Litmus Program Releases Briefs

Litmus Senior Research Scholar Sandy Mullins, Assistant Research Scholar Lina Cook, and former Marron Director Angela Hawken, along with several Litmus team members, have coauthored three briefs with support from the Council on Criminal Justice as part of its Veterans Justice Commission:

• Invisible Warriors: Veterans in State Prisons: This study examines the methods used by state prison systems to identify veterans in their custody. It presents a national scan of these methods and uses two states with available data as case studies to compare two veteran-identification methods, self-report and verification through a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs database. The authors derived a total count of veterans known to be in state prisons, noting that this number is certainly an undercount of the true number of incarcerated veterans and recommending action to improve and standardize identification methods nationally to ensure that veteran-specific services reach all who are eligible to receive them.
• Falling Through the Cracks: Gaps in Identifying Veterans on Community Supervision: This brief explores how community-supervision agencies, primarily probation and parole, identify veterans on their caseloads in order to make referrals to services tailored to this population. While findings are not nationally representative, they offer preliminary insights into common practices and challenges across supervision systems. Due to the variations in state systems of supervision, the authors recommend state-level action to identify gaps and make improvements to increase accurate identification and verification.
• Outcomes from a Jail-Based Veterans Housing Unit: Veterans housing units have not been evaluated for long-term effectiveness in helping participants succeed during reentry and avoid further criminal behavior. This report seeks to partially fill that gap by comparing data on veterans who participated in the Veterans Housing Unit (VHU) in a large county jail, and veterans who were booked into the jail but not referred for VHU participation.