Review of Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Jason Higgins (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024).

Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, The Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multi-generational group of men — white, Black and Latino — lined up proudly between two flags.

In his dispatch to the newspaper, African-American Navy veteran Robert Maury explained why everyone in the Stateville Veterans Group was wearing government issued clothing of a non-military sort. As Maury wrote, “This was the first time in the history of Stateville, if not the first time in the history of the state of Illinois, that incarcerated veterans were allowed to organize a Memorial Day ceremony in a maximum-security prison.”

There would not be another such event because, late last year, the Illinois Department of Corrections closed this century-old facility. The Veterans Group there was forced to disband; its members dispersed to other prisons around the state where some hoped to plant seeds for future veteran initiated programs at their new addresses.

How did these vets and 180,000 others end up in a U.S. prison population now numbering more than 1.2 million? And what can be done to keep other former service members out of jail in the future? These are questions that Jason Higgins, a Virginia Tech researcher, explores in his new book, Prisoners After War, which is particularly timely in light of President Joe Biden’s Dec. 12 pardon of a small group of veterans convicted of non-violent crimes, including long ago drug offenses.

Higgins, along with John Kindler, an associate professor of history from Oklahoma State University, has also produced an edited collection called Service Denied. That volume, with multiple contributors, offers a broader historical perspective on post-war mistreatment of former soldiers, including the hundreds of veterans who were born abroad, served in the military, ended up in prison, and then were deported after their release.

Higgins calls his own study a “social history of veterans in the age of mass incarceration.” It links their experience in foreign wars and related problems transitioning back to civilian life to changes in the criminal justice system that put millions of men and women behind bars during an on-going domestic crackdown on crime.

Fifty years after the official end of U.S. intervention in southeast Asia, “Vietnam vets are still the single largest population of war veterans in prison, illustrating the profound and lasting impact of the ‘war on crime’ on their generation.”

As Higgins reports, the broader U.S. trend of “criminalizing and punishing people with........

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