Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call.

Today, a topic we read about, but may rarely think about,

youth in the juvenile justice system. Sam Abed is the acting director of the Department of

Youth Rehabilitation Services in the District of Columbia. He speaks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about

the role of juvenile justice, not in punishing, but in supporting young

people. Let's listen. Sam Abbott, thank you so much for joining me in public health on call.

We're going to talk about juvenile justice, which is a term we hear from time to time, often when

there's a young person in the news accused of a crime,

but not many of us know much about it, and I'll count myself in that group.

You have been leading juvenile justice systems for many years, and I want to talk to you about

what that's like and what it really means to engage with and try to support these kids and their

families.

Well, I appreciate you having me on, Josh. Yeah, if I could just beg your indulgence and speak

freely about what I think about the juvenile justice system and maybe how it's perceived.

I think that the perceptions in the community are really shaped by the media

and the most sensational acts that get publicized in the news

kind of inform people that, oh, this is what somebody in the juvenile justice system is like,

when in reality, the majority of the kids that we see actually commit lower level offenses,

...