COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Study finds trend among imprisoned vets
MATT APUZZO, Assiciated Press
May 20, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to
have been convicted for sex offenses as nonveteran inmates, federal
researchers say. They cannot say why.
A study released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics compared the
populations of inmates who served in the military and those who did not.
Veterans are half as likely to be incarcerated as those without service
experience in the first place, researchers found, but 23 percent of the
veterans in prison were sex offenders, compared with 9 percent of
nonveteran inmates.
"We couldn't come to any definite conclusion as to why," said Margaret E.
Noonan, one of the study's authors.
The numbers mirror a trend seen in military prisons, where populations have
declined but sexual assault remains the most common crime.
"I don't want people to come away from this thinking veterans are crazed
sex offenders," Noonan said. "I want them to understand that veterans are
less likely to be in prison in the first place."
The incarceration rate for veterans is 630 per 100,000, compared to 1,390
per 100,000 for nonveterans. More than 90 percent of U.S. veterans are male
and 99 percent of the veterans in prison are male.
The study found that veterans in prison were older, more educated, more
likely to have been married and more likely than nonveterans to be
incarcerated for violent crimes or offenses against women or children.
Many of those findings can be explained simply by age demographics, Colby
College sociologist Alec Campbell said.
Crime tends to decrease with age so older inmates are more likely serving
lengthy sentences. Veterans as a group are older than the general
population, so Campbell said it is not surprising to see a higher
percentage of veterans imprisoned for violent crimes, which carry longer
prison sentences.
"I think that would go away if you controlled for age" in the study,
Campbell said.
Because crimes against women or children can carry longer than average
sentences, it is possible that statistic also follows from the aging
veterans population, he said.
He said the statistic about sexual assault was "potentially interesting"
but said it is impossible to know what that means without more information.
The veterans population has declined as the prison population has risen. Of
the more than 2 million prisoners in 2004, an estimated 140,000 were
veterans. That number is down from 153,100 in 2000.
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