If You Build It, Will Vets Come? An Identity Theory Approach to Expanding Veterans' Treatment Court Participation

<jats:p> Veterans’ treatment courts (VTCs) provide a veteran-centric diversion option to traditional court case processing. These courts have proliferated across the United States without much consideration about whether veterans want, or need, a specialty court. In this article, we investigate the underlying importance of a veteran identity in the decision to enroll in a VTC. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with veterans, we identify four primary implications for practitioners. First, veterans are ashamed of their criminal justice involvement. Second, they are concerned about increased punitiveness by criminal justice actors, particularly law enforcement, because of their veteran status. Third, veterans perceive the VTC process to bestow upon them stigma and retaliation. Fourth, veterans resist VTC involvement for fear of dishonoring their branch of service. To expand enrollment, results demonstrate that practitioners should consider how veterans reconcile their veteran and offender identities when considering VTC enrollment. /jats:p

Ahlin, If You Build It, Will Vets Come? An Identity Theory Approach to Expanding Veterans’ Treatment Court Participation, 'Criminal Justice Review' (45, 3) pp. 319-336. Copyright © 2020. DOI: 10.1177/0734016820914075. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission.

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Work Title If You Build It, Will Vets Come? An Identity Theory Approach to Expanding Veterans' Treatment Court Participation
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Eileen M. Ahlin
  2. Anne S. Douds
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. SAGE Publications
Publication Date March 24, 2020
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. 10.1177/0734016820914075
Source
  1. Criminal Justice Review
Deposited January 13, 2022

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