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Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
01:02:26
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is John Armenta, your host for this episode. In Prisoners after Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration published by University of Massachusetts Press, Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the stories of those most knowledgeable about it. Veterans who were incarcerated after their military service. Combining a thorough historical narrative with the oral histories of veterans who had been imprisoned after the return to civilian society, Dr. Higgins shows how the so called war on drugs and war on crime intersect with the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Through this history, he shows how government policies built on ableism, racism and patriarchy contributed to many young Americans being pushed into the military, punished during their service and then being kicked out with no access to any type of support, which then leads them into the carceral system. Dr. Higgins also tells the story of how these incarcerated veterans helped organize amongst themselves leading to veterans treatment courts which have helped reduce the number of veterans going into prison and also show a model for non punitive responses to crime. Prisoners after War has been awarded the Oral History Association's book award for 2025. Dr. Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and an assistant professor affiliated with the Virginia Tech University Library and the Department of History. He's Also the co editor with John kinder of Service Denied Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History. Also published the University of Massachusetts Press. Jason, welcome to New Books Network and congratulations on the book award.
- [02:45]
C
Thank you, John. I'm so glad that you had the introduction ready because reading it has become is getting long, especially with the joint titles and positions of my job. As I work in publishing, I work in library publishing. We just became a press of Virginia Tech Press. I'm the digital scholarship coordinator and I'm a history professor with the history department. So it's a joint position and you know, I'm very lucky to have it. And I get to do oral history and digital humanities all the time.
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B
That's great. So let's get into this book. So this, this book was a revision from your dissertation. And what were you trying to, what were you trying to do with this book? Why write this book and who were you writing it for?
- [03:34]
C
Well, the dissertation was written primarily for my doctoral advisor, Christian Oppe. He's the author of three book books on the Vietnam War. Most people aren't going to read your dissertation, so I intentionally wrote the dissertation as a draft of a book. I wanted to tell a story about American history over the past 50 or 60 years that centered veterans and it centered the problem that they often encountered after war, especially after the Vietnam War, but also after multiple deployments in the global war on terrorism. Right. So, yeah, I wanted to tell a history of the United States military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex with formerly incarcerated veterans centered in that story.
- [04:23]
B
Okay, excellent. And let's talk about those formerly incarcerated veterans that are at the core of the book. This is all oral histories. Can you tell us a little bit about how you met your informants, who they are, and what you learned from them?
- [04:40]
C
Yeah, well, I mean, I launched this project back in 2017. I started out by looking for people in the community. I'd been doing oral histories with veterans since I was an undergrad. So I'd already been doing it for quite some time. By the time I was a PhD student at UMass, actually like had already decided I was going to write my dissertation and my first book on incarcerated veterans. Before I even entered that program as a master's student, I was doing oral histories with veterans. And for a long time I had been interested in readjustment difficulties for Vietnam veterans. So I was really interested in listening to Vietnam veterans about their homecoming experiences. And a lot of reoccurring patterns like, emerged, you know, and I, I started paying attention to veteran communities and the Interesting thing about incarcerated veterans is that historians hadn't written about them, really, scholars hadn't written about them, but veterans have been aware that veterans have come home from war and gone to prison for decades. Right. And they have been implementing slow but effective changes through policy, through activism, through organizing for decades. It's just kind of been out of the spotlight, you know, and it was just really. So how did I find them? Most of them were formerly incarcerated. As the, the project began, I was soliciting interviews and sending around letters to organizations that might be able to help me get in touch with veterans involved in the criminal justice system. And eventually they started to find me through social media. A lot of them were outspoken already about racial justice and, you know, human rights, and, you know, a lot of them were already actively involved in pointing out some of these problems.
- [06:41]
B
And.
- [06:42]
C
Yeah, so it's, it was a. It was a variety of local regional community work, you know, interviews, and then also identifying some of the leaders and the, what I argue is a grassroots movement to reform the criminal justice system with the Vietnam veterans who founded the first Treatment Court. So I was interviewing them as well. So it was a little bit top down in that, but also grassroots, like from the bottom up.
- [07:14]
B
Thank you. And let's talk about one of the key terms that you, you introduce in your book, and that is the military carceral state. Can you explain that a bit?
- [07:27]
C
Yeah, that's one of those things that whenever you're a graduate student and you think that you're sm. Coin terms. No, I. What I see it as is really what I've outlined is the effects of it. Right. Like, I see how these certain patterns of American civilians who get into this pipeline from poverty to war and back to poverty again, and all of the inherent problems and traumas related to growing up, you know, working class in America. Right. Like, and seeing those problems play out with veterans and, and. Yeah.
- [08:11]
B
Yeah. So I guess it's kind of a. Another way of talking about. In education, we often talk about the school to prison pipeline. And now this is the school to military to prison.
- [08:22]
C
Yeah. And what I really show in the book is how the beginning of the rise of mass incarceration directly relates to the end of the Vietnam. I mean, there had been other scholars and historians like Elizabeth Hinton, who have documented the relationship between the rise of mass incarceration and the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations. Right. So what I'm really doing is showing how the war on drugs and the end of the Vietnam War intersect and how it's these veterans who are at those intersections of these national, global problems and how does it impact the rest of their life? Essentially, yeah.
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B
And I want to talk about those intersections, but first, let's get a scope of the problem here. So how many veterans are in the Carswell system? Both like, at its peak after the Vietnam War and now, if you have those numbers.
- [09:21]
C
Yeah, Well, I mean, the Department of Justice began to study this problem in 1978. The Carter administration had ordered it to collect data on incra. They had no data. Right. So. And that was largely in part due to the organizing efforts of incarcerated veterans. Talk about, like Ari says, more who organized in a federal prison outside of D.C. so what happens is the Carter administration, for the first time, does a study, tries to find out, but there are inherent problems to their methodologies. Right. They. They documented like, 73,000 in 1978, and one out of every three were veterans. So which is substantial in itself. The number of incarcerated veterans, according to the Department of Justice, increased to about 150,000 by 2001. So by 9, 11, it's about 150,000. And the vast majority of them are Vietnam veterans. In those first studies, it documented that nearly half of them were black veterans. They had disabilities. Yeah. And so on the cusp of mass incarceration, where the total prison population was 200,000 in 1970, at the end of the Vietnam War, as Nixon begins to withdraw, it's about 200,000. It goes to over 2 million by 2000. So while those incarcerated veteran populations do more than double, the prison population in the United States explodes. It's mostly black people. Right. Who inherently experience trauma and disabilities and poverty.
- [11:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, but like you said, the total number is going up, and that's going to scoop every subgroup under it.
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C
I mean, the problem with identifying how many incarcerated veterans there are is numerous limitations. In fact, the veteran treatment courts stumbled upon that limitation themselves whenever they were, like, how many veterans are in our local jails. Right. And because it wasn't being documented, it's never been documented thoroughly. Right. It's, like, largely based on studies of state samples. Right. So we have estimated sizes, but, like, incarcerated veterans don't wear caps with their service branch on their heads. Right. So, like, there's a number of reasons why a veteran might not disclose that they served in the military, especially if they're marginalized or in prison. Right. So the actual number is far greater. I know, but, you know, that's what I have to go by, is the numbers that the. The federal government provides me.
- [12:16]
B
Yeah, of course. So Excuse me, let's shift into some of the, some of the earlier, early chapters in the book, but I'm going to ask you one more, a couple more background questions just because for, for a listener who's not familiar with how the military works, what is a bad paper discharge and why is it such a common theme coming up in these veteran stories that they tell?
- [12:47]
C
So bad paper is essentially a punishment that happens in the military, usually outside of court martial. So a less than honorable disch charge would deny a veteran the GI Bill, VA health care benefits, counseling services, all of the social, economic, you know, privileges that come with being an American veteran. Right. So all the rights that veterans have fought for for the past century or more. A lesson. Honorable discharge is used as a way to kick people out of the military. I document this happening from the Vietnam War era through post 9 11, including with women who experience men who have substance use disorder, whether that be alcoholism or opioids. In the Vietnam War, things were different, right? It was far more racialized. Those racial differences are still present. But in the Vietnam War, racism was far more overt. Right? And it was institutionalized more deeply as well. The interesting thing about less than normal discharges is that in 1966-69, there were only a couple of hundred issued per year. Like during the, the war in Vietnam, Right. So whenever Nixon is elected and of course King is assassinated, there's widespread resistance from black soldiers in Vietnam. Right? There's racial conflict. By 1971, the majority of the the American population believed not only that the United States should not be at war in Vietnam, but that was fundamentally wrong. Right? So it was widespread anti war protests going across the country, and that was oftentimes led by veterans, but black veterans who resisted and they did everything from growing out Afros to coated handshakes that could take like five to 10 minutes and piss off all of the southern white asshole commanding officers in the rear.
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B
Right?
- [15:15]
C
But these were like blood brothers. They were out there fighting. They were the ones dying. And during those years, African Americans were twice as likely as white GIs to be killed in Vietnam. Right? And that leads to widespread protests. That's one of the reasons why King speaks out against the war in 1967. And so there's widespread dissent. Those couple hundred less than normal discharges a year go from 6 over almost 7,000 in 1970 to 12,000 in 1971 during this turning point that I'm arguing, and over 25,000 by 1972. They're disproportionately black, right? And the military jails and prisons in Vietnam, like Long Bin Jail, lbj, I mean, they were notorious sites of racial violence. So that's the context for all of that happening. Happening. But as the Nixon administration, you know, encounters widespread protest, I mean, think, you know, it's Kent State's happening. Daniel Ellsberg releases the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. It's really that summer of 1971, Watergate. Right. All of these things are unraveling the presidency. You know, he's targeting the Black Panther Party.
- [16:42]
A
He's.
- [16:43]
C
He thinks of any type of organized resistance from black people is inherently un American. Right. It must be a communist conspiracy. So, I mean, he's also doing that like, Nixon was a really bad dude. You know, that really undersells how bad he was. But he was doing some very nefarious things. But. And that's related to the war on drugs, but.
- [17:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, great. Yeah. Thank you. And I appreciate, like, this. This big picture, you know, you know, giving us the big picture of what is going on at this time. But now let's get. Get down to. To one of these. To one of these oral histories. You tell. Can you talk to us about Henry Burton?
- [17:32]
C
Yeah, well, Henry Burton is, you know, in many ways, he is part of that generation of black men drafted into the Vietnam war under Project 100,000, which was Robert McNamara's way to essentially boost the ranks of the military, using the military as kind of this way for black men who had been racially pathologized to think that they were inherently inferior. Right. So the military has these ideas about using the military as a way of social, educational, and economic uplift. Right. It's called Project 100,000. So the idea is to lower the test requirements for people to serve. So what happens in practice actually is that disproportionately black men, largely from the south, who have Jim Crow educations, you know, separate and unequal, they get funneled into the front lines of Vietnam. Right. And this leads to like, twice as many black men being killed in combat. I mean, the Vietnam War as a whole was a working class war. 80% of the people serving in combat positions were working class. They were blue collar. Right. But Project 100,000, there were about 400,000 of them. And, you know, they were highly likely to be killed. There's a lot. There were attempts to study what happened to them afterwards. There were a lot of guesses. I would say that many of them ended up in prison, but yeah, it's a huge chapter in black History. It's a huge chapter at the intersection of black American military history in the Vietnam War era. So you asked about Henry Burton, but. Yeah, so Henry Burton was from West Virginia, and he was drafted in Vietnam under Project 100,000. He serves during the TED offensive. Actually. Whenever he arrived in Vietnam, he got the news that his father had died of black lung disease, so he had to fly back home. And at that time, he met a wife. They eventually had a baby, but he had to go back. He filed for, like, a hardship discharge from going back to Vietnam. But whenever he goes back, it's January 1968. It's tad offensive, right? He ultimately does, like, 15 months, two tours, and he's wounded three separate occasions. So, you know, he has Purple Heart. He has. I think he has a Bronze Star as well. But it. The way he describes it to me is, is that his body and his mind change to adapt to the conditions of a brutal war in Vietnam. He comes home after being wounded three different times. He was kicked out against his wishes, which is another major theme of the book, is that these are veterans who don't want to get kicked out. They get kicked out, right? And then they come home. He has a newborn baby. He tries to get a job in, like, a Detroit car factory, right? But he's like. He has, like, a. The rivets and the gun, right? Like, it gives him what I would describe as, like, a flashback or a reenactment. Undiagnosed and unacknowledged piece. Ptsd, right? Like, it was combat trauma that he was dealing with. And ultimately, he, you know, leaves. He quits his job. He goes back to Roanoke, Virginia, actually, and he, you know, experiences what so many veterans do in that moment of transition without any support, without any structures to help him readjust, without any knowledge of disability benefits, benefits, or the va. He didn't understand that, you know, there was a process that he was outside of. And ultimately, what he does is, like, before he was drafted, he worked in a grocery store. And so after the war, he ended up robbing a grocery store. And he said something along the lines of, you know, his only marketable job experiences were working in a grocery store and setting ambushes in Vietnam. Ultimately, Mr. Burton, he served over four decades in prison. He had been let out one time after, like, I think, 15 years. And he described to me that, like, the trauma had gone dormant. Like, he had adjusted to living in prison for so long that, like, he didn't really understand the ptsd. And then whenever he got released, it was like, he was that that trauma had been activated again, and he recidivated and went back to prison. And ultimately, like, he felt more comfortable in prison than he did at home, wherever home is for him. You know, I was. I got a letter from Henry Burton during COVID during the summer of 2020. And his last words to me were, do you mind if I read him? Let me just.
- [23:12]
B
Yeah, please, please do.
- [23:21]
C
Sorry, take me just a minute. He said in a letter, I look forward to this new journey. This is the first time since Vietnam I will start a future with a right mind and a heart. So he was released in March of 2020 because he was. It was Covid and he was like his. He was deemed like a health risk. And I've searched for him and I've looked for him and I've tried to contact the. The information I have for all of his family members. And, like, I haven't been able to find any information about Henry Burton. But ultimately, like, he is an example of what happens whenever people's lives are, you know, caught up in these circumstances, largely beyond their control, but they also have limited options, one readily available to them, you know, and this guy, he. Can you imagine spending, you know, you're a teenager and you go to Vietnam and you come back and you can't readjust and, like, your whole life is spent in prison, you know, and now, like, he gets out suddenly, you know, so, you know, that's one of tens of thousands of stories that are going to be lost to us. Like, we. We don't know those histories because so many people like Henry Burton, their voices go unheard, they die, you know, in prison. And, you know, so. But it's not entirely a story of, I would say, victimhood. You know, I recognize the agency of these people. They, you know, a lot of veterans organized, and I spend a lot of time in the book talking about how the experience of Vietnam leads them to trying to provide more resources, more access to services, more community, to other veterans also experiencing these same problems.
- [25:31]
B
Yeah, thank you for that. And yeah, it is unfortunate that you're not able to reach Mr. Burton. I hope he's doing well. And I do want to talk about the veterans organizing together, but I want to pick up a couple other themes that come through the book, especially in sense of the issues around mental health, but also masculinity and patriarchy, because that's something that comes up a lot, you know, like joining the military in order to prove that, you know, you're a man. And so if you could tell US the story about Kevin Ogo and what does. What does his story tell us about these connections between mental health and masculinity?
- [26:19]
C
That's a. That's a great question. I haven't talked a lot about Ogo's story, but it is a super interesting story, actually, because his father had served in the global war on terrorism as well, and so did he. He went to Afghanistan and did multiple deployments and experience, you know, a lot of loss, a lot of death of comrades in arms, and each subsequent deployment went to Afghanistan or Iraq. He was unable to ultimately comply with kind of the. The regimen and the military. And, you know, as a lot of these post 911 generation veterans, of course, like, yeah, they serve for manhood. And if they are experiencing. And that's an old story, right? Like, what does Paul Caputi say about a war is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, you know, and they go into the military and mental health is highly gendered, you know, even if. And there are, you know, like, signature wound by David Kieran. He talks about how the army reformed itself to provide mental health resources right from the top down. But ultimately, a lot of these guys weren't seeking help if they needed it, and if they did, they were punished and they were experiencing all kinds of retaliation, especially women. Right. But also men. So, yeah, gender and manhood and masculinity is, is a huge part of it. And this leads to. All right, so what happens is a lot of these soldiers get separated with misconduct discharges sometimes that mental health can be used against them in that situation. But let's see, I'll give you some numbers here on this. 2011 to 2015, over 57,000 soldiers were separated with less than normal discharges for misconduct discharges, and they had a diagnosed mental health disorder concurrently at the same time. Right. So, like, what's happening is that these. In a time Whenever fewer than 1/2 of 1% of Americans served actively in the military, the army relied on multiple deployments to carry out the missions of the global war on terrorism from Iraq and Afghanistan. So you have a small fraction of a population who are required to do it multiple times. They're also trying to have families and raise kids and see their children born between deployments. And that messes with their sense of home. Right. Like in a lot of situations, these vets who experience PTSD or traumatic brain injuries or, you know, these detonations of these roadside bombs, they have a lot more difficulty, like, functioning as a parent parent, which also plays into the role of gender, like their, their fatherhood, their motherhood, right. Like in. And they can't go to Walmart without being stressed about it. And ultimately what a lot of veterans have told me is that they start to feel like combat feels more like home because their, their hyper vigilance or hyper awareness is a strength. It's an asset to them. It's how they stay alive in combat. But whenever they try to come home and like deal with a baby that's crying because it new diaper, right? Like, it's a different wiring that a lot of people find really challenging. And so combined with that is alcohol and substance use. And you're already talking about a group of largely men who are very, they're trained to be violent, right? Like they get into fights, they get into these problems again to behavioral issues. And so they get kicked out, they don't have access to VA healthcare, and all of the things that they need to, you know, reintegrate successfully.
- [30:47]
B
And that's another thing that came up in this is it seems that most of the offenses that these veterans are put in prison for are almost directly related to the combat experience you mentioned. Like with Burton, the only thing he knew how to do is work in a grocery store and set up ambushes and what is an armed robbery except a type of ambush. So, and then the other, other offenses were like you said, get into fights, assault and then drug issues, you know, like, and, and so it's like everything they learned in the military is what ended up putting them into prison. And, and I think let's, let's maybe shift a bit and also talk, talk more directly about the war on drugs and, and, and first of all, drug addiction and drug problems in the military and how, how they played into some of these bad paper discharges, but also just how the war on drugs itself, you know, you know, helped contribute to the rise of the prison population, catching a lot of veterans in its wake.
- [32:00]
C
Yeah, well, I mean I, I spend a whole chapter talking about or two, two whole chapters talking about the war on drugs and the war in Vietnam. In chapter two with Nixon, starting in 1971, whenever he declares a war on drugs and he names public enemy number one, he also points to addicted, heroin addicted soldiers in Vietnam. Right. Like he's doing that a time of scandal whenever he's looking for a scapegoat. And he blames essentially soldiers in Vietnam being addicted to heroin for losses in the Vietnam war. Right. He creates the scapegoat and then he implements policies and his predecessors really, and Reagan and A whole generation of both Republicans and Democrats who turn toward a tough war on drugs is tough on crime, Right. Like they all turn. A whole generation turns tough on crime after 1970, essentially from Clinton, right. Like he was one of the most significant contributors to mass incarceration with the three strikes and your outlaw. But Nixon set in motion, you know, the rise of mass incarceration by essentially, I mean, I don't want to go into too many details on this, but essentially the war on poverty becomes an apparatus by which the federal government starts to build the military industrial complex. So starting to block food stamps and education resources and Social Security that had been going into these local communities that could decide how to spend those federal dollars. Right. So what Nixon does is he shifts that pipeline to local police, Right. So that starts to build this militarized police force and prisons, and that's how they start to deal with crime is by punishment. And it doesn't work, obviously. And like, over 7 million people affected by mass incarceration today. But, yeah, it all kind of starts during that moment in the Vietnam War.
- [34:23]
B
And how is. Has the. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan been different? Because it seems that there's a new drug of ch for veterans of these wars.
- [34:38]
C
Yeah. Well, I mean, imagine that you were toting 80 pounds of gear and you have back injuries and knee injuries. And during the mid-2000s and 2010s, the military, the army doctors, and the VA doctors prescribed opioids. What happens is a lot of them develop up substance use disorder problems. And then once the VA essentially starts to get a better sense of how these opioids are causing addiction and all of these substance use disorders, I mean, not only is the army kicking out these guys, right. Once they develop these disorders, like using opioids chronically, they kick them out, of course. But also, whenever the VA changed its regulations on prescribing opioids, a lot of Afghanistan war veterans especially turned to heroin because it was cheaper and you couldn't. Like, you. No longer could you find Laura sets on the streets for, you know, a couple bucks a piece. So you spend $10. And yeah, I've interviewed a lot of people who kind of went down that path from opioid addiction in the military or through the Veterans affairs and Veterans Administration, rather. And, yeah, heroin.
- [36:09]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those the more things change type of stories. But it's great because you're able to show these links between what's going on stateside and how it affects the. The soldiers at war and then veterans when they come home. So this has been a very, very heavy conversation already. And so I want to turn to some of the more positive notes that you have in this book. And so let's talk about. You have several stories of incarcerated veterans self organizing and advocating for themselves while they're still in prison. So what were they trying to do and what did this organizing get to them?
- [36:55]
C
They tried to get access to VA services and that's exactly what they got. Ari says Umaretazan is a guy who goes by many names. And I first encountered his story and Wallace Terry's Bloods, an oral history of African Americans in Vietnam. He didn't go by that. He went by Haywood the Kid Kirkland. And so from the first time I read that as a grad student, you know, at the same time I was starting to get interested in these questions, I could never find a Haywood Kirkland. Right. But the movie Dead Presidents is based on like, it's a highly dramatized Hollywood version of what happened. Right? Like there's a shootout, like they're all painted like ghost white. And it's crazy, but it was, no one was shot. There was no, you know, cowboy style, like middle of the street, you know, duels going on. But yeah, he came home from Vietnam in 1968, right after Dr. King was assassinated. Essentially what happened was he got a job where he learned about how the federal, the Department of Treasury would incinerate old cash. They were delivering it in mail trucks. And so he plots the arm, he says it wasn't armed. The movie, of course they're armed, but no one was ever hurt. Regardless, it was a non violent crime. But they robbed an armored truck that was carrying all this treasury, right, to the Department of Treasury to be burned. So they stole like $300,000 and a lot of it got that donated to black cultural centers and stuff in Washington D.C. he was, he's a bit of a, an activist for reparations. And he kind of saw that as an act of repair in some ways. You know, he gave it to the medical center at Howard, but he went to prison. The federal judge kind of made an example out of him, gave him life, a life sentence. And that's another reoccurring story is that like these veterans after Vietnam especially, like they think that their, their veteran status was actually used against them because it made them look dangerous. Right. So he went to prison, but they start organizing and he sets up the first ever veterans VA office inside a prison staffed entirely by incarcerated veterans. He's writing letters to Congressmen Ronald Dellums gets involved. The Washington Post picks up the story. He gets invited to the Carter administration. White House meets with Carter. Ultimately, in 1979, he and others testified to Congress. He gets released. He didn't spend life, but he started going around the United States to these prisons with Dellums and trying to replicate the Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organization, which he had founded. Right. Like, so he's trying to teach incarcerated veterans how to organize across the country. They're also collecting data, they're collecting numbers, and they present that information to Congress in 1979. Reagan's elected, of course, the next year, and he defunds everything. But, yeah, it's a different chapter.
- [40:31]
B
Thank you. And. And let's move to the other example of veterans organizing to help other veterans caught in the Carlsville system, which is the establishment of these veteran treatment courts. So first of all, what are veteran treatment courts?
- [40:56]
C
Yeah, well, veteran treatment courts are a type of way that a judge handles cases. So a judge can create a separate veteran treatment court that has its own best practices. But essentially what it does is the local court connects with the federal government through the va. Right. So the VA hospital is partnering with the court system to work with them, identify veterans in the jails or in the judicial. In the criminal justice system. The first one was founded in 2008 in Buffalo by Judge Robert Russell and Jack O' Connor and other people that I interviewed in the book. You know, they started encountering veterans and provided a new model for reform that was largely based on drug treatment courts. Russell had also been trying to do a mental health treatment court at the same time. So he was already kind of thinking about reforms. But, yeah, it provides counseling services. It connects with all of the local veterans resources in a community. So like any kind of employment agency, housing, education, trans. To connect people in the criminal justice system to the resources that they need not to go back to jail. Right. So it's provided through the federal government. And it's a clear example to me of how with federal resources, we could provide alternatives to incarceration. And they work like, this is like the whole spill that all these judges and veterans and advocates will go to Congress with is like, hey, this doesn't cost a lot of money and it works. Right. So you have a generation of veterans who Vietnam veterans, largely, who wanted to provide a better model of what it means to be an American veteran, to post nine, 11 generation vets. And they provide access to all of the care and resources that the Vietnam generation didn't have. Right. So I kind of talk about grassroots Organizing and how veterans have been doing this work for decades. Kind of unseen really from the public, but they've been very effective, I would argue.
- [43:36]
B
Great, thank you. Yeah. And reading those chapters, it is, you know, again, after such reading through so many heavy stories, there is some sort of, I don't want to say light at the end of the tunnel, but there is, is some reason for some sort of optimism, you know, in, in, in, in this work. And I, I thank you for that. I, I want to go back to, you know, kind of like big picture again, I think. And what does studying incarcerated veterans show us about the nature of military service on its own and the carceral system on its own and like, and, and how studying that, that link is good. It also helps us study both individually.
- [44:23]
C
Oh, that's a big question. I wasn't ready for that one. I would say it shows how these greater forces that seem invisible but omnipresent in our society, like the military and like the prison system, impact the lives of, of everyone, but especially people who experience trauma, who experience disabilities, any type of discrimination, unequal treatment under the law, people who grew up in environments of poverty, who had very few pathways out of that poverty except for join the military, goes to college. Right. As a path. And for post nine, 11 generation veterans, you know, the National Guard especially served multiple deployments and a lot of those guys didn't sign up for that. Right. Like it was one weekend a month, you know, so a lot of veterans are impacted by this. And what I say is, like, all of those problems that I identify in the book and that we've talked about, mental health, substance use disorder, addiction, opioids, all of these are problems that most Americans experience. You know, and I think that if there's a lesson to take away from this is that there are policymakers who implement these ideas. Right. Whether it be punishment, whether it be a war, whether that rhetoric is militarized or not, or providing some type of treatment, these are the results of policymakers and their choices. Right. And so if they can make the choice to invest in a war on drugs, they can also invest in, you know, some type of treatment programs that can provide, you know, greater access to reform and mental health care and all of the things that people need to thrive in society. So we have examples of both in the book.
- [46:47]
B
Great. Thank you for that. So speaking of the, you know, decisions that policymakers are making, you know, do you have any thoughts, you know, from, you know, as a historian, looking at what's going on right now, now, and how for example, the war on drugs is now being prosecuted as an outright war with bombings of supposed drug boats in the Caribbean. And the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, himself a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is witness probably to many of the policies that you talk about in the military in war. Again, I know you're a historian and this is looking at current events, but what does your outlook tell us about what's going on now?
- [47:48]
C
Well, I mean, I ended the book with January 6th. So like, I wrote that book kind of in real time. And, you know, I would say that the things that they are doing right now are the quiet parts out loud. They're not as secretive, they're not as covert about it. They're far more obtuse about it. But Pete Hexith, if he had his way, would revert the military to an institution virtually designed for men of a specific type, for white men, based largely on his own white supremacist ideal of what the military masculinity means to him. If you watch the speech he gave to all the generals and admirals, he kept referencing like, like, would you want your son serving? Right. But he never acknowledged that more than 20% of the military are women. The vast majority of women are people of color. And there's been incremental reforms to redress the crisis. I've described it as plenty of times about military sexual violence committed in the military. These are perpetrators who oftentime victims fell up. You know, they get moved around, they never get prosecuted. But the victims of sexual trauma in the military are often retaliated against. They're marginalized or ostracized within their departments and oftentimes kicked out of the military without these benefits, less than horrible discharges for mental health problems related to sexual violence. Right. Like in this is a problem. One in three women in the military today, they have experienced rape. And that's been pretty consistent for like the past 15 years. You know, it goes up and down, but it's alarmingly high. And now, like after Vanessa Guillen, her murder, and the, the grassroots roots movement of women veterans who spoke out publicly against the, the crisis of raping military women, right. In the United States today, there have been in criminal reforms such as, you know, someone in the chain of command, someone outside the chain of command investigates these incidences, which has been a huge problem.
- [50:23]
A
Right.
- [50:23]
C
Like, they've been fighting for that reform since 2012. Right. If not before then. So there have been small changes that someone like Pete Hegseth would love to, to dismantle and he's doing everything he can to break it up. Like. Like that's what they do is they go in and they just start tearing things apart, right? And dismantling everything that they can. But it's against all of the efforts of these veterans who have organized for the past 50 years, you know, so. Which is what I write about. And I guess it's frustrating if. If I could be honest with you, because my first book, Service Denied, you know, we write about the history of queer people and these blue discharges, and we write about black veterans and these lesson horrible discharges and transgender veterans and immigrants and all of these veterans who don't fit that archetypal view of what a veteran looks like it stands for in America, Right? And, you know, I'm sure a few scholars have read it, but, like, it doesn't have the impact that people like Pete Hexith have, you know, so, yeah, it's a little frustrating as, as a scholar, as someone who tries to make things publicly available and accessible. Like Prisoners After War is open access, it's free online, and I want people to read it.
- [51:54]
B
But, yeah, I want to talk about that minute, but I want to kind of wrap up the conversation. This conversation first. We're recording this. November 4th, a week from today, is Veterans Day, so it'll probably be released somewhere around then. What do you like for the listeners? How should your listeners, especially those who have never served in the military, how should they commemorate Veterans Day with. With your work in mind?
- [52:31]
C
I think that we live in a culture of militarism in America. And unfortunately, we've come full circle right, from this idea during the Vietnam era that veterans weren't supported at all, and to this era today, where they're turned into statues, they're turned into icons and idols and embodiments of patriotism and strength and masculinity. And humans can't be that, right? Like, veterans are complex or diverse. They don't fit any single model, but they also represent American society. It's a microcosm of the United States as a whole. But another thing to really understand is that veterans talk about second service, right? Like, their lives are dedicated not necessarily to just following orders in the military, but to trying to find a higher purpose, right? And trying to do something on the benefit of communities and other peoples. And that is also patriotism. That is a love for country, right? So of patriotism isn't, you know, waving an American flag on someone's faces and beating a wardrobe. It's rather these examples of men, women and other Americans who have served in the military, oftentimes with problem, problematic, romanticized ideas about what war is and what to expect, but have survived in it and have tried to affect social change throughout the rest of their life. And I think that that's a story that's just as interesting. Right. And so as we write about the history of veterans, American veterans, we need to think about larger problems and how they impact the most marginalized people, like mass incarceration and war.
- [54:38]
B
Very, very great answer. Thank you so much for that. So let's get back to. You had mentioned that Prisoners After War is available open access. I also want to talk about that, this gig you have at Virginia Tech as the digital scholarship coordinator, if I'm getting that right, yeah. So why did you make Prisoners After War open access? And, and was that a big issue or did you have to fight for that? And then what do you do as this digital scholarship coordinator?
- [55:14]
C
Well, part of what I do is I work in publishing and I work in open access publishing, and I believe in the value of good scholarship for a public audience. And it's part of my training as a public historian to think about how history impacts people today. So I work in publishing. I applied for a grant through Virginia Tech, and through. It was a tome grant. It was kind of an experimental open access grant to, for historical or scholarly monographs. So single author books. Yeah. And they paid $15,000 to UMass Press to make it open access. And it was cool. And I'm, I was totally happy to do it. And it was, yeah, it's great. I'm, I, I'm thrilled that people can read it for free because my audience, like, even though my dissertation was written for an expert in the Vietnam War, was the veterans I'm writing about. Like, I, I'm first generation, you know, I come from an environment where people don't go to college. So, you know, I tried to write it in a way that it's accessible to anyone who wants to read about it. And the greatest reward that I've experienced so far is that veterans are reading it. There are numerous formerly Equestria veterans who've told me that they read it and saw a part of their own lived experience represented within it. And, you know, that gives me, like, the encouragement because, you know, I'm writing about a group, you know, 10 or 15, I interviewed 60. But to have other people say that the pattern I'm recognizing was relevant to their life, you know, like, that's powerful.
- [57:13]
B
That's really great to hear. And I'm glad that it's reaching that audience. So the last question we have is what current projects are you working on besides your publishing work and teaching? Are you working on any new book length or even just article length projects?
- [57:32]
C
I'm working on all the things, John. I never stopped working. So I, like I said, I work in publishing. I do a lot of digital humanities. I've been creating a digital humanities internship program for like supervising it for like the past three years. And I have it pretty efficiently set up replicable workflows. I'm doing a lot right now. I am doing a project with queer alumni from Virginia Tech. We just launched it. We did the second interview today remotely. I have kits that can mail out to anyone. So I have a Shure MV7 microphone, a MacBook Pro, a light and headphones I can ship anywhere and we can record a virtual interview. Very high quality. And I have 10 of those. So I'm like, they're in rotation, they're going in and out. The other things I'm doing right now, I just got peer reviews back for two different projects. One is kind of of an extension of this work. It deals with some of the same topics, but it's called Dissidents. It's about veterans who spoke out for justice and it talks about racism, the experiences of women, the experiences of queer people and anti war veterans. I just got the first peer review back. It was very, very positive. It'll be on Scalar, which is a digital humanities company of creation site. And I have a WordPress site that we just got another positive peer review for that I've been working on for more than three years with it's called Face to Face with Slavery. I partnered with a descendant community organization called the More Than a Fraction foundation. And she is a descendant of the people whose families were enslaved on the land that Virginia Tech now occupies. So we did 30 interviews with descendants. We also included the perspectives of the family whose ancestors enslaved them. And it's a large oral history project. I'm trying to make oral history more accessible. So we're creating highlight clips we have. Each story has a short abstract and a hook multiple short video clips from the larger interviews. So five to seven, two minutes, minute, you know, clips to highlight the important parts of it. The full interviews all available on WordPress. So that's what I've been doing and it's been really busy. But also I have a lot of resources to be able to do some really cool things. As far as book projects. I'm working on an open education resource on oral history. I'm applying for a grant to create a new like oer are on how to do oral history. So that'll be my third book.
- [60:34]
B
Excellent. That those all sound fascinating and I really can't wait to read them. So Jason, thank you for your time and I really telling the listeners pick up this book like Jason said, it is available open access. It is Prisoners after Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration, published by University of Massachusetts Press. Jason. Jason Higgins, thank you so much for your time.
- [61:03]
C
Well, John, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk in so much depth about the book and fantastic questions and it's just a delight to have someone who's read it, you know, talk to me back about it because, you know, I I wrote most of that five years ago ago, so I kind of have to read it before I talk about it now. But these questions were great and it got me talking about things I haven't thought much about before.
- [61:29]
B
Great. Thank you. All right.