Court officials are beginning to recognize a need to treat these soldiers and veterans suf-fering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury before they get caught up in a cycle of crime.
\nA coalition of legal officials and advocates for veterans in Maricopa County, Ariz., is con-sidering setting up a special court that would provide vets with the help they need to cope. Buffalo, N.Y., and Orange County, Calif., have launched similar specialty courts.
\nThe courts\u2019 goal: Keeping the troubled vets out of the criminal justice cycle. That could mean identifying veterans early in the system, connecting them to services the government already provides and linking the vets to a support network.
\n\u201cOne of the things that offended me is seeing a veteran who is self-medicating with alcohol or marijuana or meth and going to court and standing side-by-side with some gangbanger or lifetime criminal and being treated the same as them,\u201d said Billy Little, an attorney and re-tired Air Force colonel. \u201cI thought they deserved better than that.\u201d
\nMany cities today have diversion programs that are designed to keep people in need of help \u2014 often alcoholics or drug addicts \u2014 out of the courts, provided they receive the treat-ment that they need.
\nWith the growing number of combat vets suffering from PTSD, TBI or depression \u2014 one in three, according to the Rand Corp. in what it called a \u201cconservative estimate\u201d \u2014 it makes a lot of sense to create special courts for folks with these disorders. And it\u2019s only fair to help these vets get the treatment they deserve \u2014 rather than a prison term. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Court officials are beginning to recognize a need to treat these soldiers and veterans suf-fering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury before they get caught up in a cycle of crime. A coalition of legal officials and advocates for veterans in Maricopa County, Ariz., is con-sidering setting up a special court that would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}