The Great Arkansas Swindle: Should juvenile crime sentences be softened by ACEs?

In a remarkable deception, the Republican-controlled Arkansas legislature just voted yes, almost unanimously.

CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

Greg Leding, Democratic State Senator

Source: Arkansas State Legislature
Read time: 2.5 minutes plus 2-minute video
 
This Happened
On April 15, 2025, The Arkansas state legislature passed Senate Bill 458 which will require judges to consider whether juvenile criminals experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) or trauma.
 
Who Did This?
Greg Leding (D) was lead sponsor. He is the Senate minority leader.
 
The Premise
Judges must consider certain factors when sentencing juveniles or transferring juveniles to adult courts. These include the severity of violence and previous history of crime, among other things. A new law will add to that list whether juveniles experienced “exposure to adverse childhood experiences, childhood trauma, involvement in the child welfare or foster care systems, status as a victim of human trafficking, sexual abuse, or rape” [1].
The law does not define adverse childhood experiences but in testimony for the bill, a supporter explained that one could measure them with the well-known ten experiences popularized by Dr. Vincent Felitti’s research (see here). 

The obvious inference behind the law is that childhood experiences can have causal and unconscious impacts on human behavior to commit crimes.

The premise of the bill is NOT that individuals were living in homes of neglect at the time of their criminal acts. The ACEs theory specifically allows that experiences from the distant past have long-lasting causal effects on molding minds to subvert normal human empathy far removed in time from those experiences.

Analysis
There are at least three concerns about the passing of this bill. First, there is no good evidence that childhood experiences make people commit crimes they would not otherwise commit. There are two correlational studies that show higher ACE scores associated with criminal activity [2,3]. But, like one-hundred percent of all the other hundreds of ACEs studies that are correlational, they have zero power to prove causation. It is probably more likely that criminal behavior has a biological basis (i.e., genetic), dysfunctional parenting that places children in adverse experiences has a biological basis, and these genetic profiles greatly overlap. ACEs and crime are associated because of shared genetic vulnerabilities and neither causes the other. Taking ACEs into account to reduce sentences is more likely to increase recidivism than to decrease it.
 
Second, embedding the ACEs theory into law will undoubtedly expand from juvenile judges' standard practice. Seven of the ten ACEs are not traumas, including emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, divorce, parental substance abuse, parental mental illness, and a parent in prison. It seems inconceivable that, say, parental divorce contributes to criminal psychopathy, but that has now been quietly codified into Arkansas law.
 
Third, Republicans did this. Republicans hold 29 of the 35 Senate seats and it passed 35-0. Republicans hold 81 of the 100 House seats, and the bill passed 82-2 (9 voting Present). It seems this was possible because Republicans didn’t understand they were voting to codify a radical neo-Marxist view of human nature that society is the oppressor that drives fragile minds to hold dysfunctional moral codes.
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The testimonies of the sponsors were condensed into a misleading message that “it’s what we’re already doing.” The adjacent 2-minute video shows four clips: (1) In Sen. Leding’s testimony before a Senate committee, he misleads the panel by saying that a child who steals a loaf of bread because he is hungry is what this bill is addressing. He omits the bedrock of the radical ACEs theory that earlier experiences have long-lasting neurobiological effects long after the stress has passed. (2) In the same hearing, a judge is asked if we really need this bill, and the judge minimizes any change by saying, “We’re already doing this.” (3) In Sen. Leding’s testimony before a House committee, he repeats this minimization by claiming that this is already standard practice in juvenile courts. (4) He repeats this claim before the full Senate.

Why Did This Happen?
Judges have always been allowed to consider mitigating factors at their discretion. So, of all the mitigating factors that could be added to a binding law, why ACEs and trauma? It’s the same tragedy of misguided compassion for the 1960’s Great Society bills where it was believed that federal government welfare could lift people out of poverty, or, at least, it was worth a try. The unintended consequences of that were tragic in helping to destroy the two-parent family. It seems inevitable many states will repeat this type of doomed experiment with the trauma and ACEs belief system that gentleness can reform unempathic criminals.
 
References
[1] SB458. State of Arkansas 95th General Assembly.
[2] Lansing AE, Park J, Beck AN (2023). Cumulative trauma, adversity, and loss among juvenile justice-involved girls: Implications for health disparities. Journal of Traumatic Stress. 36(6):1015-1030, 2023 Dec.
 [3] Levenson, JS, Socia KM (2015). Adverse Childhood Experiences and Arrest Patterns in a Sample of Sexual Offenders. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 31(10), 1883-1911.