Highlighting the successes and limited availability of veteran treatment courts

December 8, 2024

Law360 has this lengthy new piece, headlined “Veterans Courts Help Some, But Leave Many Others Behind,” which provides an effective overview of veteran treatment courts and their limits. I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts:

Veterans treatment courts have helped thousands of former service members get much needed help for addiction and mental health problems rather than being incarcerated. But strict eligibility criteria, difficulty identifying veterans in the justice system, and a limited number of courts combine to turn away many veterans who most need their services, according to veterans’ advocates.

So those advocates are trying to change how the courts operate to ensure that no veteran in need falls through the cracks. “This is not radical. This is about giving a veteran who raised their right hand to serve the United States a hand up, not a handout,” said retired U.S. Army Colonel D.J. Reyes, who mentors veteran defendants in Florida. “They made a mistake. Does that mean we just throw them in prison with no rehab or treatment?”…

Hundreds of diversionary courts intended specifically for criminal defendants who served in the military have sprung up across the country since the first veterans treatment court, or VTC, was established in Buffalo, New York, in 2008.

VTCs integrate the criminal justice system, the VA, drug treatment programs, community organizations and veteran mentors to offer help and services rather than incarceration to former service members who run into trouble with the law due to substance abuse or mental health issues.

A growing number of veterans need that help, according to experts, who blame that increase on post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries, addiction, military sexual trauma and difficulty readjusting to civilian life after repeated deployments during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One in three veterans report having been arrested, according to the Council on Criminal Justice’s Veterans Justice Commission. Around 181,000 veterans are currently behind bars, according to All Rise, a nonprofit that provides training and best practices for specialized treatment court programs.

“When we take our young men and women, and we train them to be part of the most lethal force on the planet, and then we ask them to go do their job, some of them struggle when they come home with just being normal again,” said Veterans Justice Commission Director Jim Seward.

So VTCs are intended to sentence veterans who plead guilty to usually lower-level, nonviolent offenses to addiction and mental health treatment and mentorship rather than prison. Defendants attend regular treatment sessions, discuss their progress with the court, and undergo random drug testing, among other requirements….

The programs have been successful, according to experts. VTCs help approximately 15,000 veterans each year, according to Scott Tirocchi, division director of Justice for Vets, All Rise’s veterans court division.

The court in Hillsborough, Florida, where Reyes mentors defendants, averages a single-digit recidivism rate, he said. In Ohio, Cuyahoga County’s court has a graduation rate of 76.2%, according to Judge Andrew J. Santoli, who presides over that VTC. And only 9.1% of the participants of the VTC in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, are charged with a new offense after completing the program, according to Program Coordinator Kiel Kuroki, a U.S. Air Force veteran who participated in a veterans diversion program himself….

But many of the veterans who most need help aren’t getting it, advocates say. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, VTCs only serve about 10% to 15% of justice-involved veterans….

[T]he exceedingly limited number of VTCs further exacerbates the lack of access. Around 85% of the counties in America don’t have a VTC, and there are barely any veterans courts in the federal court system, according to Seward.

Congress did pass the Veterans Treatment Court Coordination Act in 2020 directing the attorney general to establish a grant program to help fund state and local VTCs, but there seems to be no organized effort to create VTCs at the federal level. Only a few federal VTCs have been established by individual federal judges…. The result is that, while VTCs have helped many service members, a good deal of veterans are still falling through the cracks.

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