98% of People Living in Prison Experienced Childhood Trauma

Abused children can grow up believing that violence is a solution. Childhood trauma can lead to imprisonment.

When a child experiences extreme adversity, their brain lives in flight or fight and their decision-making skills and empathy are compromised, sometimes to the extent of being incapacitated.

Childhood trauma is defined as:

• Physical abuse

Emotional abuse

• Sexual abuse

• Physical neglect

• Emotional neglect

• Substance abuse

• Parental separation

• Mental illness

• Domestic violence

• Incarceration of a family member

In 2018, Fritzi Horstman volunteered at a prison expecting to encounter hardened, malevolent offenders. Instead, what she discovered was a correctional facility full of men traumatized by childhood experiences.

“This isn’t a prison; this is a trauma center – and nobody knows it,” Horstman exclaimed.

As a result, in 2019 Horstman founded the Compassion Prison Project (CPP) to deliver trauma-informed awareness, education, and care to prisons nationwide. The foundation is based around the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study, a body of research that correlates childhood trauma such as poverty, abuse, neglect, and parental incarceration, with a higher risk of poor physical and mental health.

Since its inception, the organization has been gaining traction by delivering its trauma-informed curriculum to several prisons in California and other states around the country, transforming prisons from punitive human warehouses into rehabilitative environments.

The program earned an endorsement from (now former) California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris.

CPP hosts a podcast called Compassion in Action, a series of interviews with trauma experts including Dr. Bruce Perry, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Gabor Maté, and Dr. Peter Levine.

The organization conducts healing circles inside prisons. In some instances the circles have attracted over 200 incarcerated participants at a time. This gives them the opportunity to talk about how childhood trauma impacts their lives, and they learn how those experiences negatively impacted their brain, body, and spirit.

95% of people in prison will return to our communities one day. If you could help a traumatized child who ended up incarcerated become a more compassionate, empathetic human being, would you?

Horstman adds, “By shining a light on what’s going on in prison, we’re able to transform society. Because when we stop seeing people in prison as pariahs, as the worst of the worst, and see them for the trauma they’ve endured, we become a compassionate society.”