The ACE to Prison Pipeline
The link between ACE scores and criminal justice system involvement is impossible to ignore:
The data is no surprise. For example, it’s easy to imagine why young people with absent or unavailable parents would have a low sense of self-worth, and might attempt to find a sense of community, belonging, and worth, in a gang. It’s also easy to imagine how trauma would prevent a young person from being able to fully engage in their education, which might also lead to feelings of low self-worth, and a lack of opportunities, which might in turn steer them towards crime. Trauma also increases the risk of an individual developing substance abuse problems, which in most states is still criminalized, which in turn can also lead to criminal justice involvement.
There are easy and available ways to treat and prevent the negative effects of trauma. Some of these treatments include yoga, numerous types of therapies, and access to creative outlets. The tragedy is that many of these things are generally unavailable to young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Often, the first time an individual from this type of background has access to therapy is in prison.
What we need to do instead is incorporate these practices into education, employ social workers and therapists and educate educators, to identify, treat and prevent trauma where it starts–in childhood. If children learn how to deal with their trauma early on, it is much less likely that prison will ever become a reality for them. This is how we break the pipeline.
