The Military to Prison Pipeline: Trading One Uniform for Another

In a new piece for the LA Progressive, VHPI Senior Policy Analyst Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early review a fascinating new book by Jason Higgins, a Virginia Tech researcher, called Prisoners After War. Higgins looks at the 180,000 military veterans who make up an outsize share of the U.S. prison population and asks what can be done to keep other former service members out of jail. 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. "One common theme among those who end up in legal trouble," the authors write, "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. Read the full review here.