SBAND Seminar Materials 2013 Free Ethics: Echoes of War The Combat Veteran

years after the war, approximately a quarter million veterans, a large portion from the Vietnam era, were still housed in our nation’s prisons.50 Those who attempt to deny the link between war trauma and crime often cite this same 1998 Department of Justice study cited above, pointing out that veterans are imprisoned in smaller percentages than the civilian population. What they overlook, however, is that since WWI, the military has aggressively screened out those it deems psychologically or morally unfit. During the call-?up for World War II, for instance, 1,681,000 men were rejected and excluded from the draft for emotional, mental, or educational disorders or deficiencies.51 Another 500,000 were subsequently separated from the Army during training on psychiatric or behavioral grounds.52 This recruit screening continued through Vietnam and into our current conflicts. Thus, any direct comparison of incarceration rates between veterans and the civilian population is flawed. Given the military’s screening, the fact that veterans are incarcerated at even close to the same rates as the civilian population is alarming and is prima facie evidence that military service, itself, played a role. The most recent and definitive tie between combat trauma and criminal behavior comes from the military, itself. In 2009, following a highly-?publicized wave of homicides and other violent crimes committed by recently-?returning combat soldiers on and around Fort Carson, Colorado, the Army commissioned a study called the Epidemiological Consultation, or EPICON, for short.53 Epidemiology is the branch of medicine that seeks to study the factors affecting the health and illness of entire populations. Most of the time, epidemiologists focus on infectious disease, but increasingly the Army has used its experts to look at behavioral health issues. A team of 24 physicians and PhDs from Walter Reed Institute of Research descended on Ft. Carson, studying soldiers who had acted out violently, looking ? ?for common factors. CHRISTOPHER J. MUMOLA, BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, VETERANS IN PRISON OR JAIL, NCJ 178888 (2000), http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/. 51 Marlowe, supra note 13, at 48. 52 Id. 53 U.S. ARMY CENTER FOR HEALTH PROMOTION AND PREVENTIVE MEDICINE, EPIDEMIOLOGIC CONSULTATION NO. 14-?HK-?OB1U-?09: INVESTIGATION OF HOMICIDES AT FORT CARSON, COLORADO NOVEMBER 2008–MAY 2009, ES-?1 (2009). 50 14

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