Childhood Trauma Prevalent Among Death Row Inmates

A major­i­ty of Texas death row pris­on­ers who vol­un­tar­i­ly respond­ed to a recent sur­vey by the Texas Observer report­ed hav­ing expe­ri­enced abuse or oth­er trau­ma as chil­dren. The sur­vey results are con­sis­tent with the find­ings of aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies that have repeat­ed­ly doc­u­ment­ed high rates of child­hood abuse among those sen­tenced to death. The Texas Observer sur­vey found that 22 of the 41 death row pris­on­ers who respond­ed (54%) vol­un­teered hav­ing expe­ri­enced ​“vio­lent or abu­sive” child­hoods. An addi­tion­al nine death row pris­on­ers (22%) described their child­hoods as hav­ing been ​“hard,” typ­i­cal­ly cit­ing impov­er­ished con­di­tions and high-crime neigh­bor­hoods. Psychiatric research shows that child­hood trau­ma affects devel­op­ing brains in last­ing ways. ​“The Cycle of Violence,” pub­lished by the American Psychological Association, found 94% of the 43 inmates stud­ied had been phys­i­cal­ly abused, 59% sex­u­al­ly abused, and 83% had wit­nessed vio­lence in ado­les­cence. ​“Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Criminality,” a 2013 study pub­lished in The (Kaiser) Permanente Journal, com­pared a group of 151 offend­ers with a sam­ple of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, find­ing that ​“the offend­er group report­ed near­ly four times as many adverse events in child­hood as the con­trol group.” Drs. Mark Cunningham and Mark Vigen, who reviewed the find­ings of sev­en clin­i­cal stud­ies of death row pris­on­ers for the jour­nal Behavioral Sciences & the Law report­ed that the patho­log­i­cal fam­i­ly inter­ac­tions expe­ri­enced by cap­i­tal mur­der­ers are con­sis­tent with an exten­sive body of research lnk­ing the expe­ri­ence of abuse and neglect to lat­er vio­lence. Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, founder and chair­man emer­i­tus of the Dart Center and a pio­neer in the study of trau­ma, said that while ​“not all crim­i­nal­i­ty is the prod­uct of child­hood abuse[,] … these ear­ly adverse sit­u­a­tions reduce the resilience of human biol­o­gy and they change us in very fun­da­men­tal ways. Our brains are altered. And that’s what this research is bearing out.”

(A. Hannaford, ​“Letters from Death Row: The Biology of Trauma, New stud­ies show that trau­ma bio­log­i­cal­ly alters the brains of young boys in ways that affect their adult behav­ior,” Texas Observer, June 22, 2015.) See Mental Illness.