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Former prosecutor challenges pediatricians to help black youth achieve success

Adam Foss

ORLANDO, Fla. — Pediatricians must use their “sword and shield” to help black children overcome the obstacles early in life that can lead them to incarceration, according to a presenter at the AAP National Conference & Exhibition.

Adam Foss, JD, a former district attorney in the juvenile division of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston and an advocate of criminal justice reform, delivered the keynote address as part of the meeting’s opening plenary session on shifting the focus from incarceration to transformation for black youth.

Foss said there are 2.3 million people in prison in the United States, and that one in three black men will spend time in prison during his lifetime. Although blacks make up 13% of the United States population, they comprise half of the incarcerated population, including parole, he said.

“We need a new civil rights movement,” he said. “We are an endangered species.”

Looking out into the audience, Foss said, “I see participants in this new civil rights movement.”

Foss related a personal story of how he was caught selling drugs in the 1990s while he was in college. Luckily for him, his father, who was in law enforcement, was the one who caught him, and set him on the right path. He was not incarcerated.

Instead, Foss graduated from college, going on to get a law degree. After a career in the juvenile justice system, he became a public speaker.

This was possible because Foss’ father used his “sword and shield” to show him the way without incarceration.

“You have a sword and shield, too,” he told the AAP audience.

Foss cited a statistic that 75% of juveniles who are incarcerated in Massachusetts had on average three interactions with the child welfare system before the age of 3 years for abuse, neglect and malnutrition. “These are children telling us, ‘Please do something. Exercise or sword and your shield, or I am going to go to prison.’ But we don’t.”

Foss noted that a black youth who is expelled from school between the ages of 8 to 12 years has a 50% increased likelihood of dropping out of school. Seventy-five percent of people in prison are high school dropouts, he said.

“Each one of you has the opportunity to stick your arm into that pipeline and pull out one kid,” he said. “Exercise your sword and your shield, because when you do, amazing things happen.” – by Bruce Thiel

Foss, A. Keynote address. Presented at: AAP National Conference & Exhibition; Nov. 2-6, 2018; Orlando, Fla.

Disclosure: Infectious Diseases in Children was unable to confirm Foss’ relevant financial disclosures at time of publication.