Childhood Trauma & Juvenile Justice by Dr. Micah E. Johnson

Childhood Trauma & Juvenile Justice

Written, Directed & Performed by Dr. Micah E. Johnson

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Childhood Trauma & Juvenile Justice is a new solo play by UCLA’s Dr. Micah Johnson that explores how trauma, opportunity, and systems shape the course of a person’s life. Through multiple characters and alternative realities, the play examines how different combinations of risk and protective factors can send the same person down dramatically different trajectories. One life may lead toward stability, healing, and opportunity, while another may lead toward addiction, violence, incarceration, or loss.

Grounded in Dr. Johnson’s personal experiences and life’s work investigating the criminalization of mental illness and the poverty-to-prison pipeline, the performance asks what happens when children experience trauma and the very systems designed to support them fail. Blending storytelling, science, drama, humor, and lived experience, Childhood Trauma & Juvenile Justice reveals how individual choices matter, but those choices are shaped by families, communities, institutions, and systems that can either protect young people or push them further into crisis.