In September, against a backdrop of razor wire and imposing concrete walls rising from Colorado’s remote Eastern Plains, incarcerated men inside Sterling Correctional Facility took part in an ice cream fundraiser. Pints of chocolate, superchunky cookie dough, and something called Sea Salt Carmel Craze went for $5. Extra-large Neapolitan sandwiches cost $3, as did cookies and cream bars. Everything sold out immediately.

The event was sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 12226, one of about 6,000 VFWs worldwide but the only one inside a prison. It was a unique assemblage: a collection of military combat veterans that included 24 inmates and four corrections officers from the Sterling facility, which houses men convicted of some of Colorado’s most violent crimes. For 11 months, the group had met often, discussing a hat and scarf drive for unhoused veterans, a coloring book collection for a children’s hospital, and a Veterans Day event. The end-of-summer ice cream fundraiser was their most ambitious project and would benefit the VFW’s Veterans & Family Support Program, which provides health care, housing, and emergency relief to struggling veterans and their families.

5280 April 2025
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An inmate who served as the post’s commander spread flyers across the sprawling 2,111-person facility. News of the sale proliferated through the housing barracks, called “pods,” the chow hall, and even the prison’s protective-custody wing. “It felt like the event of the year,” Tom Stewart, the post commander, told me during one of our many monitored 20-minute phone conversations.

When the frozen treats arrived, Stewart checked the inventory. He was accompanied by Carol Thomas, a Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC) captain at the prison and a Navy veteran with 36 years of military experience. Thomas, state commander for the Colorado VFW, had been instrumental in the Sterling post’s creation, working as a liaison among the inmates, the DOC, and the national VFW, which approved the prison charter in 2023. Thomas and Stewart spent at least 12 hours reviewing orders and making hundreds of deliveries throughout Sterling’s concrete corridors.

Founded in 1899, the VFW is one of the nation’s oldest veterans organizations, with more than 1.6 million members across the United States. Though most people think of cheap beer and flag-lined, wood-paneled ballrooms when imagining local chapters, posts are much more than watering holes. The gathering places serve as critical sources of support for service members—respites that offer privacy, resources, and camaraderie.

The beer aside, Post 12226 meetings provided many of the same benefits, only they were attended by men in prison-issued forest green uniforms and a corrections officer who watched over them. Some men made friends and talked about their military service. For others, the get-togethers simply afforded a break from the stresses of prison life, the isolation from their families, or difficult bunkmates.

Amid the ongoing debate about whether prolonged, relentless punishment is the surest way to maintain order in America’s prisons, Post 12226 was promoted as an exemplar of how things might change for the nation’s 181,500 incarcerated veterans if they simply had a place to sit and talk with like-minded people. “Our motto is, ‘No One Does More for Veterans,’ ” then-VFW Department of Colorado Commander John Keene told VFW Magazine this past August in a story celebrating the Sterling post. “There are no qualifiers in that. It just says ‘vets.’ In my mind, a veteran is a veteran.”

During Sterling’s first year, the VFW rated the prison chapter among the nation’s best posts, lauding the outfit for its enthusiasm and fastidious record-keeping. Stewart earned special recognition for his leadership, and Thomas was awarded the organization’s Distinguished Fraternal Award for her work supporting the incarcerated men. “I am very humbled, and I appreciate everybody’s assistance in this,” Thomas said during her acceptance speech. “We are bringing all veterans back to the forefront.” The prison-based project had been so successful there was talk of opening VFW posts in correctional facilities nationwide.

It wasn’t a surprise, then, when the VFW mentioned Sterling in its October update to elected national officers. But the statement didn’t acknowledge that the men had raised $5,400 for the Veterans & Family Support Program, and it didn’t praise their recent awards. Instead, the VFW announced that Post 12226 had closed forever.

Richard Hy had never heard of Sterling, Colorado, when he received a friend’s text in August. Inside was a link to a story about Post 12226. The piece included names of post members, and Hy’s friend had done some research online. “Two of these guys are baby-killers,” the friend wrote.

Hy, a 37-year-old detective with New York’s Buffalo Police Department and an Army reservist who has completed two combat deployments, runs the popular YouTube channel Angry Cops in which he delivers military and law enforcement news through a barrage of shouted insults, crude humor, and belligerent mockery. Though Hy has been banned by TikTok and blacklisted on Facebook, he’s exceptionally popular on YouTube. His videos usually attract more than 200,000 views each, and his 1.4 million subscribers rank him among that platform’s apex creators.

One YouTube video, titled “Afghanistan Fire Sale! Everything Must Go!,” features Hy in a keffiyeh as he plays a thick-accented merchant named “Makmuhd.” It has more than 750,000 views. A Reddit fan page dedicated to Hy’s work often includes posts with racist Photoshopped images and memes.

Hy’s notoriety has earned him legion fans—as well as disciplinary investigations from the Buffalo police and the New York Attorney General’s Office. In 2021, Hy claimed he’d been passed over for promotions because of his online work. This past September, the attorney general’s Law Enforcement Misconduct Investigation Office reported Hy had been “repeatedly discourteous and unprofessional during encounters with civilians and escalated…encounters, including by using physical force.”

After reading the story on Post 12226, Hy did his own research. Newspaper articles showed Stewart, the post’s commander, was serving an 80-year term for shaking his girlfriend’s toddler to death. One post member had reportedly been twice convicted of sexually assaulting minors. A Purple Heart recipient, who’d served tours in Iraq and Kuwait as an Army Ranger, used an AR-15 to kill a man in a Denver alleyway. Hy was shocked. “They lost their marbles,” he says of the VFW.

Hy filmed a 17-minute video about Post 12226 and put it on YouTube on September 15. “The VFW is hurting for members so bad that they’re going to prison in order to recruit veterans,” an unshaven Hy yells into the camera. “It’s not hard to be involved in a little bit of controversy when the people in the VFW post in prison are convicted murderers, rapists, and pedos!” Hy showed mug shots of Stewart and other Post 12226 members. He described their crimes. He made fun of the post’s fundraising efforts.

“I don’t know how much money they’re fundraising,” Hy says in his video. “We getting an extra bag of Cheetos from the commissary and giving them to kids?… And what community are they outreaching to? They’re literally locked up. Their community is a community of felons, murderers. What are we doing here?” Hy ended with a call to action: “If I happened to be a post commander of a VFW somewhere, I think I would raise hell and say these sycophants don’t represent me, and we don’t want them in our brotherhood.” He included a link for viewers to contact the VFW.

The video got more than 250,000 views and 17,000 likes. Over 1,700 YouTube comments piled up. “The only VFW these things should belong to,” one user wrote, “is Veterans For the Woodchipper.”

Sterling Correctional Facility has often served as an unlikely laboratory for modest reforms. In 2019, it opened a pod exclusively for military veterans. An inmate performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest received national attention in the New York Times that same year, after the production went on tour to other Colorado prisons. The Reimagine program, which began in 2023, enlists inmates serving life sentences as mentors for incarcerated individuals preparing for reintegration into society, giving long-term prisoners a purpose while also reducing recidivism.

A VFW post would fit the same mold, Stewart thought. “It doesn’t make a person irredeemable because of the fact that they committed a crime,” the 48-year-old says. “They made a mistake, they’re gonna pay for their mistake, and then they want to get out and live productive lives.”

Stewart served aboard the USS Tripoli in the mid-1990s and was convicted in November 2005. He now works as a master handler at Sterling in its Prison Trained Canine Companion Program. He and other incarcerated veterans floated the prospect of a VFW post sometime around 2014, but the idea never gained traction. “I didn’t want to do another book club,” Stewart says. “I wanted to give back in some way.” He connected with Thomas, the DOC captain, in 2022. “We knew if we were going to do this that we had to be better, more prepared, more solid, because of where we were at,” Stewart says. “We had to show we’re not the run-of-the-mill people in prison.”

Stewart studied the organization’s bylaws then enlisted Ryan Krueger, an inmate and prison journalist who later wrote the VFW Magazine story, to help answer questions about the potential post. The VFW wanted to know who would have access to the chapter’s bank account (only Thomas), whether inmate leadership would have authority over correctional officers and other nonincarcerated members (they would not), and whether noninmates might physically restrain their post brothers during prison lockdowns (yes, but only if the moment called for it). The organization had strict rules about members having served in a combat zone, and existing members who were convicted of felonies could face disciplinary action, but nothing in its bylaws excluded an incarcerated person from joining. The VFW formally accepted the post at its July 2023 national convention.

Post 12226 began meeting once or twice a month that fall. “It was a place where you could step out of the day-to-day of prison life, where you could salute the flag and sit across from another like-minded guy and just talk,” Krueger says. Members stood at attention when the American flag was presented, then gathered around a large table inside a room where prison employees once did roll call before their shifts. The group had to stick to the agenda; no one was allowed to bring up outside issues.

Days after the Angry Cops video went live, Thomas pulled Stewart aside. He says she told him the Sterling chapter was getting heat but that the VFW wouldn’t waver in its support.

Stewart asked to see the YouTube video, but the captain said it’d be better if he didn’t. So, he called his sister, who played the video against her phone’s receiver. “The raw emotion was, ‘This guy is a piece of crud,’ ” Stewart says of Hy. “After that, I was like, ‘I don’t care what this dude says, because I know what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.’ What’s going to make him shut up is we were going to be the absolute top post.”

Al Lipphardt, the VFW’s newly elected national commander-in-chief, talked to Stewart on the phone. Lipphardt said the post had to “stay strong,” according to Stewart. “He told me not to worry,” Stewart remembers. “He said, ‘We got the stuff out here. You just worry about the stuff in there and making this the best it can be.’ ” (Lipphardt did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

Soon, though, the VFW was besieged by outraged emails. The organization initially released a Facebook message in support of Post 12226 but removed it after irate users bombarded the note. Existing social media posts about the chapter also were inundated with negative comments:

“We veterans do not condone this type of behavior and don’t want to be associated with it.”

“That nonsense about rehabilitating them is crap.”

“Shut it down.”

On October 11, less than a month after Hy published his video, VFW Adjutant General Dan West penned a letter to the group’s membership: Veterans serving time on felony convictions would no longer be eligible to join the organization. Because of the change, West added, Post 12226 fell below the VFW’s mandatory 10-member minimum requirement. (West told 5280 the VFW’s Bylaw Committee is reviewing the new rule prohibiting incarcerated veterans from joining, though there is no plan to reinstate the Sterling post or create a new post at another correctional facility.)

Stewart heard about the closure from Thomas before the pair began distributing ice cream across the prison. “It was devastating,” he says. Thomas told the rest of the group a couple of days later. One inmate broke down in tears. “We did nothing wrong,” the man said.

Most confounding to the post’s membership, Stewart says, was the silence that followed. No one from the VFW called or wrote to explain the decision. The DOC also stayed quiet. “It’s like we never existed,” Stewart says. In an email to 5280, Thomas referred questions to the DOC. A DOC spokesperson declined to comment. Former Colorado VFW head John Keene, who had initially offered his support to the fledgling chapter, also declined to comment.

A few weeks after Post 12226 closed, a letter from the VFW arrived at the prison. Stewart’s aunt had helped him scrape together $375 for his lifetime VFW membership, and raising the money had been a point of pride for him. Inside the envelope was a refund. “That was the gut punch,” Stewart says.

Hy heard about the post’s shutdown from his YouTube followers. “This isn’t an individual effort,” he told me. “It’s the people who clicked on a link or sent an email or went to their VFW posts and said, ‘What is Colorado doing?’ ” Hy added that he was never opposed to putting a VFW in a prison but nonetheless called the organization “retarded” for its decision. “They did it the wrong way by putting the wrong people in it,” he says. “Sometimes people belong in jail, and jail isn’t a playground.”

A week after talking to Hy, I spoke to West, the VFW adjutant general. West had supported Post 12226, and he was doing his best to be sanguine about the situation. “VFW members are proud of their service,” he said. “They have high standards. And part of those standards is, you have to be worthy.” He still thinks the Sterling post’s former members are worthy.

West served in the Marine Corps for 11 years and was part of a frontline combat group deployed to the Middle East during Operation Desert Storm. After a career in some of the world’s most dangerous places, he felt powerless and uneasy when he re-entered civilian life. A couple of years later, he discovered the VFW. “To put it bluntly, the VFW kept me out of prison—kept me out of the cemetery,” West wrote to members in 2022, explaining that he was the living embodiment of the organization’s mission.

He didn’t want to downplay the crimes committed by the inmates at Sterling. “They were convicted of some horrific stuff,” he said. Still, he added, they are human beings. And they’re still veterans. “You can condemn these men for what they did, but you should still reach out to them and help them become better people,” West said. When Post 12226 opened, West often thought about the men who’d served with him in combat. Many later found themselves addicted to drugs or alcohol or inside prison cells. “Still,” he said, “at some point, they had my back.”

I mentioned to West that I’d spoken to Stewart. I explained that the former post commander felt like he’d let down the rest of Sterling’s members, how he held himself responsible for ruining the program for other prisons, and how he worried he’d cut a safety net for someone who might have needed it. “You tell them they didn’t ruin anything,” West said. “When you’re the first to do something, you’re going to get a lot of criticism, you’re going to get a lot of ridicule. But then, 20 years later, they honor you.”

Stewart isn’t so sure. He talked to Thomas, the DOC captain, a couple of times in February. He says she told him she might start a new veterans group at Sterling—one that wouldn’t be limited to combat vets. Still, Stewart is pessimistic about the chances of anything getting done. “The majority of the post absolutely lost all faith, hope, and trust whatsoever in the captain,” Stewart says. “They feel like they’ve lost everything.”

Despite his bitterness following Post 12226’s closing, Stewart keeps nearly everything from his time as its commander inside his eight-by-12-foot cell. He has the bylaws and other VFW books. He has the notes from the ice cream fundraiser. “That was so much money,” he says. He talks wistfully about the meetings, how he was getting to know a Purple Heart veteran a little more, how members were opening up to one another. He talks about a corrections officer who was preparing to become the group’s 29th member—and its first woman member—just before the post closed. He talks about the structure of a two-hour meeting and how everything seemed stable and safe in that moment. “When I’m [with the VFW], I’m a productive member of society; I’m rehabilitating myself,” he says.

For one year, his 19th in prison, Stewart found a sense of pride in his life. Something had stirred in him, and he’d wanted to be a better man.

For one year, at least, he felt useful.