IF ONLY IT WERE IGNORANCE INSTEAD OF MALICE:

 Although an outsider looking in, I was surprised the legislation passed without a single Republican vote in support, especially in light of their 'tough' stance on crime.

Poverty is a form of "Adverse Childhood Experience" (ACE) which affects future life outcomes. This is not a new idea: American researchers first highlighted the importance of ACEs in a major study in the 1990s. Their construct has since been universally adopted and supported by the global community; the WHO has even developed an 'ACE international questionnaire' to guide social investments and interventions. It is easy to grasp that poverty may cause problems such as malnourishment and chronic illness. But physical deprivation is only half the story. Having socially and materially deprived parents can also be a form of ACE, as can conditions in your community. Your ACE "score" is based on one point for every kind of negative influence: including the obvious, such as direct abuse and material neglect. Along with parental mental illness and parental substance misuse, parental incarceration is another ACE of particular concern in the US, given the high incarceration rate. 45% of the American population have had a family member incarcerated, which rises among minorities to reach 63% in the Black community.

Over the last 30 years, I have worked within the UK's National Health Service, which includes the provision of mental health care to offenders in our prisons and secure psychiatric hospitals. I provide expert testimony about the roots of violence in criminal and family courts and have studied the research evidence about the link between poverty, social inequities, mental health issues and different types of crime. I have seen firsthand in our prison population that the majority of convicted offenders are from poor backgrounds, including a disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged minorities.

The same is true in the US, albeit on a larger scale. Recent data from the CDC and others demonstrate how a child exposed to 4 or more kinds of ACE is at increased risk of criminal violence. A study of 20,000 offenders in a Florida prison found that the higher the ACE score, the more likely the offenders carried out repeated violence from an early age. The authors termed this "downstream wreckage," demonstrating how someone's chance of becoming a serious, chronic, and violent offender increased with each additional ACE point. Half of all prisoners they studied had been exposed to four or more ACEs.  Their report concludes with this warning: "the prevention of ACEs in future generations is critical and a key factor in the prevention of crime."

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