From the Editor: Giving veterans a break

By BILL DECKER
bdecker@daily-review.com
If you’ve followed the race for 16th Judicial District attorney, you’ve heard about drug courts, changing the way bail is set, providing better funding for public defenders, justice reform generally, and that old favorite, “thinking outside the box.”
Incumbent Bo Duhe and challenger Lori Landry, a former 16th JDC judge, have lots of ideas.
One of them caught me by surprise. It came up during Duhe’s presentation Thursday at a St. Mary Parish School Board meeting.
Duhe talked about looking into the creation of a veterans court.
This isn’t meant to be an endorsement of either candidate. But veterans courts? There’s an idea that deserves an endorsement.
We’ve seen other types of courts aimed at a specific class of offender, based on the idea that those offenders need some type of adjudication other than locking them up for a while and turning them back out. Juvenile courts and drug courts are examples.
If you look at some statistics about veterans, you’ll get the idea that they face specific types of problems that seem unlikely to be solved by a conventional approach.
—On any given night, there are nearly 50,000 homeless veterans, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Veterans are 2% of the U.S. population but 11% of the homeless population.
—The Veterans Administration reported in 2019 that the number of suicides among veterans had declined. But the numbers were still alarming. The decrease in four years was from 22 per suicides per day to 17. The Military Times reports that some experts say the VA is drastically undercounting the number of veteran suicides.
—The VA says a fifth of veterans who seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder also have a drug or alcohol problem. A third of veterans seeking treatment for substance abuse also suffer from PTSD. And veterans with PTSD and substance abuse problems are prone to binge-drinking, the VA said.
It’s been a privilege over the last 35 years to interview veterans of every American war since World War I. As a group, they displayed a lot of courage in talking about their experiences.
But sometimes it was clear the memories were difficult to deal with.
One man who served in Vietnam as a helicopter door-gunner broke down and cried in our office as he talked about what he’d seen. Another veteran, a bomber crew member who was shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans, talked my ear off. A relative told me the man remained preoccupied with his POW experience after what was then half a century.
My World War I interview was with the father-in-law of a co-worker in Missouri. She called him ’Nother Daddy.
He talked about his life before the war, and he talked about wandering around France looking for food after the armistice. But I couldn’t get him to talk about what combat was like. His family told me later that he’d never talked much about his war experiences.
The closest I got was when he leaned forward in his chair to tell me what it was all about. At the time, in the mid-Eighties, I had long hair and a full beard.
“Whiskers,” ’Nother Daddy said, “you don’t want none of what I had.”
My own experience with relatives and co-workers leads me to think that the special problems of veterans are not limited to those who have gone into combat. Separation from the military even in peacetime seems to be a problem for some veterans, although certainly not for all. And sometimes those problems manifest themselves as substance abuse or emotional problems of one kind or another.
There seems to be a lot of variation in the way other jurisdictions have developed veterans courts. But the common threads seem to be a request from the veteran to have the case handled by a veterans court and agreement among prosecutor, judge and defendant that it’s appropriate.
The court would be empowered to explore options other than just jail time or probation for veterans. The options would presumably include mental health counseling or substance abuse treatment.
We often talk about the bad choices that offenders make, the choices that put them behind bars. Veterans made a choice to serve their country, knowing that they could be called on to put their own lives at risk.
They deserve a second chance.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.