Veterans more likely imprisoned for sex crimes

WASHINGTON -- Military veterans are more than twice as likely to be in prison for sex crimes than are people without military experience, the government reports. Federal researchers cannot say why.

A study released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics compared the populations of inmates who served in the military and those who did not. Veterans are less likely to be incarcerated, researchers found, but nearly one in four veterans in state prison was a sex offender, compared with one in 10 nonveteran inmates.

"We couldn't come to any definite conclusion as to why," said Margaret E. Noonan, one of the study's authors.

The numbers mirror a trend seen in military prisons, where populations have declined but sexual assault remains the most common crime.

"I don't want people to come away from this thinking veterans are crazed sex offenders," Noonan said. "I want them to understand that veterans are less likely to be in prison in the first place."

The study found that veteran in prison were older, more educated, more likely to have been married and more likely than nonveterans to be incarcerated for violent crimes or offenses against women or children.

Many of those findings can be explained simply by age demographics, Colby College sociologist Alec Campbell said.

Crime tends to decrease with age so older inmates are more likely serving lengthy sentences. Veterans as a group are older than the general population, so Campbell said it is not surprising to see a higher percentage of veterans imprisoned for violent crimes, which carry longer prison sentences.

"I think that would go away if you controlled for age" in the study, Campbell said.

Because crimes against women or children can carry longer than average sentences, it is possible that statistic also follows from the aging veterans population, he said.

He said the statistic about sexual assault was "potentially interesting" but said it is impossible to know what that means without more information.

The veterans population has declined as the prison population has risen. Of the more than 2 million prisoners in 2004, an estimated 140,000 were veterans. That number is down from 153,100 in 2000.