Perhaps the inevitable conclusion here is the one nobody wants to say out loud: we have known for years that treatment works better than incarceration when it comes to criminal defendants with drug and mental-health problems. We also know that close supervision and monitoring work better than casting our most vulnerable citizens adrift. Veterans deserve special treatment for their service, and the fact that veterans’ courts seem to work as well as they do suggests that politicians needn’t justify their existence beyond that fact. But whether we really want to create first- and -second-class criminal-justice services, and whether we can truly draw any principled line between nonviolent veterans and violent ones in the judicial treatment they receive, are not easy political questions, but thorny legal ones.
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Why Veterans Deserve Special Courts - Dahlia Lithwick - Newsweek.com
If it’s the inevitable conclusion that treatment works better than incarceration, why the hell are we still using incarceration at all? Let’s just reform the entire criminal justice system, which would a) eliminate thorny legal issues of creating a special class of citizens, and b) oh yeah, HELP A LOT MORE PEOPLE.
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