At a news conference in Youngstown Wednesday, a point was raised that a majority of the suspects causing all the gun violence are repeat offenders and should be in jail.

Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Anthony D'Apolito talked with 21 News about the challenges he faces when it comes to those types of cases and determining how long to keep criminals locked up or if they should be given a chance to rehabilitate.

"Certainly, a judge's job is to protect the public but also to protect the rights of those accused and those two responsibilities sometimes butt up against each other on these types of cases," D'Apolito said. "There are a lot of things that the courts have to take into consideration. Of course, primarily we want to protect the public and we want to make sure that if someone shows they can be a dangerous person they're not on the street but we have to respect under the law the rights that they have and if we go to far, a higher court and even the Supreme Court has stated you can't make a bond on someone who cannot afford it as a way of keeping them in jail."

D'Apolito says he takes his responsibilities very seriously and the decisions he makes weigh heavily on him.

"I'll tell you Derek, this keeps me up at night and I mean it's not the bigger cases that normally are the ones where this happens, it's the smaller ones, the ones that as a judge you go, I understand where this person came from, I understand they are young, I understand I want to give them a chance, I want them to be a contributing person in our society but you don't want them to hurt anyone because then you live with that," D'Apolito said.

When it comes to sentencing, D'Apolito says you take it case by case.

"One of the first things I look at though, did that person have a gun before? Did that person commit a domestic violence before? Those are two factors that I have seen can be indicators of future crime," D'Apolito said. "You take it case by case, you talk to the person, you read all the information, you get all the reports, you have people in the community to try to help you with this and all those things together give you the best chance to make a good decision, but it's not a guarantee by any stretch, so it's difficult."

When asked if longterm incarceration was a solution to curbing gun violence in the city, D'Apolito isn't sure.

"I don't know, I don't," D'Apolito said. "I've done both. I've sent people to prison for long periods of time, I've given people chances, I've done both and every time I give a person a chance, like I said, I hold my breath and I worry every night because my job is to protect people but it's also to try to rehabilitate people and you hope you are making the right decision but only time tells you. You take both sides into account and you look at the record and you look at what would be beneficial by sending them to prison. Do they need to go to send a message to teach them a lesson? Do they need to go because we need to protect our community for a time knowing that you can't keep them forever and at some point, they will come back. So, you want that person coming back hardened or do you want them given a taste of the system and then try to get them back in our community with programs, re-entry programs and different things so they don't do that? It's very difficult and it takes everyone working together and more people are working together than before but we're not there yet."

D'Apolito says he immediately remembered the victim, Rawsheem Aponte, who was killed in the triple shooting on Tuesday.

"The young man that got killed, he was in front of me a year ago and I went back and looked as soon as I heard his name and I looked what did I do, what could I have done differently and try to learn from it because I think I made the right decision, the best decision," D'Apolito said. "He's not here and I feel terrible about that and I'm going to try to do better next time, that doesn't mean my decision was wrong, it just means for some reason it didn't work out, why didn't it and how can we make sure that doesn't happen again."

D'Apolito agrees that continuing to focus on rehabilitation is key and that it needs to be a community effort. It can't be individual entities trying to fix the issues, but rather the collective.