Dr. Shoba Sreenivasan - Justice-Involved Veterans

You mentioned doing outreach with veterans and, you know, correctional carceral settings.

What is the veteran situation like in these carceral settings? Is it their over-representation or under-representation? How common is it for our service men and women to get involved in the legal system?

It's mainly males, male veterans.

And historically, at least during the Vietnam era, there was an overrepresentation of veterans in prison, primarily related to drug offenses.

So at different points, up until I'd say maybe the 2000s, veterans were overrepresented.

about 25% federal and state prisons.

And that was a higher rate than the representation in the just general population, which was much lower than that, than 25%.

But there was a shift probably because these bats got older.

and they were no longer going back into prison around drug charges.

It has now gone to the point where veterans are actually, they represent a lower percentage in the prison sample than they do in the general population.

So it's about 8%, a little bit under now, which is a good thing.

That's a shocking shift from 25% to 8%.

To what do you attribute that?

I attribute that to the drug offenses and also because it was a number of the Vietnam veteran or Vietnam vet era incarcerated veterans kept cycling and recycling through the system behind drug charges and using drugs and drug dependency.

And as they got older, because crime and drug use really is a young man's game, And so they got older and they settled down, to use a non-clinical interpretation.