From The Council on Criminal Justice:
America’s service members have long been held up as the global standard for military mastery. Their superior training is one reason so many other countries look to the United States for assistance and guidance. Yet despite that peerless reputation, our nation has performed far less admirably on an equally important mission: supporting veterans once their service ends.
Roughly 200,000 men and women transition out of military service and into civilian life each year. Most do so successfully, as I did when returning home from Vietnam in 1968, with my brother Tom. Others face a more challenging transition, struggling with addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries, or homelessness. For some veterans, these and other problems lead to involvement with the criminal justice system.
One in three of our 19 million veterans report having been arrested and booked at least once, and approximately 181,00 are incarcerated in local, state, or federal facilities. While I’m troubled by the magnitude of this human toll, I am not entirely surprised. I’ve seen firsthand how some veterans struggle to adjust to life after the military, first as a returning service member myself and later as Deputy Administrator of the Veterans Administration under President Ronald Reagan and the 24th Secretary of Defense under President Barack Obama.
Read the full report here.
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