Buffalo Veterans Treatment Court: A Community Effor

This is a history of the Buffalo Veterans Treatment Court based on oral history interviews conducted by me from February through May 2015. The interviews are with veterans that volunteer with the court, court staff, or members of the broader veterans' community. I also observed court sessions from late 2014 to mid 2015. The interviews and observations are placed in context with primary and secondary sources. This ethnographic narrative is meant to explain the impetus for the courts formation and how the veterans' community contributed to its success and has been changed because of it. Through the court an image of a dynamic veterans' community emerges.;To develop this ethnographic approach, the first two chapters identify and discuss two broad social issues. The first issue is the difficult situation that veterans face after returning from armed conflict. The second issue is criminal justice system reform. When veterans returning from long tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan began to get arrested they found themselves enmeshed in a criminal justice system that was often ineffective and unforgiving. The third chapter focuses on Robert Russell, a city court judge in Buffalo, NY, and his associates as they worked to develop a response to the problems that veterans were facing in the criminal justice system in the mid 2000s. The chapter explains how the court works and leads to the fourth chapter that argues for the need to take a broader view, beyond courtroom innovation and jurisprudence, at the veteran community structures that contribute to the court's success, arguing that community support is as responsible for the court working as anything else. The conclusion raises the broader issue of whether the veterans' treatment court approach can be generalized and expanded for other communities in need, beyond the special case of veterans. It also summarizes what we have learned about veteran support structures and argues that mandatory national service could strengthen communities by making veteran type support structures available to all Americans.