The Military to Prison Pipeline: Trading One Uniform for Another

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, 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.

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, 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. That volume, with multiple contributors, offers a broader historical perspective on post-war mistreatment of former soldiers, including the hundreds of veterans 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–led 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, 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, 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. 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. 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 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 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.)

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., 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 (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.

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