Adam Foss
37 statements · 1 topic · summaries given as host listed separately
Featured statements
you're a domestic violence victim and you come in the day after the arraignment and you say something like I don't want to press charges, uh, instead of like thinking through that and understanding what it is to be in a domestic violence relationship in a place where you're living in poverty, we make judgments about that because we're like, I wouldn't do that.
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Trauma
if I set up an appointment and you miss it now, now that's confirmation bias and now I actually just don't care about you or this case even though I should know that you not showing up that appointment was the result of not you not caring but the fact that you don't have a car, you don't have childcare, you have lots of other things that are going on
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Trauma
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Adam's statements about Trauma 37 statements
#APSA50: Social Determinants of Health
Quotation
over the last 3 years I have developed a curriculum for prosecutors that looked at uh why we're having such disparate impacts on our communities in terms of racial disparity and socioeconomic disparity and lo and behold, um while I was learning about this and doing research on this I look across the street to the public health sector and the disparities are the same and it and it turns out the reasons, uh, many, many of the times are the same.
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Racial and socioeconomic disparities in criminal justice and public health have the same root causes.
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Mass incarceration removes adults from communities, creating voids children cannot fill, leading to intergenerational cycles where children fall into the same traps as their families.
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Quotation
I went to law school for 3 years knowing full well that I was gonna come out and be a public interest lawyer. Um, meaning that I was going to go into communities that I did not grow up in and advocate for people and uh I was forced to take a bunch of classes and pay for them like property law and contract law and wills and trusts, but never once was I confronted with any topics about trauma even though for the rest of my career I was going into an environment into a community that was dictated by trauma.
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Quotation
you're a domestic violence victim and you come in the day after the arraignment and you say something like I don't want to press charges, uh, instead of like thinking through that and understanding what it is to be in a domestic violence relationship in a place where you're living in poverty, we make judgments about that because we're like, I wouldn't do that.
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Statement
When prosecutors see domestic violence victims who don't want to press charges, they make judgments without understanding the constraints of poverty (lack of car, childcare, competing priorities) rather than recognizing these as barriers to appointment attendance.
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Quotation
if I set up an appointment and you miss it now, now that's confirmation bias and now I actually just don't care about you or this case even though I should know that you not showing up that appointment was the result of not you not caring but the fact that you don't have a car, you don't have childcare, you have lots of other things that are going on
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Statement
Code for America reduced steps in California's criminal record clearance process and increased completion rates by 44% by removing barriers for people living in poverty.
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Patients seeking help experience distrust when they enter a hospital or doctor's office and nobody looks like them, which can ruin the first interaction critical to long-term health outcomes.
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learning never stops, and what is more important for you to be a successful doctor, a successful surgeon, has very little to do with like the books that you read or the tools that you're using.
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to be able to get up and walk away from it is a privilege that lots of people don't have. There are people who wake up uncomfortable because of the skin that they're born in. Or they're uncomfortable when they're out in the street because of their identity or their sexual preference or their religion. They can't run away from those things
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this is the first time that I've ever sat next to two black people on the airplane. In 1.5 million miles, it was the first time that it ever happened. In fact, I've never sat next to a black person in first class.
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unless we're prepared to sit here and think that somehow I was born with a genetic deficiency that made me less intelligent or less creative or less hardworking or less ambitious than all of those people in those places of privilege and power, then we have to have a very fundamental conversation about where everybody is.
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Being convicted of a drug crime in the 1990s deprived people of access to housing, employment, education, healthcare, and pro-social activity, increasing rather than decreasing the likelihood of committing another crime.
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There are 2.3 million people in jail and prison in the United States right now, with another 5 million on probation or parole.
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Quotation
I think about the images of a 15 year old boy who was beaten so badly that his mother had the wherewithal to keep his casket open during his funeral so the rest of the country could see what they had done to his son.
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650,000 people are released from prison every year and face 50,000 collateral consequences of felony convictions that impede successful reentry into society.
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Quotation
when I think about those images, I don't just think about the 4 little girls, I don't think about Emmett's Till, I don't think about those 3 young men hanging from the trees. I think about all of the people staring around the periphery watching it happen. I think to myself, how could you just be standing there? What are you doing? I would have done something. Why aren't you doing anything?
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70 million Americans have a criminal record that will never go away and will impede their reentry into society.
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The leading cause of death for young black men aged 18 to 35 in the United States is handgun homicide, which is not true of any other demographic in any other place on the planet.
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This is the greatest human and civil rights crisis of our time. And we're about to hand it To not just the millennials, but lots of other young people, we're about to leave this at their doorstep and say, you fix it.
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Handgun homicide accounts for more deaths than the next nine leading causes of death combined for black men aged 18-35.
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In Manhattan, black women are 12 times more likely to die during childbirth than white women.
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Black women and white women experience breast cancer at almost the exact same rate, but black women are almost twice as likely to die from it.
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In Boston, at one intersection on Massachusetts Avenue, life expectancy drops by 25 years depending on which direction you look.
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There are more segregated schools in the United States today than there were at the time of Brown v. Board of Education.
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There are more black people under correctional control today than there were slaves on the eve of the Civil War.
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Over the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade, researchers estimate 12 million Africans were captured, enslaved, and killed; last year 11 million people went through US jails, recreating slavery every single year.
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The best piece of legal education I ever got did not come from the $150,000 piece of paper that now sits on my wall. It came from a 17-year-old kid in an orange jumpsuit, reading at about a 5th grade level.
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Children conceived to mothers living in toxic stress inherit that toxic stress epigenetically, changing the way their bones and brains develop and eventually the way they behave, with these changes traceable into prison.
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75% of children who were incarcerated in 2015 had an average of 33 interactions with the child welfare system before age 3 for abuse, neglect, and malnutrition.
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75% of the kids who were locked up here in 2015, 75% of them had on average 33 interactions with the child welfare system before the age of 3 for abuse, neglect, and malnutrition. Those are nonverbal children telling us, yo, pay attention to us down here or it's gonna get much worse.
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Children in underperforming schools never learn to read not because they are black, brown, or poor, but because educators don't understand the stress they bring to school and instead blame, shame, and expel them.
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In Massachusetts, if an 18-year-old kills another 18-year-old, he receives a life without parole sentence at a cost of $11 million.
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Summaries Adam gave as host · 5 summaries
Recaps of other experts' statements, not Adam's own clinical position.
Summaries Adam gave as host · Trauma 5 summaries
#APSA50: Social Determinants of Health
Host summary
Adam Foss summarizing a resource: is that what you think? Is that what you people think? That when I was out there robbing those men, the thought of prison ever came into my mind? I was worried about my mother dying.
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Host summary
Adam Foss summarizing a resource: Do you think that my friends put handguns in their pants to go to high school in the morning, we're thinking about the 18 months in the house of correction that we might get? No. We're worried about what happens if we get caught without one.
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Host summary
Adam Foss summarizing a resource: the criminal law is for the land of the living. We're out here trying to survive.
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Adam Foss summarizing a resource: I wish adults would spend more of their time helping young people do good things and try to instead of trying to catch us to do bad things.
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Host summary
Adam Foss summarizing a resource: I want to thank Adam. For putting me back on the path that I was already on before.
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