How childhood trauma shapes adulthood: Jermaine Hicks’ experience

Childhood trauma shapes how a brain reads danger, weighs risk, and decides what to do with very little time to think. Researchers have followed that path from early adversity through adolescent decision-making into the criminal justice system, and it runs through a large share of the young people held in American prisons. Jermaine Hicks has spent more than 30 years in Texas prisons on a capital murder conviction for a crime committed when he was 15. His history does not erase the harm at the center of the case. It raises a different question: whether the systems that transferred and sentenced him adequately accounted for the developmental effects of chronic trauma, adolescent immaturity, and the absence of stable adult support. When telling the story of how childhood trauma shaped him, he pinpointed how adverse childhood experiences shaped his life even before he was born. “I was born into some crazy circumstance,” Hicks said. “I think that’ll be the start point right there.” He went back two generations to explain what he meant. His mother was an infant when her father killed her mother; she was raised in foster care. In 1979, the year Hicks was born, his father shot a man in Michigan and left the state before becoming incarcerated. By 1985, when Jermaine was 5 or 6, both parents were unavailable, and he and his siblings were turned over to child protective services. What followed was a decade of moving. Shelters, foster homes, a residential treatment center, juvenile placements, stretches back with each parent. “We never had an opportunity to settle, man, you know?” he said. “Today, we’re here, the next day, we somewhere else.” In June 1994, a convenience store clerk was killed in San Antonio. Hicks, 15, was charged with capital murder, certified as an adult, and sentenced to life in prison. That death sits at the center of this story, and nothing in the research that follows makes it smaller. He doesn’t look to his childhood for excuses, though. “As a once criminal, I’m not making any excuses for any form of criminal behavior,” he wrote this June. The research on childhood trauma does something other than excuse. It describes what happens inside a developing brain when the world it is developing for is dangerous, unpredictable, and short on adults. Read alongside his account, it describes in advance a good deal of what he went on to do. Childhood trauma & the brain Adversity leaves specific marks in specific systems. The brain’s threat detector learns how fast to fire and how long to stay lit. The executive control system, which supplies the pause between an impulse and an action, is the last to finish developing and the first thing stress degrades. The reward system decides whose approval registers, and in adolescence it swings hard toward peers. Each of the three runs on its own developmental schedule, and each is shaped by what a child’s environment demands of it. What follows is what researchers have found happening in each system, set beside what Hicks described happening to him. 1. Hypervigilance: the amygdala learns to expect danger In Tampa, around 7 years old, Hicks watched men rob drug dealers on the street, make them lie face down on the concrete, and fire. It was the first time he heard gunshots. In San Antonio two years later the danger came with a dress code. “You couldn’t even wear certain colors in my neighborhood,” he said. Before either city there were the placements. Physical abuse in foster care, which he wrote about himself in 2011. Sexual abuse by older children in at least two homes, from about the age of 6. By his teens he was describing the aftermath without the vocabulary for it, remembering one 1993 placement where he lay awake: “I had problems sleeping, and I was really anxious.” Repeated danger teaches the amygdala, the brain’s threat detector, to expect more of it. Imaging studies of children exposed to domestic violence find sharper reactivity in the amygdala and insula when the children see angry faces, and the reaction appears even when the faces are flashed too briefly to register consciously. Researchers have compared the pattern to what they find in combat veterans. In children raised in institutions, studies have found the same amygdala hyper-reactivity alongside an altered developmental path in the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The threat system appears to mature early, which looks less like damage than like a body rushing to get ready. The calibration lasts. For a 2023 paper in Brain and Behavior, Jianjian Cai and colleagues scanned 216 adults and matched their brain function against childhood trauma questionnaires. Those who’d been abused as children showed altered function in regions governing emotion and threat detection, and read threat in faces more readily than others did. Kristen Holderle, clinic director of the HEAL Collaborative at the University of Rochester Medical Center, describes the mechanism in one line: “Early trauma affects stress response. Flight or fight response, your neurodevelopment, gets off track.” 2. Impulse control depends on a prefrontal cortex that isn’t finished Trauma makes it harder for a young person to stop and think, because the mental machinery behind impulse control is still under construction and already strained. Working memory, which lets a person hold options side by side and compare them, keeps developing into the twenties, and emotional context measurably degrades it. Research summarized by the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior finds that people in their early twenties show more disrupted working memory under emotional stimulation than older adults do. Sensation-seeking peaks in late adolescence; self-regulation catches up later. At 15, Hicks was standing in the widest part of that gap. Chronic instability widens it further, and Hicks had a decade of it. He first ran away at 11, after his father said in front of him that he would be doing better without his children. He was, in his own words, “real rebellious towards authority.” When adults did try, he couldn’t take it in. Mr. Hall, who ran the 1993 placement, tried to mentor him; Hicks remembers caring about the man and retaining nothing he said. School never reached him either. Nobody, he said, ever sat him down and taught him to read, write, or spell. He wouldn’t learn properly until prison, where he taught himself. The unusual thing about his case is that he can now describe the missing skill from the other side, because he teaches it to other men. He calls it catching the automatic thought: notice the reflex, find the habit underneath it, look for another option, count what the next thirty seconds will cost. “You don’t have to punch [him] in the face,” he tells them. He is teaching the skill he lacked at 15. 3. The reward system turns toward peers when positive mentors aren’t present There was one temporary home that Hicks remembers positively. A foster mother named Mary and her husband, Jack. “That was love,” he said. “Like, [I] could feel love for that place… it was love there.” He was moved out of it. Nobody asked him whether it was working. Everyone after that fell short in a different way. His father was in prison, then addicted to crack and alcohol. His mother couldn’t provide stable care. Foster placements split him from his siblings, and in some of them the adults were absent and the older children were dangerous. His summary of the pattern is the most important thing he said in the interview. He never had a mentor he could look up to, he said, “somebody who was really doing good.” And then the clause that lands: “because I think I would have listened.” What filled the vacancy was the group he ran with. “Just me and the gang,” he said of that year. The gang supplied continuity, identity, and a rule that never varied: your neighborhood against theirs. Adolescent brains are unusually receptive to that offer. The same white paper reports that when peers are present, adolescents show increased activation in the striatum, the brain’s reward center, in response to incentives; adults between 25 and 35 show no such effect. Peer presence measurably increases adolescent risk-taking through the same reward circuitry. Maltreatment appears to tilt the balance from the other side as well: imaging has found that maltreated children show reduced activation when recalling positive experiences and heightened amygdala engagement for negative ones. A child with no dependable adult, offered belonging by a group of peers, is not making a strange choice. He is making the one his neurobiology is built to make. Is childhood trauma considered a mitigating factor during criminal sentencing? Texas law treats childhood trauma differently depending on the proceeding. Trauma may be relevant to juvenile transfer, juvenile disposition, adult sentencing, or capital sentencing, but the governing rules do not uniformly require a court to treat it as mitigating or assign it a particular weight. Keeping those four stages separate is essential. Certification comes first. It is the juvenile court’s decision whether to waive its jurisdiction and transfer a child to adult criminal court, and it happens before any question of punishment. Before the transfer hearing, Texas Family Code §54.02 requires the juvenile court to order and obtain “a complete diagnostic study, social evaluation, and full investigation of the child, his circumstances, and the circumstances of the alleged offense.” In deciding whether to transfer, the court must consider factors that include “the sophistication and maturity of the child” and “the likelihood of the rehabilitation of the child.” The statute requires the court to look closely at the child. It leaves the weight of what the court finds to the court. A child who stays in juvenile court receives a disposition under the Family Code rather than a criminal sentence. A child who is transferred and convicted is sentenced as an adult. In most adult cases, the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure allows evidence on “any matter the court deems relevant to sentencing,” which can include a defendant’s history, but it does not require that history to be weighed as mitigation. Capital sentencing runs on its own track. In death-penalty cases, jurors are asked whether the evidence, including the defendant’s “character and background,” supplies a sufficient mitigating circumstance to warrant life in prison instead of death. Today that question never reaches anyone who was under 18 at the time of the offense, because the death penalty is unavailable to them. But when Hicks was convicted of capital murder for an offense committed at 15 in 1994 Texas law allowed only one sentence: life in prison. Where background evidence is heard, it may not count for much. In a Stanford Law School analysis of how courts actually treat this evidence, Mirko Bagaric and colleagues found that judges routinely acknowledge childhood abuse and then give it little weight. A Texas appellate court in Curry v. State upheld the seating of a juror who said he wouldn’t consider childhood abuse as mitigating at all. The evidence runs the other way. Michael Baglivio and Nathan Epps studied 64,329 young people in Florida’s juvenile justice system and found that among those with any adverse childhood experience, 67.5% had four or more, against roughly 26% in general population studies. Up to 90% of justice-involved youth have at least one, and more than 20% meet criteria for PTSD, against about 5% of adolescents generally. The Supreme Court has gone further than most legislatures. Miller v. Alabama held that “the signature qualities of youth are transient” and required sentencers to weigh a young defendant’s family and home environment before imposing the harshest penalties. Writing for judges and attorneys, the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior states the limit of what anyone can know at sentencing: there is “no basis in science to reliably determine that an individual youth at the time of sentencing in adolescence is incapable of rehabilitation.” For Hicks, the proceeding where his childhood could have counted most was certification, because the sentence that followed was fixed by law. Lone Star Justice Alliance’s argument in his case is that the order transferring him to adult court did not meaningfully apply the required investigation or the statutory factors to him. How Jermaine Hicks is breaking the cycle The research on childhood adversity is unusually clear that outcomes are modifiable, and that what modifies them is ordinary: stable support, community, access to therapy, and what the nursing researcher Joan E. Haase describes as positive coping and a sense of meaning and purpose. Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy produces results within 12 to 16 weeks. Hicks had little of it as a child, and built what he could of it as an adult, inside. He taught himself to read and write. He became a peer educator, teaching peer health, and then a life coach, and he now facilitates life-skills programming for other men. What he teaches is the pause he never had. He didn’t do all of it alone. His father visited until he died, the one person, Hicks says, who was always there. And a woman he has known for a decade has been, in his words, “on my team for 10 years straight.” Both are the kind of durable connection the protective-factor research keeps pointing to. He describes the work as a debt. He has said he owes society something, and that the question of how to atone is what pushed him into running programs in the first place. In a handwritten letter addressed to the man who was killed, he wrote that his attempts to express his regret always fall short, “not because I don’t feel remorse, it’s because I feel it to the degree beyond forgiveness.” Later in the same letter, he wrote: “I realize that change is the application for forgiveness. There is nothing I can say that could bring you back.” Conclusion Population research can’t diagnose a single person. Hicks has been evaluated as an individual, though, twice: by Dr. Sherman in November 1994, and again by Dr. Fabian in 2021 and 2022. Neither evaluation has been given the weight the developmental science says it deserves. What the research does establish is that the behavior that led to a man’s death in 1994, and that a Texas court weighed afterward, wasn’t mysterious. A boy on permanent alert, unable to pause before acting, loyal to peers because the adults kept failing him: each is a documented consequence of the childhood he had, and each was visible in the case file the state had kept on him since he was 6. The court wasn’t required to give any of it weight. It still isn’t. Hicks reached a harder conclusion than most would write for him. His purpose, he wrote in June, is not to soften the criminal justice system “but to dig into the soul of our problem, which are the people.” What changes behavior, he argued, is “the mending of the thoughts and how we embrace our trauma or situations.” Holderle of the University of Rochester describes the goal of trauma treatment in a sentence: “We can’t change our past, but we can change our relationship to it.” Jermaine Hicks has spent many years changing his relationship to his past. As he teaches others to do the same, he participates in building a justice system that’s more rehabilitative than punitive. DISCLAIMER – “Views Expressed Disclaimer – The information provided in this content is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, investment, legal, tax, or health advice, nor relied upon as a substitute for professional guidance tailored to your personal circumstances. 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