Written by Nicholas Eliades, L’26
Our nation’s veterans suffer exposure to the legal system at a substantially high rate.[1] Failing to address these legal needs amplifies the risks veterans already encounter, including housing instability, homelessness, unemployment, and even suicide.[2] Breaking the cycle of struggles that veterans face requires recognition of the scope and causes of the challenge, as well as a commitment to providing competent and sustained legal resources that veterans can readily access.
Confronting legal issues can be daunting for anyone, but for veterans, these challenges are compounded by the unique circumstances generated from their military service.[3] Studies show that 76% of low-income veteran households faced at least one civil legal issue, while 44% experienced five or more in a one-year period.[4] The study further revealed that 84% of those civil legal issues went unresolved due to a lack of adequate legal assistance.[5]Similarly, in the criminal justice realm, approximately one-third of the nation’s 19 million veterans have reported being arrested and booked at some point in their lives, with over 181,000 currently incarcerated.[6] These statistics highlight the significant involvement of veterans in the criminal justice system, underscoring the need for tailored interventions that address their unique risk factors, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”), Traumatic brain injury (“TBI”), substance abuse, and difficulties reintegrating into civilian life.[7] The path forward in structuring appropriate responses to the acute legal services needs of veterans begins with understanding why veterans encounter legal challenges at such a staggeringly high rate.
Civil Legal Issues:
Veterans often experience serious civil legal challenges that “remain invisible” to the public.[8] This cycle often begins with a process involving an other-than-honorable discharge from the military, which cascades into heightened obstacles to a veteran’s health, housing, job stability, and productivity.[9] The United States Department of Veteran Affairs (“VA”) provides a wide range of services to veterans and, while the effectiveness of these services routinely draws debate, these services are either severely curtailed or withheld from veterans with less than honorable discharge statuses.[10] These services can dramatically improve civilian transition and, when they are withheld, the outcome can be equally devastating. VA services withheld due to an other than honorable discharge include: mental and physical health care; housing assistance; job training; service-connected disability compensation; education assistance programs (such as the GI Bill); pension; life insurance; and burial benefits.[11] As one veterans’ advocacy group has noted, “[t]ragically, . . . veterans with bad paper discharges get turned away by VA frontline staff every day without being allowed to apply for care.”[12] Civil litigation targeting discharge status upgrades is among the top needs for veterans given the waterfall of benefits that become accessible with an honorable discharge.[13]
Civil legal burdens are not at all isolated to veterans with other than honorable discharge status, however as those honorably discharged also confront the same legal needs.[14] For example, veterans are 10% more likely than other Americans to experience homelessness.[15] Nearly 50,000 veterans sleep on the streets, while another 1.4 million are at risk of becoming homeless.[16] Additionally, homelessness veterans’ have higher rates of illness, are three times more likely to contract HIV, have a suicide rate nine times greater than other Americans, and die on average twelve years prior to housed Americans. [17]
A VA study surveying over 6,000 homeless veterans found that non-existent or inadequate legal services to help combat eviction or foreclosure were among the top three unmet needs for veterans.[18] The American Bar Association has noted the “direct link between veterans’ homelessness and the lack of legal help.”[19] Notwithstanding the dire need for help and the existence of dedicated public and private Veteran Legal-Aid clinics, nearly 84% of veterans report receiving a lack of or inadequate legal help to resolve their issues.[20] The civil legal challenges veterans face are not unique to homelessness, but rather they are representative of multiple areas in the civil legal system that need substantive attention to relieve the obstacles veterans face in reintegrating themselves into their pre-service lives.
Criminal Legal Issues:
Approximately 180,000 Veterans are arrested every year.[21] The observed risk factors contributing to veterans’ involvement in the criminal justice system fall into three general categories: individual-level risk veteran characteristics; service-related factors stemming from military experiences; and post-service challenges faced after leaving the military.[22] An alarming body of research demonstrates that America has moved backwards in addressing this issue as “recent veterans are twice as likely as non-veterans to face incarceration, while veterans from previous eras, such as World War II and the Vietnam War, were half as likely as non-veterans to become incarcerated.”[23]
Individuals enlisting in the military often demonstrate pre-existing characteristics associated with criminal justice involvement at higher rates than civilians.[24] The military’s offering of stable housing, income, and job training are opportunities not widely available to those from challenging backgrounds, making refuge in the military an appealing option.[25] For example,, nearly 75% of post-Vietnam Veterans reported adverse childhood experiences (“ACE”) – “traumatic events before age 18, such as physical or sexual abuse, neglect, witnessing household or community violence, and parental mental illness, incarceration, and substance abuse.”[26] Additional research shows that both males and females with pre-existing histories of antisocial behavior enlist at highly increased rates.[27]Individuals with a history of ACEs and antisocial behavior are more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system, spend longer periods of time in prison, and engage in repeat offending.[28]
Service-related risk factors include combat exposure, PTSD and TBI, substance use disorder, moral injury, and military sexual trauma.[29] Veterans deployed in combat demonstrate the highest level of criminal justice involvement.[30] Combat exposure enhances the “traumatic nature of military service (e.g., witness to death and torture of vulnerable populations, potential participation in violent acts).”[31] PTSD is among the most common ailments affecting veterans and is a significant contributor to criminal behavior including, increased aggression and intimate partner violence in veterans.[32] It is estimated that as many as 38% of veterans have PTSD, and criminal justice involvement is 61% greater for veterans with PTSD.[33] Similarly, veterans suffering from TBI were 59% more likely to face criminal justice involvement, with 49% more likely to be rearrested once exposed to criminal justice involvement.[34] Substance abuse, especially the abuse of alcohol, is a critical factor contributing to veteran justice involvement.[35] Studies show that 21% to 71% of Veterans have alcohol use disorder and 26% to 65% have significant drug use disorder.[36] Further, one quarter of incarcerated veterans were using drugs and/or alcohol at the time of their arrest.[37]
Post-service risk factors include readjustment challenges, barriers to healthcare, and discharge status, all of which increase criminal justice involvement.[38] Employment resources are offered to military personnel in the months leading up to their discharge through the Transition Assistance Program (“TAP”), but veteran reviews of TAP have been largely negative, with many feeling the program is a “box-checker” the government feels compelled to offer but that produces few meaningful benefits.[39] As a consequence, many veterans find themselves untrained and ill-prepared to transition back to civilian life.[40] Veterans also confront significant barriers to healthcare brought on by a complicated system, staffing shortages, and lack of available resources in the rural areas where many veterans reside.[41] Only about 50% of 16 million veterans are enrolled in VA healthcare benefits.[42] The chief complaint among enrollees is the lack of available appointments in the overburdened system, leading many to self-medicate and pursue self-harm, which is a precursor to criminal justice involvement.[43] Finally, the other than honorable discharge status of many Veterans as discussed above leads to a denial of benefits that promotes desperation and risky conduct exposing Veterans to potential criminal involvement.[44] For veterans, criminal justice involvement often triggers an inescapable cycle of perpetual struggle where felony convictions lead to chronic unemployability that often leads to homelessness, which in turn fosters depression that exacerbates existing mental illness and encourages substance abuse, resulting in recidivist criminal behavior.[45]
Current Efforts to address Veterans Legal issues:
There are many government and privately funded initiatives designed to assist veterans with the obstacles they face reintegrating to civilian life.[46] The VA budget alone for 2025 is approximately $370 billion.[47] Other government agencies also direct funds from their budgets to address veterans assistance programs.[48] In the provision of legal resources to veterans, the U.S. Department of Justice has taken a leading role.[49]
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Access to Justice program (“AJT”) is designed to “help Veterans and their families meet their legal needs . . . [and] to identify effective ways to promote access to justice in the civil and criminal legal systems, including through medical-legal partnerships, legal assistance clinics, Veterans Treatment Courts (“VTC”), and reentry programs and services.”[50] Veteran-centric engagement has been an AJT priority that looks to veterans, veteran service organizations (“VSO”), and veteran advocates at the federal, state, and local levels to provide legal services to veterans.[51] ATJ also strengthened its expertise on veterans’ access-to-justice needs by hiring staff with specialized backgrounds in legal services and medical-legal partnerships including, importantly, staff that are veterans.[52]
The VA has also made concentrated efforts to enhance legal services provided through private organizations through its participation in White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable (LAIR). The 2022 LAIR Report highlighted the VA’s collaboration with legal aid providers to create two new legal service grant programs addressing veterans’ civil legal needs.[53] In 2023, the VA awarded $11.5 million to 79 legal aid providers and organizations to assist veterans facing homelessness with legal issues. The 2023 LAIR Report detailed the VA’s accreditation of approximately 500 nonlawyers and over 7,700 individuals from VSOs as representatives and agents capable of assisting veterans with legal needs under VA programs.[54]
Some government programs still need enhancement, however. For example, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) noted the implementation of TAP services to service personnel pending discharge was plagued by lax enforcement resulting in nearly 25% of service personnel failing to attend and roughly 70% having not begun the program in a timely manner sufficient to achieve the TAP objectives.[55]
Among the more promising initiatives is the implementation of Veterans Treatment Courts (“VTC”), special courts that are a hybrid mental health and drug court and are designed to “address the underlying causes and correlates of a veteran’s criminality (e.g., mental illness, lasting effects of trauma, substance abuse) to reintegrate and restore the veteran to society and reduce or eliminate future contact with the criminal justice system.”[56] A national study of over 22,000 veterans found that VTC participants had better housing and employment outcomes as compared to other criminal justice-involved veterans.[57] The same study found that veterans that participated in VTCs had marked improvement in their mental health and stress disorders as well.[58]
Conclusion:
The legal challenges confronted by Veterans are wide-ranging and have the ability to be extraordinarily life altering. Addressing the root causes of veterans’ legal challenges that are fostered by chronic unemployability, homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse, and barriers to healthcare are essential to veterans’ reintegration into civilian life. The programs mentioned above are a welcome contribution to the problem, but much more can certainly be achieved. We owe veterans the same level of commitment they gave to us: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” [59]
[1] Access to Justice is Access for Veterans, U.S. Dep’t of Just. at 1, https://www.justice.gov/atj/media/1353941/dl.
[2] Montgomery, A. E. et al., Association between Services to Address Adverse Social Determinants of Health and Suicide Mortality among Veterans with Indicators of Housing Instability, Unemployment, and Justice Involvement, Archives of Suicide Rsch, 28(3), 860–876, (2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/13811118.2023.2244534.
[3] Access to Justice is Access for Veterans, U.S. Dep’t of Just. at 1, https://www.justice.gov/atj/media/1353941/dl.
[4] Id., (citing The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans, Legal Services Corp.
at 10, 41 (April 2022), https://lsc-live.app.box.com/s/xl2v2uraiotbbzrhuwtjlgi0emp3myz).
[5] Id., (citing The Justice Gap, supra note 5, at 55).
[6]Honoring Service, Advancing Safety: Supporting Veterans from Arrest through Sentencing, Council on Crim. Just. (2023) https://counciloncj.foleon.com/veterans-commission/vjc-reports/arrest-through-sentencing.
[7] Kweilin, T. Lucas, et al., Military Veteran Involvement with the Criminal Justice System: A Systematic Review,
Aggression and Violent Behav., Vol. 66, (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2022.101721.
[8] Manchanda, Rishi, et al., Veterans Facing Health-Harming Legal Needs In Civilian Life, Nat’l Center for Medical-Legal P’ship, at 3 (June 2016), https://medical-legalpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/The-Invisible-Battlefield.pdf.
[9] Id.
[10] Id. at 5.
[11] Id. at 9.
[12] Turned Away: How VA Unlawfully Denies Health Care to Veterans With Bad Paper Discharges, Legal Service Center of Harv. L. Sch., (2020) https://legalservicescenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Turn-Away-Report.pdf.
[13] Manchanda et al., supra note 9, at 7.
[14] See e.g., Access to Justice, supra note 4, at 1.
[15] Earls, Alan, Veteran Homelessness is on the Rise Despite Government Efforts—Here’s How it Happens, Franklin Observer (2024) https://franklinobserver.town.news/g/franklin-town-ma/n/263608/veteran-homelessness-rise-despite-government-efforts-heres-how-it#:~:text=Although%20they%20make%20up%20just,when%20leaving%20the%20armed%20forces.
[16] Manchanda et al., supra note 9, at 4.
[17] The State of Veteran Homelessness 2024, Mission Roll Call (July 2024)https://missionrollcall.org/veteran-voices/articles/the-state-of-veteran-homelessness-2024/#:~:text=Homelessness%20significantly%20worsens%20veterans’%20health,and%20long%2Dterm%20support%20services.
[18] Community Homelessness Assessment, Local Education and Networking Groups (CHALENG), U.S. Dep’t of Veterans Affs., https://www.va.gov/HOMELESS/docs/CHALENG-2015-factsheet-FINAL-0616.pdf.
[19] Study Finds Direct Link Between Veterans’ Homelessness, Lack of Legal Help, American Bar Ass’ Bar Leader, (2016) https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/barleaderweekly1/2016/071916.pdf.
[20] The Justice Gap, supra note 5, at 55.
[21] Kweilin et al., supra note 8.
[22] Orak, Ugur, From Service to Sentencing: Unraveling Risk Factors for Criminal Justice Involvement Among U.S. Veterans, Council on Crim. Just. (October 2023) https://counciloncj.org/from-service-to-sentencing-unraveling-risk-factors-for-criminal-justice-involvement-among-u-s-veterans/#:~:text=Combat%20exposure%20and%20its%20associated,justice%20system%20involvement%20among%20veterans.
[23] Id.
[24] Id.
[25] Id.
[26] Blosnich, J. R et al., Disparities in Adverse Childhood Experiences Among Individuals with a History of Military Service, JAMA Psychiatry, 71(9), 1041–1048. (2014) https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.724.
[27] Teachman, J., & Tedrow, L., Delinquent Behavior, the Transition to Adulthood and the Likelihood of Military Enlistment Soc. Sci. Rsch., , 45, 46–55, (2014) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.12.012.
[28] Orak, supra note 23.
[29] Id.
[30] Id.
[31] Kweilin et al., supra note 8, at 1.
[32] Id. at 2.
[33] Taylor, E. N. et. al., Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Justice Involvement Among Military Veterans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, J. of Traumatic Stress, 33(5), 804–812 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22526.
[34] Orak, supra note 23.
[35] Id.
[36] Id.
[37] Kweilin et al., supra note 8.
[38] Orak, supra note 23.
[39] Keeling, M., Kintzle, S., & Castro, C. A. Exploring U.S. Veterans’ Post-Service Employment Experiences, Mil. Psych., 30(1), 63–69, (2018) https://doi.org/10.1080/08995605.2017.1420976.
[40] Id.
[41] What Are the Barriers to Healthcare for Veterans? Mission Roll Call (March 2023) https://missionrollcall.org/veteran-voices/articles/what-are-the-barriers-to-healthcare-for-veterans/. supra
[42] Id.
[43] Id.
[44] Orak, supra note 23.
[45] Addlestone, D. F., & Chaset, A., Veterans in the Criminal justice system. The American veterans and service members survival guide: How to cut through the bureaucracy and get what you need and are entitled to (2008) https://www.nvlsp.org/images/products/survivalguide.pdf.
[46] See e.g., Military-Transition.org, Transition Resources, https://www.military-transition.org/resources.html.
[47] See U.S. Dep’t of Veterans Affs. Fiscal Year 2025 Budget, at 3 https://www.va.gov/opa/docs/remediation-required/management/fy2025-va-budget-in-brief.pdf.
[48] See e.g., Access to Justice supra note 4.
[49] Id. at 5.
[50] Id. at 1.
[51] Id. at 2.
[52] Id.
[53]RoundtableAccess to Justice through Simplification A Roadmap for People-Centered Simplification of Federal Government Forms, Processes, and Language, White House Legal Aid Interagency (2022) https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-03/Legal%20Aid%20Interagency%20Roundtable%202022%20Report.pdf.
[54]Access to Justice in Federal Administrative Proceedings Nonlawyer Assistance and Other Strategies, White House Legal Aid Interagency (2023) https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-12/2023%20Legal%20Aid%20Interagency%20Roundtable%20Report-508.pdf.
[55] Servicemembers Transitioning to Civilian Life:DOD Could Enhance the Transition Assistance Program by Better Leveraging Performance Information
GAO-23-106793, U.S. Gov. Accountability Off. (May 2023) https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106793.
[56] Craddock, T.B. (2022) Veteran’s Treatment Courts: Will More be Necessary Now that the 20-Year War on Terror has Concluded for US Soldiers?’ J. of Veterans Stud. 8(2), 8–20, (July 25, 2022) https://doi.org/10.21061/jvs.v8i2.359.
[57] Tsai, Jack et al., A National Study of Veterans Treatment Court Participants: Who Benefits and Who Recidivates. Nat’l Institute of Health https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5776060/#:~:text=A%20national%20study%20of%20over,other%20criminal%20justice%2Dinvolved%20veterans.
[58] Id.
[59] John 15:13.