Taken from Trading One Uniform for Another: The Military to Prison Pipeline by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon (reviewers):
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 white, Black, and Latino men lined up proudly between two flags.
In his dispatch to the paper, 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.... Read More
