Veterans Treatment Courts

Abstract

Treatment courts, also known as problem-solving courts, offer an alternative to incarceration in the form of mandated individualized treatment. Veterans Treatment Courts (VTCs) emphasize the criminal justice goal of sustainable rehabilitation rather than mere incarceration, seeking to restore the Veteran as a productive member of society instead of taking the costly step of removing the Veteran from society through imprisonment. In this chapter, we discuss Veterans Treatment Courts (VTCs), the fastest-growing variety of specialized court in the United States (Baldwin and Brooke, Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 58:1–29, 2019). Today, there are at least 461 operational VTCs and Veterans dockets within drug, mental health, or criminal courts. This chapter builds on this book’s important body of work and presents to you what is known about VTC participant characteristics, delves into the origins and history of VTCs and other problem-solving courts, reviews known outcomes of VTCs, and presents the complications and criticism that arise in the delivery of the VTC model around the United States.