www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/59
This is the Big One That Got Away...there's always a back-log of stories that miss the bus. We run out of time ... "run out of time" and forget to close the door on the way out it seems.
So we have this warm heart cockles tale of Returning Warriors:
Around the country, including Oregon, veterans' advocates are pushing such initiatives as veterans courts and veterans dockets to steer them into substance abuse treatment or other programs instead of prison. Clark County has such a court. So does Klamath County, which was the first in Oregon when it launched in November 2010. Lane County followed suit, and Marion County has a veterans docket.
But if a veteran is convicted of a crime in a place where there is no specialty court for veterans, he goes to jail. Once in, he enters a caged new world where he may have some opportunities that other inmates don't -- or, as in Jones' case, face exceptional challenges.
The Oregon Department of Veterans' Affairs keeps a running census of veterans incarcerated by the Department of Corrections. Veterans' Affairs officials help veterans get their family benefits fully restored when they are released and work with incarcerated veterans to file paperwork with the VA, said Tom Mann, the administrator of the department's Veterans Services Division."
Right.
First Question: Why do soldiers get their own special less punitive form of justice? They weren't drafted; Oh ho ho ho No: they signed on for the job in full knowledge that they might very likely be required to kill utter strangers in places they can't find on a map (although they have been living in said places for upwards of a year or more...) whose names they can't pronounce, for reasons they are incapable of understanding. Close your eyes, Baby, stick a flag in the nearest hole and call it yours - until the banks comes to take it back. It takes a special kind of a person to join the military. And that is the sort of people who can stomach the notion that killing people is a "legitimate" career choice. In much the same sense that "legitimate" rape is the knid that does not result in pregnancey. Presumably, "illegitimate " rape can get you knocked up because you are a "slut" in the full Limbaughian sense.
- KBOO