Children conceived to mothers living in toxic stress inherit that stress epigenetically, which changes the way their bones and brains develop and eventually the way they behave, and these changes can be traced into prison.
opinionRacial and socioeconomic disparities in criminal justice and public health have the same underlying causes.↗
▶Ep 6 · 3:07
clinicalWhen adults are removed from communities, the economy, and healthcare through incarceration, children are forced to breach the void and fall into the same traps, creating intergenerational and sometimes intractable cycles.↗
▶Ep 6 · 3:07
epidemiologicalChildren in the US are disadvantaged by racism, classism, homophobia, and xenophobia, which marginalizes people not fitting the dominant narrative in every aspect of life including culturally, economically, health metrics, and the criminal justice system.↗
▶Ep 6 · 4:23
opinionProfessional education fails to prepare practitioners for working with marginalized populations: law school does not teach about trauma or poverty despite public interest lawyers working in trauma-dictated communities, and medical school likely does not teach the history of racial bias in the United States.↗
▶Ep 6 · 8:05
epidemiologicalWhen procedural steps are placed in the way of people living in poverty, the likelihood they complete the process decreases exponentially.↗
▶Ep 6 · 8:05
epidemiologicalCode for America reduced steps in California's record clearance process and increased completion likelihood by 44%.↗
▶Ep 6 · 11:23
opinionWorkforce diversity is important for inclusivity, but what is most important is building pipelines for people who are impacted by the issues to reach professional positions, not just demographic representation.↗
▶Ep 6 · 11:23
clinicalPatients experience distrust when they enter a hospital or doctor's office and nobody looks like them, which ruins the first interaction and is critical to long-term health outcomes.↗
▶Ep 6 · 12:56
quoteIt's not an appendectomy. Like you need to be immersed, it has to be part of your culture, um, you need to be talking about it all the time and instead of making it a, a checkbox like we've talked about it all of the time, uh, understand like to your fiber and to your core, the thing that makes you wanna be a doctor, makes you wanna be a surgeon should compel you to wanna know this stuff because it will make you. 10 times better.↗
▶Ep 6 · 12:56
quotelearning 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.↗
▶Ep 6 · 14:57
quoteif you're mad or upset about the facts. That's a you problem.↗
▶Ep 6 · 14:57
quoteJust like sit in your discomfort. Because 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.↗
▶Ep 6 · 14:57
epidemiologicalIn 1.5 million miles of air travel, Adam Foss sat next to two black people on an airplane for the first time, and he has never sat next to a black person in first class except celebrities from television or sports.↗
▶Ep 6 · 14:57
epidemiologicalIn Fortune 100 C-suite offices (Amazon, Airbnb, Google, etc.), the only black people present are those bringing in and out the coffee.↗
▶Ep 6 · 14:57
epidemiologicalOf approximately 90 colleges, graduations, and law schools visited, none had an African American population over 5%.↗
▶Ep 6 · 14:57
quotethe only time that people who look like me are in those offices are the people who are bringing in and out the coffee.↗
▶Ep 6 · 14:57
quoteman, this is the first time that I've ever sat next to two black people on the airplane.↗
▶Ep 6 · 18:16
quoteThis is the greatest human and civil rights crisis of our time.↗
▶Ep 6 · 18:16
quoteI 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?↗
▶Ep 6 · 18:16
quotewe're missing out on their company. We're missing out on their ideas, we're missing out on their challenges, the diversity and their creativity. And as a result, we'll never know what we missed out on.↗
▶Ep 6 · 21:39
epidemiological1 in 3 black men born today will spend some time in jail or prison.↗
▶Ep 6 · 21:39
epidemiological2.3 million people are in jail and prison right now, with another 5 million on probation or parole.↗
▶Ep 6 · 21:39
epidemiological650,000 people come out of prison every year and face 50,000 collateral consequences of felony convictions that impede successful re-entry.↗
▶Ep 6 · 21:39
epidemiological70 million Americans have a criminal record that will never go away and will impede their re-entry into society.↗
▶Ep 6 · 23:19
epidemiologicalHandgun homicide accounts for more deaths than the next 9 leading causes of death combined for black men aged 18-35.↗
▶Ep 6 · 23:19
quoteCan you imagine a country where we would be remotely allowed that to be true of young white women from the suburbs? I can't Cause we never would let that happen.↗
▶Ep 6 · 23:19
epidemiologicalThe leading cause of death for young black men aged 18-35 in the United States is handgun homicide, which is not true of any other demographic in any other place on the planet.↗
▶Ep 6 · 24:59
epidemiologicalBlack 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.↗
▶Ep 6 · 24:59
epidemiologicalIn Boston, at one intersection on Mass Ave, life expectancy drops by 25 years depending on which direction you look.↗
▶Ep 6 · 24:59
epidemiologicalIn Manhattan, black women are 12 times more likely to die during childbirth than white women.↗
▶Ep 6 · 24:59
epidemiologicalBlack women have a 71% higher chance of dying of cervical cancer.↗
▶Ep 6 · 25:59
epidemiologicalOver 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 12 million Africans were captured, enslaved, and killed; last year 11 million people went through US jails, recreating slavery's scale every year.↗
epidemiologicalThere are more segregated schools in the United States today than on the eve of Brown v. Board of Education.↗
▶Ep 6 · 25:59
epidemiologicalThere are more black people under correctional control today than there were slaves on the eve of the Civil War.↗
▶Ep 6 · 25:59
quoteWe are recreating slavery every single year, and this is our legacy.↗
▶Ep 6 · 25:59
quoteI do not just view you as professional medical caretakers and pediatric surgeons, I view you as the next civil rights leaders of our time.↗
▶Ep 6 · 27:41
clinicalBeing convicted of a drug crime in the 1990s would have resulted in the label 'convicted drug felon' and deprivation of access to housing, employment, education, healthcare, and pro-social activity, which increases the likelihood of committing another crime rather than decreasing it.↗
▶Ep 6 · 27:41
clinicalAt age 19, Adam Foss was caught drug trafficking (a federal offense with a 10-year minimum mandatory sentence), but the arresting officer was his adoptive white father who took him home and loved him instead of prosecuting him.↗
▶Ep 6 · 27:41
quoteThe police officer who pulled me over was my dad. And after he took me down to the station and he sat me in a cell for a little while, he took me home and he loved me. Just like he did every time I screwed up after that. Just like somebody did when you screwed up.↗
▶Ep 6 · 27:41
quoteNone of that happens if I don't win the lottery.↗
▶Ep 6 · 27:41
quoteI didn't realize how close I was to the edge of a rabbit hole that millions of people fall down in every single year and never get access to chairs like these.↗
▶Ep 6 · 32:16
quoteYou have the opportunity every day to exercise your sword and your shield, and I guarantee you. That it feels really good.↗
▶Ep 6 · 34:51
clinicalStanley's two brothers went to prison and his father ran away due to fear of deportation after problems with law enforcement, leaving Stanley and his mother alone.↗
▶Ep 6 · 34:51
clinicalStanley emigrated from the Dominican Republic at age 9 with his two older brothers to get a better education in Boston, but witnessed more violence, poverty, and trauma in the Fidelis projects than he had in a developing nation.↗
▶Ep 6 · 38:34
clinicalStanley told Adam Foss that when robbing people, the thought of prison never entered his mind because he was worried about his mother dying, and that young people carry handguns to high school not thinking about 18 months in jail but worried about what happens if they are caught without one.↗
▶Ep 6 · 40:14
quoteThe 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.↗
▶Ep 6 · 41:54
epidemiological75% of children locked up in 2015 had on average 33 interactions with the child welfare system before age 3 for abuse, neglect, and malnutrition.↗
▶Ep 6 · 41:54
quoteit's much less about their individual bad decision making. It's much more about structures that have been put in place here forever.↗
▶Ep 6 · 41:54
clinicalChildren conceived to mothers living in toxic stress inherit that stress epigenetically, which changes the way their bones and brains develop and eventually the way they behave, and these changes can be traced into prison.↗
▶Ep 6 · 44:14
epidemiologicalIf an 18-year-old boy in Massachusetts kills another 18-year-old boy, he receives a life without parole sentence at a cost of $11 million.↗
▶Ep 6 · 44:14
clinicalChildren from impoverished communities do not learn to read in underperforming schools not because they are black, brown, or poor, but because educators do not understand the stress they bring to school and blame, shame, and expel them instead.↗
▶Ep 6 · 44:14
quoteI ask you as a public health community, what could you do with $11 million for children between the ages of 0 and 3.↗
▶Ep 6 · 44:14
quotehow did we get to the place where we are, we are so committed to spending $11 million to keep a kid until he dies? But the thought that we take any of that and do anything else creative, all of a sudden we're pulling our hair out.↗
▶Ep 6 · 45:54
quotein 50 years from now when people are asking those questions of you, how is it that you want to be remembered?↗
▶Ep 6 · 45:54
clinicalStanley became the first freshman in his college's history to pitch in the national championship game (11 innings, 8 strikeouts, 2 hits), made the Dean's list for the first time, and is now a junior majoring in criminal justice applying to law school to become a prosecutor.↗
Summaries Adam gave as host
· 7 summaries
Recaps of other experts' statements, not Adam's own clinical position.
host summaryAdam Foss summarizing a resource: I don't wanna go work there because nobody looks like me.↗
▶Ep 6 · 38:34
host summaryAdam 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.↗
▶Ep 6 · 38:34
host summaryAdam Foss summarizing a resource: We're worried about what happens if we get caught without one.↗
▶Ep 6 · 38:34
host summaryAdam Foss summarizing a resource: the criminal law is for the land of the living. We're out here trying to survive.↗
▶Ep 6 · 40:14
host summaryAdam 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.↗
▶Ep 6 · 45:54
host summaryAdam Foss summarizing a resource: I want to thank Adam. For putting me back on the path that I was already on before.↗
▶Ep 6 · 45:54
host summaryAdam Foss summarizing a resource: Doctor Martin Luther King said in the future, it's not the words of your enemies you remember, it's the silence of your friends.↗
