Notable RAND review of data and research on "justice-involved veterans"

I just saw this intriguing new publication from the RAND Corporation titled "Identifying Promising Prevention Strategies and Interventions to Support Justice-Involved Veterans."  I recommend the full piece, and here some excerpts:

The research on veterans who have come into contact with the criminal justice system — whom we refer to as justice-involved veterans — is extremely limited. Over the past decade, there have been very few rigorous studies with large sample sizes. It has been historically difficult to secure funding for research on the needs of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations (Boch et al., 2023).  However, there has been renewed interest at the national level in how military service and military-to-civilian transitions affect the risk of justice system involvement, as well as the specific needs of formerly incarcerated veterans as they reenter their communities.  In 2022, the Council on Criminal Justice launched the nonpartisan Veterans Justice Commission, chaired by former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to explore these questions and issue evidence-based recommendations for policy change...

Not all justice-involved veterans are incarcerated in jails and prisons.  There are no reliable statistics on the total number of justice-involved veterans (Council on Criminal Justice, 2022).  Across the population of justice-involved veterans, we have the clearest picture of the differences between incarcerated veterans and their nonveteran counterparts, in part because the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts periodic surveys and publishes reports specific to incarcerated veterans.  These survey data are among the best sources of information about justice-involved veterans.  The bureau's most recent survey, conducted in 2016, showed that 98 percent of veterans in state and federal prisons were men and that they were older and more likely to be White and serving longer sentences than incarcerated nonveterans (Maruschak and Bronson, 2021)....

Although questions remain about veterans' pathways to criminal justice involvement, the public is generally supportive of rehabilitative approaches for these individuals (Atkin-Plunk and Sloas, 2019). A National Institute of Corrections report referenced the frequent refrain that offering alternatives to incarceration for veterans was the "right thing to do" (Edelman, Berger, and Crawford, 2016); the country has an obligation to address the enduring effects of military service, and this sense of responsibility has led to innovative interventions....

Perhaps the most well-researched intervention for justice-involved veterans is the veteran treatment court (VTC) model. VTCs follow a similar model to other problem-solving courts, such as drug courts and mental health courts, where the emphasis is on providing treatment to justice-involved individuals with substance use or mental health needs rather than incarcerating them....

The number of VTCs has expanded significantly since the first court was founded in 2008, and recent estimates suggest that there are more than 620 operating across the country (VA, 2022a).  However, there is substantial variability in policies and practices across VTCs (Baldwin, 2015; Henderson and Stewart, 2016; Douds et al., 2017; McCall, Tsai, and Gordon, 2018), making it difficult to know what models are most effective.  Some studies have yielded promising findings (Hartley and Baldwin, 2019), but most have been limited by their small scale, focus on a single court, and lack of a comparison group (e.g., Derrick et al., 2018; Shannon et al., 2017).  Estimates of recidivism rates following VTC participation range widely, from 2.5 percent to 56 percent (McCall, Tsai, and Gordon, 2018).  And beyond recidivism, there is also a need for research on ongoing treatment engagement and clinical outcomes associated with court participation.