Think Vietnam Vets Were Screwed? Wait Until You See How Many Veterans of Bush's Wars End up in Jail

As all the other justifications for the U.S. invasion of Iraq have fallen by the wayside, it is ironic that the one that remains is "freedom," because in the name of someone else's freedom, we train our own soldiers to behave in ways that may very well cost them their own.

Gordy Lane is a retired Syracuse police detective who served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. As a cop, it was his job to put lawbreakers behind bars, but as a veteran, he understands that when you go to war, "you come back a little different than when you went over there."

"Listen," he says, "you pop up out of a foxhole, and you blow a guy's head open like a watermelon. The other two guys in the foxhole start patting you on the back and saying, 'Good job!' because you just did the worst thing that you can do to another person. How do you translate that into civilian life?"

For far too many soldiers, the simple answer is, you don't.

But with them behind bars and out of sight, most of the rest of us are free to ignore the human evidence of what our military ventures really cost. Even putting issues of compassion and justice aside, any number of alternatives to prison have been shown to save taxpayer money.

For example, the average annual cost of incarceration in New York state in 2008 was $44,000 a year. But a 2009 report by the Legal Action Committee found that for every individual diverted from prison into community-based treatment programs, the state would save between $62,492 and $88,892 a year.

The LAC calculated those savings by subtracting the average cost of treatment (for addiction or mental-health issues) from the cost of incarceration. It turns out to be cheaper, both in the long and the short run, even considering expenditures such as program administration and court supervision, if projected savings in health care, public assistance and future criminal justice involvement is also considered.

With that in mind, as these new wars drag on, and as more and more service members find themselves entangled in the criminal justice system, it seems worth asking, in whose interest is the status quo maintained? Especially when there are more humane and even more rational solutions available.

Jim Strollo, who directs the veterans program at Groveland Prison in New York, has "a group of veterans that meets on Thursday nights that addresses PTSD, among other things.

"But I'm not a trained counselor. We have the Office of Mental Health, but they are not equipped to do a lot of counseling because crisis intervention keeps them so busy. Veteran inmates rely in the counseling of their peers. They do the best they can."

Even 10 years ago, veterans at Groveland and other New York prisons had more support and treatment options than they have today.

Don Little, who coordinated the NYS Department of Correctional Services' Veterans Programs from 1986 until December 2004, when he retired, told me sadly, "We had good results. We made the department look good, and we weren't even spending the state's money. I just don't understand."

Reintegrating Vets into Civilian Life

After the war in Vietnam, when veterans began showing up in the nation's prisons in large numbers, Vietnam Veterans of America was the first organization to respond with rehabilitation programs specifically designed to help returning troops reintegrate into civilian life.

NYDOCS adopted VVA's design and did perhaps the best job of implementing the program.

"We even had the VA involved, " Little says proudly. "They provided trained substance-abuse and PTSD counselors, and the NYS Division of Parole and Department of Labor had signed on as well."

By 1993, NYSDOCS could boast a recidivism rate (five years after release) of 8.9 percent for veterans who had completed the program, compared with 51.6 percent for non-veterans.

In 1999, 19 facilities in NYSDOCS offered veterans programs. Then, for the sake of "efficiency and effectiveness," those programs were consolidated. There are now three. And since the consolidation, program participation no longer counts toward certificates of "earned eligibility," which make an early parole more likely.

"Our program was undermined at the highest levels of the department," Little recalls with bitterness. "They said vets were getting preferential treatment. But I believe they just didn't want it to succeed. Vindictive, that's what it seemed to me."

What happened to those demonstrably successful programs makes no sense in human or even in fiscal terms. But even while various agencies of government appear content to keep veterans behind bars and out of sight, an array of creative and compassionate -- not to mention economically rational -- solutions continue to emerge, put forward by concerned individuals.