DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Knutey on August 18, 2008, 11:58:57 AM
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The Military
A Few Bad Men
William Pentland 08.18.08, 6:00 AM ET
If the population of America's jails was cut in half in a single year, you'd probably have heard about it. But that's just what's gone on in U.S. military prisons, without fanfare.
In recent years, while America's armed services have been hard-pressed to assemble the manpower to fight two simultaneous wars, the number of U.S. soldiers in the military prison system has fallen by 50%, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The facilities now operate at just 20% of their capacity.
While the Pentagon did not respond to numerous requests for comment about the changing numbers, P.J. Crowley, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs and senior fellow and director of homeland security at American Progress thinks he knows what's going on.
"The military needs as many soldiers in uniform as possible, even though some of them probably would have been kicked out a decade ago," says Crowley, who served in the Army for 28 years.
The numbers aren't large--in 2005, the population was 2,322; the following year, the last period for which figures are available, it dropped to 1,135--but coupled with other data, it signals changing standards for military justice in America's armed forces.
During the same time period, the Air Force, Navy and Marines discharged the smallest number of soldiers since at least the early 1990s. And records show that the number of courts-martial proceedings, the judicial process the military uses to determine guilt or innocence and the appropriate punishment for soldiers accused of criminal and disciplinary offenses, have been the lowest on record for the Navy, Army and Air Force Department of Defense.
The Marine Corps had 527 active-duty marines incarcerated in 2005. In 2006 it was 167, a 70% decline. In the far-larger Army, roughly 170 of every 100,000 soldiers were in prison in 2002. In 2005, the rate for the 1.4 million soldier force was roughly 18 per 100,000. In the civilian world, 762 of every 100,000 U.S. citizens are currently in federal, state or local prisons.
Until only a few decades ago, desertion was the most common military offense committed. But since the first Persian Gulf War, the profile of the average military inmate has changed dramatically. In 2002, the most common crime committed by military inmates was rape, followed by drug possession and drug trafficking. Only 12% of those prisoners committed offenses like desertion or disrespect enforced exclusively by the military.
The Army has made extensive efforts to keep soldiers out of the military justice system, relaxing enforcement procedures and otherwise softening military justice laws. Since 2003, the U.S. Army has funded all defense counsel travel for courts-martial, beginning with the initial detailing of counsel to a client.
This allows counsel to get "actively involved in cases at the earliest stages, defense counsel have successfully negotiated non-punitive dispositions of cases that otherwise may have been disposed of at courts-martial," according to the Report of the Judge Advocate General for Fiscal Year 2005.
The Army also gives commanders wide discretion to punish soldiers as they see fit, but requires them to keep the incident out of the justice system wherever possible. "A commander should use nonpunitive measures to the fullest extent to further the efficiency of the command before resorting to nonjudicial punishment," according to a revision of the U.S. Army regulations that went into effect on Dec. 16, 2005.
Under military law, nonjudicial punishment is a less severe form of punishment than prosecution. In turn, nonpunitive discipline is even lighter than nonjudicial punishment. The key difference is that nonjudicial punishment generates a paper trail and nonpunitive doesn't. In other words, nonpunitive offenders are treated as first-time offenders if they get in trouble down the road while nonjudicial offenders are treated like recidivists.
The result: Military courts-martial rates have fallen to record lows in the past three years. Simply put, it is harder to get kicked out of the military than ever, at least since the Department of Defense started reporting annual corrections data in 1994.
The changes came as the military struggled to meet its recruiting and retention goals. While all four branches of the military generally met their numbers from 2000 until 2005, the Army and the Air Force missed retention goals in the first quarter of fiscal year 2005, according to a study conducted by the Government Accountability Office.
"If future [recruiting and retention] rates dropped to a mix of the 2005 and 2006 levels," the GAO said, "the Army would fall almost 50,000 people short of its end-strength objective in 2012."
To solve the problem, the Army relaxed recruiting standards with the percentage of new soldiers with high school diplomas falling from 94% in 2003 to 70.7% in 2007. The number of moral waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds grew roughly 65% between 2004 and 2006, rising from 4,918 in 2003 to 8,129 in 2006, according to Department of Defense records.
"The army is doing everything it can to keep kids in the ranks," says Crowley. "Ten years ago they could have just gotten replacements, but it's a tough market right now."
http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/15/legal-army-prison-biz-beltway-cx_wp_0818prisoners_print.html (http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/15/legal-army-prison-biz-beltway-cx_wp_0818prisoners_print.html)
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Don't know if Forbes is a LW RAg, but the Soros funded CAP sure is a LW propaganda mill.