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THE MILITARY TO PRISON PIPELINE: TRADING ONE UNIFORM FOR ANOTHER  
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Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
January 5, 2025
LA Progressive
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_ Fifty years after the official end of U.S. intervention in
southeast Asia, “Vietnam vets are still the single largest
population of war veterans in prison. _

, (CC BY 2.0)

 

_Review of Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass
Incarceration by Jason Higgins (University of Massachusetts Press,
2024).  _

Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service
members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades
on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, _The Veteran
[[link removed]]_, a newspaper published by Vietnam
Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It
shows a multi-generational group of men—white, Black and
Latino—lined up proudly between two flags.

[Screenshot 2025-01-05 at 8.37.53 AM]
[[link removed]]

In his dispatch to the newspaper_,_ African-American Navy veteran
Robert Maury explained why everyone in the Stateville Veterans Group
was wearing government issued clothing of a non-military sort. As
Maury wrote, “This was the first time in the history of Stateville,
if not the first time in the history of the state of Illinois, that
incarcerated veterans were allowed to organize a Memorial Day ceremony
in a maximum-security prison.”

There would not be another such event because, late last year, the
Illinois Department of Corrections closed this century-old facility.
The Veterans Group there was forced to disband; its members dispersed
to other prisons around the state where some hoped to plant seeds for
future veteran initiated programs at their new addresses.

How did these vets and 180,000 others end up in a U.S. prison
population now numbering more than 1.2 million? And what can be done
to keep other former service members out of jail in the future? These
are questions that Jason Higgins, a Virginia Tech researcher, explores
in his new book, _Prisoners After War
[[link removed]]_,
which is particularly timely in light of President Joe Biden’s Dec.
12 pardon of a small group of veterans convicted of non-violent
crimes, including long ago drug offenses.

Higgins, along with John Kindler, an associate professor of history
from Oklahoma State University, has also produced an edited collection
called _Service Denied
[[link removed]]_. That
volume, with multiple contributors, offers a broader historical
perspective on post-war mistreatment of former soldiers, including
the hundreds of veterans
[[link removed]] who were born abroad,
served in the military, ended up in prison, and then were deported
after their release.

Mass Incarceration

Higgins calls his own study a “social history of veterans in the age
of mass incarceration.” It links their experience in foreign wars
and related problems transitioning back to civilian life to changes in
the criminal justice system that put millions of men and women behind
bars during an on-going domestic crackdown on crime.

Fifty years after the official end of U.S. intervention in southeast
Asia, “Vietnam vets are still the single largest population of war
veterans in prison, illustrating the profound and lasting impact of
the ‘war on crime’ on their generation.”

As Higgins reports, the broader U.S. trend of “criminalizing and
punishing people with behavioral and social problems”—due to their
being non-white, unemployed, unhoused, and/or drug dependent—ed to a
doubling in the number of vets in prison between the end of that war
and 9/11. The author finds, however, that the “history of
incarcerated veterans is not exclusively a story of racial
injustice.”

In _Prisoners After War,_ we learn that white veterans are much more
likely to go to prison compared to white civilians, while Black vets
are slightly less likely to be jailed than African-Americans who never
served. Overall, about one third of all veterans
[[link removed]],
who number 19 million, report having been arrested and booked into
jail at least once in their lives, as compared to less than one-fifth
of the rest of the population.

When they end up incarcerated, veterans receive longer sentences than
non-veterans
[[link removed]],
despite the good work of a national network of Veterans Treatment
Courts (VTCs). As Higgins documents in great detail, this “hybrid
drug and mental health treatment system” offers access to counseling
services, opportunities for housing, education and job employment, and
disability benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

As a diversion program, VTC’s “have the lowest recidivism rates in
the nation” and, according to the author, “could serve as a model
for greater criminal justice reform.” But the effectiveness of their
“reparative justice” approach varies from state to state and is
not available to vets charged with violent crimes, which disqualifies
many defendants.

Betrayed and Abandoned

Higgins builds his book around personal stories he collected for
the Incarcerated Veterans Oral History Project
[[link removed]]. He
interviewed scores of veterans still imprisoned and out of jail,
police officers and judges, and fellow vets who have become VTC
volunteers and helpers. One common theme among those who end up in
legal trouble is the feeling of being betrayed and abandoned. That’s
because they’ve been denied the services and benefits—or
opportunities for citizenship—promised by military recruiters,
charged with filling the ranks of an “all-volunteer force” with
poor and working-class youth since 1973.

Their exclusion from the few perks of “veteranhood” occurred when
pre-existing mental health issues or service-related medical
conditions lead to misconduct while in uniform and resulting military
discipline. As Higgins notes, punitive discharges first became
widespread, during the Vietnam era, even before conscription was
suspended.

“Thousands of African-Americans were excessively punished for minor
offenses, behavioral issues, acts of resistance and drug use,” he
writes. “As the military began to withdraw forces from Vietnam, a
disproportionate number of Black soldiers received administrative
discharges compared to whites, disqualifying them from VA care,
disability compensation, and the GI Bill.”

This left many Black combat veterans—more likely than others to
suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—without access to
much needed treatment programs and disability pay. As one government
study found in 1981, their resulting “readjustment difficulties
increased the likelihood of incarceration.”

More than 300,000 veterans, who served at home and abroad, since 9/11
also received less than“honorable” discharges. The Department of
Defense (DOD) often made such determinations in the absence of uniform
disciplinary standards across military branches or even among
individual commanders within the same branch. For the DOD, despite its
ample $884 billion budget, getting rid of soldiers whose performance
is adversely affected by PTSD, traumatic brain injuries (TBI),
military sexual trauma (MST), drug or alcohol abuse is easier,
quicker, and cheaper than treating them.

The Stigma of “Bad Paper”

Being drummed out of the military in this fashion, without even a
court-martial, has lasting consequences
[[link removed]*10fc4ez*_gcl_au*MTgyNjU2MDQ1Mi4xNzMzNDI5Mzc0*_ga*NzM5ODQ2OTA1LjE3MzM0MjkzNzU.*_ga_QT13NN6N9S*MTczMzQyOTM3NC4xLjEuMTczMzQzMDc3Ny42MC4wLjA.].
As civilians, “bad paper” holders aren’t eligible for
preferential treatment when applying for public sector jobs. The
American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Disabled American
Veterans won’t even let them join. According to Swords to
Plowshares, a San Francisco-based advocacy group, vets stigmatized in
this fashion are more likely to have mental health conditions and are
also twice as likely to commit suicide.

A Syracuse University study found that “minorities and women
[[link removed]] were
disproportionately represented among veterans with bad paper” due to
“racial inequities in the military’s criminal justice system and
the number of women who struggle with MST.” Those who seek their own
discharge upgrade face a long legal fight, which is why, in the waning
days of the Obama Administration, Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA)
“called for the outgoing president to issue a full pardon for every
veteran with a bad paper discharge.”

Unlike most other veterans’ organizations, the VVA has long
distinguished itself not just as an advocate for disabled vets, but
for those in prison as well. In 2017, as Higgins reports, VVA helped
win passage of the Fairness to Veterans Act, which reformed the
individual appeals process for “bad paper veterans diagnosed with
PTSD or a TBI.”

Unfortunately, Barack Obama left office without acting on the VVA’s
appeal for broader clemency. Seven years later, Biden did pardon
[[link removed]] a
few of the many of the LGBTQ service members court martialed and
kicked out of the military before the DOD’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell” policy was repealed in 2011. (Months after this much
publicized action, only 8 had applied
[[link removed]].)

So Swords to Plowshares, Minority Veterans of America, the Black
Veterans Project, and two veterans’ legal clinics are now trying
again with Biden. In a December 6 letter
[[link removed]],
they reminded him that past “administrative separations and
resulting denial of critical veterans’ benefits” are “a life
sentence,” that can result in greater risk of substance abuse,
joblessness, homelessness, incarceration, and self-harm.

A week later, Biden did grant clemency to 15 military veterans
[[link removed]] (out
of 1,500 other people who got pardons or commutations on the same
day). The recipients were mainly officers and NCOs aged 46 to 79, with
honorable discharges and military decorations, who committed some
lesser offense long ago and then, in the words of the White House,
“turned their lives around.”

But time is running out for Biden to erase the stain of “bad
paper” from the records of the many veterans who tried to serve
honorably but got fired from their jobs in the military with little or
no due process but lasting adverse consequences.

Veterans behind bars—like the ones who celebrated Memorial Day in
Stateville last May—are even more unlikely to see their names on any
additional presidential pardon lists issued before January 20. For
them, Biden’s claim last month that America “was built on the
promise of possibility and second chances” sounded like the spiel
many got from military recruiters who signed them up, as teenagers,
and put them on the road from one government-issued uniform to
another.

_STEVE EARLY is a long-time labor activist, member of the Richmond
Progressive Alliance, and author, most recently, of Refinery Town:
Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City (Beacon
Press, 2017)._

_SUZANNE GORDON is an American journalist and author who writes about
healthcare delivery and health care systems and patient safety and
nursing. She is the author of Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers
Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans._

* Mass Incarceration
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* Vietnam Vets
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