The Link Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Crime

PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (Dr. Wendy Smith) – September 4, 2025

KEY POINTS

• Governor Gavin Newsom recently granted clemency to four youthful offenders serving life sentences.
• Juvenile offenders have high rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
• ACEs can negatively affect the development of a child’s stress response system.
  
  

On Aug. 29, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he had commuted the sentences of five people serving life without parole for murder. The oldest of them was 28 at the time of his crime, 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.

Governor Newsom’s office mentioned the adverse childhood experiences of one of the men, noting that traumatic events can affect a person’s physical and mental health. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) include physical, sexual, and emotional child abuse; physical and emotional neglect; substance abuse, mental illness, or incarceration of a household member; parental separation, and domestic violence.

The early lives of the 20 men and women whose stories are told in my forthcoming book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding about Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing, were marked by occurrences of ACEs far greater than the average person’s. 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).

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, use of injectable drugs, depression, and income below the federal poverty level (Center for Youth Wellness, 2014).

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’ve come to call the “classic” ACEs—those 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—death of a parent, school suspensions and expulsions, being bullied, foster care, witnessing gun violence, multiple house moves, being introduced to crime by a relative—the total ACE numbers of my interviewees skyrocketed.

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 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).

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