WASHINGTON – Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to have been convicted for sex offenses than nonveteran inmates, and federal researchers cannot say why.
A study released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics compared the populations of inmates who served in the military and those who did not.
Veterans are half as likely to be incarcerated as those without service experience in the first place, researchers found, but 23 percent of the veterans in prison were sex offenders, compared with 9 percent of nonveteran inmates.
“We couldn’t come to any definite conclusion as to why,” said Margaret Noonan, one of the study’s authors.
“I don’t want people to come away from this thinking veterans are crazed sex offenders,” Noonan said. “I want them to understand that veterans are less likely to be in prison in the first place.”
The incarceration rate for veterans is 630 per 100,000, compared with 1,390 per 100,000 for nonveterans.
The study found that veterans in prison were older, more educated, more likely to have been married and more likely than nonveterans to be incarcerated for violent crimes or offenses against women or children.
Crime tends to decrease with age so older inmates are more likely serving lengthy sentences. Veterans as a group are older than the general population, so it is not surprising to see a higher percentage of veterans imprisoned for violent crimes, which carry longer prison sentences, Colby College sociologist Alec Campbell said.
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