FARGO — Many incarcerated veterans have been missing out on assistance after they fail to report their military status at the jail’s intake office, but the Cass County Sheriff’s Office found a way to help.
In a Facebook post, the Cass County Sheriff’s office reported that across the country, “a large number of incarcerated individuals don’t self report as veteran to law enforcement entities, which means these entities are not able to refer the individuals to services or may not be educated on the services that they rate from their military service.”
Locally, deputies are seeing the same trend, and began working with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in early September and discovered that less than 50% of veterans at intake at the Cass County Jail report their veteran status.
About 5% of inmates at the Cass County Jail are veterans, said Sheriff Jesse Jahner, adding that the discrepancy means they’re missing out on a lot of assistance after being released.
Sgt. Kale Peterson came up with the idea, according to Jahner, and brought it back. “That’s how we want to look at our organization as a whole, and how we can build relationships. He took this and ran with it,” Jahner said.
Peterson discovered the program after a trip to a National Sheriff’s Association meeting, a meeting he was rewarded after receiving the supervisor of the year award. While there, he found a class about a program that could help veterans behind bars.
“I saw one that was geared toward jails and prisons and when I went I saw it was veterans orientated. And when I saw it was free, I reached out to our contact at the VA about it,” said Peterson, who served in the Marine Corps in Jordan and Afghanistan.
Peterson said the point is to simply identify those incarcerated who can receive help and give them options for those services.
The way the program works is simple. The jail reaches out to the VA with a list of inmate names. Paperwork is shuffled around, including consent forms, and then the VA alerts deputies about which inmates are veterans.
Chris Deery, Cass County veterans service worker, said before the sheriff’s office began working with the VA, there was no discharge plan for those who served.
“I loved the idea when I first heard of it. We noticed in the past people got released and they didn’t get the benefits they should have, so this jump starts their life again,” Deery said. “It gives them a second chance to shoot for a goal.”
With about 12,000 veterans in Cass County, Deery is still trying to track down about 3,000, he said. Working with the jail will also help identify veterans who slipped through the cracks so that assistance can be offered to them, he said.
Some of the help veterans can find includes: health care, going back to school, filing claims through the VA office, vocational rehabilitation programs, and more, said Deery, who’s also a veteran of the U.S. Army who served in Iraq.
Many veterans don’t want to disclose their status because of shame, Jahner said, noting someone might not disclose that information when they go to jail after serving their country.
“They feel shame, and they don’t want to admit it because they don’t want to associate the two,” Jahner said of being both a veteran and an inmate.
Peterson said some at…
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