{"id":398799,"date":"2025-09-05T02:17:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T02:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/398799\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T02:17:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T02:17:09","slug":"the-link-between-adverse-childhood-experiences-and-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/398799\/","title":{"rendered":"The Link Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Aug. 29, Governor Newsom announced that he had commuted the sentences for five people serving life without parole for murder. The oldest of them was 28 at the time of his crime<\/a>, and the others were 18, 21, 23, and 25. In California, that puts the younger four of them in the category of youthful offenders, distinguished from adults by not yet having reached full development of key areas of the brain.<\/p>\n

Governor Newsom\u2019s office mentioned the adverse childhood experiences<\/a> of one of the men, noting that traumatic<\/a> events can affect a person\u2019s physical and mental health. Adverse childhood<\/a> experiences (commonly referred to by the shorthand ACEs) include physical, sexual<\/a>, and emotional child abuse; physical and emotional neglect; substance abuse<\/a>, mental illness, or incarceration of a household member; parental separation, and domestic violence<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The early lives of the 20 men and women whose stories are told in my forthcoming book, Before Their Crimes: What We\u2019re Misunderstanding about Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing, were marked by occurrences of ACEs far greater than the average person\u2019s. The original groundbreaking study that first identified the relationship between ACEs and long-term health outcomes, a survey of 9508 mainly white, middle-class people insured by Kaiser Permanente, found that half the respondents reported at least one of these experiences and one quarter reported more than two (Felitti et al, 1998).<\/p>\n

Since then, studies with more diverse populations have shown that ACEs are more common than is generally recognized and have a powerful influence on emotional and physical health in adulthood. Adverse experiences in childhood lead to higher rates of attempted suicide<\/a>, use of injectable drugs, depression<\/a>, and income below the federal poverty level (Center for Youth Wellness, 2014).<\/p>\n

Most of the people I interviewed, all of whom had been incarcerated for crimes they committed as juveniles, reported from four to six of what I\u2019ve come to call the “classic” ACEs\u2014those listed above. During the course of my interviews, it became clear that these experiences captured only some of the adverse events that affect children. When I added the ones that were missing from this list\u2014death of a parent, school suspensions and expulsions, being bullied, foster care<\/a>, witnessing gun violence, multiple house moves, being introduced to crime by a relative\u2014the total ACE numbers of my interviewees skyrocketed.<\/p>\n

To understand what ACEs have to do with juvenile crime, we have to consider how the brain and body respond to stress. When extremely stressful<\/a> things happen, our stress response systems are triggered. They alert us to danger so we can either confront it or flee from it (fight or flight). When there are too many of these events or they are happening too frequently, it overwhelms that internal alert system, leading to over response (hyperarousal) or shutting down (going numb).<\/p>\n

The problem for children in this situation is twofold: first, their stress response system is still under construction, and the constant or overwhelming hammering on it can lead to a dysregulated or poorly functioning stress response. Second, if your parent has died or is an addict or is incarcerated, you may have no one to turn to when something disturbing or painful happens at school or in the neighborhood\u2014or at home. If you can\u2019t process it with a trusted adult, you have to find a way to contain it, suppress it, or discharge it.<\/p>\n

The areas of your brain involving judgment and decision-making<\/a>, the areas that could help you compensate for your unreliable response to stress, have not yet developed fully. Your jarred stress response might cause you to assault someone if you think they are looking at you the wrong way on the school yard, seeing danger where it isn\u2019t actually present. At the other end, you might fail to recognize the danger of joining gang activity, or the predatory motives of someone appearing to be a mentor. You might resort to taking drugs yourself to get rid of unmanageable feelings; you might engage in destructive or violent activities to relieve the internal pressure from those feelings.<\/p>\n

Juvenile offenders must be held accountable for their crimes, for the good of society and for the sake of their own futures, but Governor Newsom understands, as I do, that violent crimes committed by children and young people don\u2019t just happen. A cascade of early traumatic experiences combines with insufficiently developed judgment to create the conditions for these crimes to occur. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Aug. 29, Governor Newsom announced that he had commuted the sentences for five people serving life without…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-398799","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115149291021184450","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}