in America’s current overseas wars occurs in urban areas and on roadsides, highways and roads have emerged as a common point of interaction between police and veterans.
“Roadside bombs are a huge tool for insurgents, so soldiers are trained to drive at high speeds, and if you see anything – a package, a car – alongside the road, (you) veer,” says Ron Bruno, Utah’s CIT program director. “So when a soldier comes back, hits our streets and sees a broken-down car, out of habit, he may swing wide. If an officer sees this, he may think the driver is impaired, and pull him over. The veteran is already experiencing nervousness, anxiousness – he’s having an emotional reaction, almost like a flashback — and the presence of the officer adds more stress. Maybe he starts sweating.”
For a police officer, these bodily signals often indicate that the person they’ve pulled over is intoxicated, or hiding something. But for a vet, Bruno says, it can be a “a normal response to an abnormal situation.” Simply asking, “Are you a veteran?” can put the vet at ease and help the officer end the situation peacefully.
Schumacher recalls hearing about the case of a local veteran who, while driving the highway, spotted a police officer with a radar gun.
“The vet went nuts,” says Schumacher, who fought in Vietnam. “He tried to aim his car at him, then realized what was happening and veered away at the last minute."
Stateside Shoot-outs
Of course, not all situations are as easily resolved as a simple driving incident. In the fall of 2007, I wrote an article about Sgt. James Dean, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Dean had returned to his hometown in rural Maryland suffering from depression, and began drowning his sorrows in alcohol. He received inconsistent mental health treatment from the local VA and just after Thanksgiving 2006, received news he would be redeployed, this time to Iraq.
Dean, who’d just gotten married, took the news hard, and on the night after Christmas, holed up in his childhood home and called his sister threatening suicide. Dean’s sister called 911. She told the operator that her brother was a veteran, was armed, and needed help.
Unfortunately, instead of following the guidelines for intervention espoused by Farr and Bruno, the responding agencies, perhaps acting out of fear that a soldier with a gun is highly trained and thus potentially dangerous, surrounded Dean’s remote home with armored cars and snipers.
Although a negotiator attempted to interact with him over the phone, the tapes of the call revealed a clear lack of understanding of Dean’s situation and mental status. Dean begged the negotiator to tell the dozens of officers to stand down, back off, leave him be. Instead, the officers launched tear gas into his home, and finally, when Dean stepped out on his front porch with a rifle in hand, they shot him dead.
Farr hopes his video, and the training that goes along with it, will educate officers about why a veteran like Dean might react poorly to the kind of escalation of force the Maryland State Police engaged in. “Vets with PTSD often have an exaggerated fear response, and more stimulus will cause them to be more reactive,” he says.
Last year, Schumacher, a Vietnam vet, was approached by the state’s Department of Health and Social Services to create a program for law enforcement aimed at promoting better understanding of new veterans’ issues. He received a $40,000 grant which allowed Schumacher and his colleagues to train more than 200 officers in Yakima County, and in July he received another grant that will allow him to continue and expand the training over the next two years. Part of Schumacher’s aim is to educate officers about the similarities between the kind of work soldiers do overseas and the work police themselves do stateside.
He explains, “When veterans get approached by police, they often think, ‘Wait, I’m one of the good guys – I’m on your side!’”
Julia Dahl is a contributing editor to The Crime Report
Photo by amg200, via Flickr.
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In Part Two of our special Veterans Day report, we explore how returning soldiers are gravitating towards law enforcement—and examine the problems that sometimes result.
All across the country, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are returning—or turning—to police work. According to a recent survey of the nation’s police agencies conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), about 86 percent of the 112 responding departments currently employ veterans who have deployed within the last five years. (Ed Note: the survey did not ask the departments to distinguish between returning officers or new hires.)
The experience of working under the pressures of combat can be a plus in the complex challenges of modern law enforcement, but it can also pose problems.
“Many police departments look upon vets as a great source of strength,” says Arnold Daxe, a Vietnam veteran and the Project Manager of the IACP’s Employing Returning Combat Veterans as Law Enforcement Officers program. “They know discipline, chain of command and weapons.” But, he adds, veterans often need special attention. “Physically, they don’t have any wounds, but mentally they may not be ready” to dive into police work right after combat, he says.
The survey and special report, entitled “Employing Returning Combat Veterans as Law Enforcement Officers,” was presented to the IACP annual conference in Denver last month. The report represents the first attempt to provide systematic guidelines for police departments.
To address the challenge of reintegration, the IACP report recommends a one-to-two year plan that includes everything from peer and family support groups to drivers’ and firearms training. Retraining is especially important because, although there are some obvious parallels between military duties and police work, the rules of engagement in war are significantly different than those accepted stateside.
Soldiers deployed in the combat theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy lurks in alleyways, along roads, and inside domestic dwellings, have had to develop hyper-vigilance to survive. That constant alertness isn’t easily shed, which can pose problems for veterans who return to—or begin—police work back home.
“We can’t just grab people off the street like we did in Iraq,” says Thaddeus Kerkoff, a Renton, Washington police officer who served two tours in Iraq. After leaving the Army in early 2007, Kerkoff spent a year bartending and working as a car salesman to give himself time to readjust to “regular” society.
“I knew I needed time to transition,” says Kerkoff, who was a military policeman at Ft. Hood and ran a security team for a colonel in Iraq. Like many returning veterans, Kerkoff came home an anxious driver. Once while driving near home, he swerved through three lanes of traffic to avoid a cardboard box, terrifying his wife. “In my mind, that box could have blown up,” he says. “No matter what you’re doing in Iraq you have to be hyper-vigilant.”
John Firman, the IACP’s research director, says that such heightened alertness can be a boon to officers in that they are used to dealing with stressful, dangerous situations. But unlike in war, most citizens aren’t trying to blow up cops, and readjusting to that reality can be tricky. “You can’t just tell someone who’s just back from a combat zone, ‘Relax, you’re going into the community now.’ The issue is transition,” he says.
Daxe agrees. “Smart chiefs understand this and ease them back in,” he says, but points out that until now, law enforcement leaders had little guidance about the best way to help veterans successfully transition from combat to community policing. Daxe believes the IACP report, and two upcoming guidebooks -- one aimed at law enforcement leaders and one for veteran officers -- will go a long way toward bridging this gap.
Recognition and Retraining
One key recommendation involves paying more attention to the sacrifices made by officers deployed abroad—the kind of “touchy-feely” approach that goes against the stoic culture of policing. “I’ve seen officers return embittered and angry because they felt their departments let them down while they were deployed,” says Daxe, who notes that the lack of attention is especially painful for National Guard Reserves, who were subject to long and multiple deployments. Returning soldiers complain that their colleagues or police department brass didn’t bother to stay in touch, even through cards or packages, and rarely contacted their families to see if they needed any assistance.
The IACP report suggests that departments support their overseas officers through family liaisons, email and phone contact, and public acknowledgement of the veteran officer’s sacrifice upon return.
“It doesn’t cost anything to bake a cake or put your arm around an officer,” says Daxe, who suggests that old-fashioned welcome-home celebrations like a department BBQ can make a major difference in helping the veteran officer transition back into policing with a positive attitude.
Of course, there are some things a cake and a card can’t fix, like the mental health symptoms that 28 percent of officers the IACP surveyed reported experiencing.
“Police and soldiers worry about whether psychological services are actually confidential,” says Daxe. “And they think that if someone sees them going to the mental health unit they’ll be looked on as weak.”
The IACP report recommends that departments establish peer and family support groups for vets and initiate a “flexible timeline” for returning to duty. Though Daxe says there isn’t a magic number of weeks or months a veteran officer should wait until hitting the streets in uniform, he sees reintegration taking 60 to 90 days on average, and no more than six months. Among the recommendations for reintegration are full reviews of the rules of engagement (including deadly force), comprehensive driver training and programs to reprogram muscle memory and language use, so that officers automatically respond in a manner appropriate to their community environment, instead of the combat theater where everyone is the enemy.
Recruiting
Earlier this week, in honor of Veteran’s Day, President Obama signed an executive order creating the Council on Veterans Employment to “enhance recruitment of and promote employment opportunities for veterans” in the executive branch. But police departments around the nation are already actively recruiting recent vets. As the IACP's report states: "The prevailing perception is that individuals with military experience make desirable law enforcement employees."
One way that departments recruit is through the Army PaYS (Partnership for Youth Success) website. Agencies including the Phoenix Police Department, the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and the NYPD are all listed as “premier employers” for vets.
Captain Dale Saffold of the Arkansas State Police, which is also listed on the Army PaYS site, says his agency employs about 50 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 10 percent of the force.
“Like a lot of State Police, we’re a quasi-militaristic organization,” says Saffold. “These vets already have experience with that chain of command structure. They tend to have personal discipline and know how to operate under pressure. Typically, if you can operate in those conditions over there, you can definitely come back and operate here on the highways.”
That said, Saffold believes that new recruits and returning officers both need “adequate time to readjust from what they’ve been subjected to over there.” Saffold could think of a handful of officers who worked with the ASP for a few weeks or months after discharge and ended up leaving the force.
“Whether they were a police officer before deploying or not, they’re a different person when they come back from war,” he says. “Some people just can’t readjust because they have too much baggage from the experience.”
But Saffold says the recruits and returning officers he’s seen have been, by and large, a tremendous boon to the force. And according to Daxe, the chiefs who responded to the IACP's survey had much the same attitude: “Most of the [police] chiefs we spoke with said they wish they’d had a primer seven years ago."
NEXT WEEK: How police departments are training officers to interact with troubled veterans in the community.
Julia Dahl is a Contributing Editor at The Crime Report.
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In a series of articles to mark Veterans Day, The Crime Report examines the impact of returning soldiers on the U.S. justice system. In Part 1, we explore the special tragedy of troubled veterans in prison.
Most of the returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan never get in trouble with the law—but the outlook is bleak for those who do. The U.S. justice system is poorly prepared to cope with young ex-military personnel whose post-combat stress or inability to adjust to civilian society pushes them over the line into criminal activity, a special report by The Crime Report shows.
Although the number of incarcerated veterans has not risen dramatically, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report planned for release next year is expected to show that for the first time since the Vietnam War, the majority of veterans now serving prison terms are between the ages of 25 and 34. With no early end of America’s overseas military commitments in sight, U.S. authorities need to devote more attention to the needs of troubled soldiers, says Paul Sullivan, Executive Director of Veterans for Common Sense, a national advocacy group based in Washington D.C.. Improving and expanding treatment and prison counseling programs for needy veterans can “make a tremendous difference” if corrections officials made this a top priority, Sullivan adds “It can save untold lives and billions of dollars.”
A recent Department of Veterans Affairs study underlined the gravity of the problem. Rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), major depression, and generalized anxiety among returning veterans ranged from 15.6 percent to 17.1 percent after duty in Iraq, and 11.2 per cent after duty in Afghanistan. Such conditions are not necessarily a predictor of criminal activity, but this month’s tragedy at Fort Hood, in which an Army psychiatrist opened fire at a processing facility for soldiers going overseas, killing 13 and wounding 30, further underscores how little is understood about dealing with troubled military personnel. Although the motives for the shooting are still unclear, it underlines the critical importance of intervention, counseling and preventive treatment for soldiers whose reactions to trauma and stress have brought them in contact with the justice system.
“We have to address issues that veterans in the system feel were not addressed when they came back from Vietnam, ” said James McGuire, PhD, Veterans Affairs Program Manager, Health-Care for Reentry Veterans Program at The Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA does not want this current crop of veterans to feel their needs are neglected after returning civilian life.
Specialized Programs, No Precedents
There are still few systematic procedures in place either on the federal or state level to deal with vets who have been imprisoned or are under correctional supervision. In a program that began in May 2009, Justice Outreach Specialists have been assigned by each of the nation’s 140 medical centers operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Still in the early stages of development, the program is aimed at coordinating counseling and other programs with local justice authorities, including law enforcement. The VA also funds and supplies counselors in conjunction with community organizations in individual states. New York’s Veterans Project, for instance, steers troubled vets away from lawbreaking activities by helping them with housing, mental health or substance abuse problems.
Perhaps the most innovative approach has been the creation of Veterans Courts. There are currently 18 courts around the nation, with 42 others in the planning stages, according to the VA. Borrowing from the model of other “problem-solving courts” dealing with drug offenders, these courts allow most low-risk defendants to avoid incarceration in exchange for strict monitoring. Veterans who have been arrested can self-identify to the court and ask to be put on this track.
Without a longitudinal study on the effectiveness of these courts, it is hard to discern if they are actually helping veterans. Nevertheless, there are few other alternatives that address the needs of both communities and ex-soldiers. A Veterans Court in Rochester, New York opened in January 2009 with a grant from the Department of Justice. In the first six months it has dealt with 56 active cases.
According to presiding judge Patricia Marks, the success rate of such courts depends on close coordination with communities and law enforcement. “Communities need to assess their resources and impact of returning vets,” says Marks. “Sometimes it takes a while to discover PTSD. When people become educated about issues that veterans face, law enforcement can reduce their interactions.”
Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense says the purpose of such innovative approaches is not to excuse criminal behavior by vets—but to deal with them before their problems, and the potential threat to society, is aggravated. “If you do the crime you do the time,” he told The Crime Report. “But these courts are needed because so many veterans have fallen through the cracks. Veterans picked up on first offense can be assessed for mental health instead of going to jail.”
One important limitation: Veterans Courts are established for dealing with minor offenses, but historical data suggests that soldiers or returning veterans usually land in prison for serious felonies such as assault. A 1998 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that more than half of the veterans in state prisons around the U.S. were convicted of violent offenses. More recent statistics are not available. Moreover, almost 30 percent of offenders in military detention are held for rape and sexual assault, compared to seven to eight percent of the civilian population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Once discharged from the military, civilian criminal justice does not have access to the veterans prior history.
However, experts say, soldiers that commit sexual assault in the military are likely to repeat their offenses.
The figures for rape and sexual assault highlight the special problem of military personnel who are apprehended on charges of domestic violence. Women’s advocates argue that soldiers or veterans who are guilty of spousal abuse should not get special treatment. “The reality is you have vets who were using violence before they had PTSD,” said Connie Sponsler-Garcia, Military Project Manager at Battered Women Justice Project in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which recently released the report, “A Guide to Developing a Military/Civilian Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence.” “There are two different issues: domestic violence is one and PTSD is another.”
Nevertheless, a 2009 VA study by Charles Marmar of the University of California, San Francisco found that families of veterans with PTSD are more likely to suffer domestic violence or intimate partner violence than families of veterans without PTSD. Which is one reason that veterans would be better served in a special court, says military law expert and former Air Force Officer Elizabeth Hillman, who teaches this subject at Hastings College of the Law. “[A veteran’s] court would be better prepared to handle domestic violence than the military. Former service members’ (criminal activities) are best addressed in a place that understands them.”
Next Steps
But the range of options for dealing with troubled vets is still limited. Numerous NGOs and community organizations are joining forces with the federal government to search for new and innovative ways to assist veterans. For example, the Battered Women Justice Project received a grant from the Office of Violence Against Women to study domestic violence, veterans and the criminal justice system. Other organizations, including the Vera Institute of Justice, are working on a project tentatively titled “Returning Heroes,” which looks at the intersection of the criminal justice system and veterans.
Unfortunately, the data from these studies may not be available for months, if not years. Meanwhile, as America’s overseas military commitments continue, the challenge of dealing with troubled vets is likely to grow.
NEXT: Vets and Cops: Law enforcement agencies around the US are filling their ranks with returning soldiers.
Cara Tabachnick is News Editor of The Crime Report.
