By Charles J. Hynes
Brooklyn District Attorney

I recently read some articles which suggest many different ways of solving the problem of today’s troubled youth. As someone who works in a school and is a concerned parent of a son, I am writing to you in the hopes that you can help to change our present system. I believe that jail is not the answer and just creates more criminals.

I happen to agree with you wholeheartedly. Indeed, a report describes record-high numbers of Americans currently incarcerated in our jails and prisons (One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, Pew Center on the States). According to this study, tens of thousands of adult Americans are currently incarcerated, and the United States holds the dubious distinction of being number one in the world in both the number and percentage of residents whom we incarcerate. The impact on minority communities is especially troubling. According to the report, one in nine black men age 20-34 is behind bars. For black women, age 35-39, the figure is one in 100, as compared with one in 355 for white women in that same age group.

When I took office as District Attorney in 1990, I pledged to the citizens of Brooklyn that I would be tough on crime and that I would not hesitate to put in prison and throw away the key those individuals who would pose a danger to our citizens — for-profit drug dealers who are poisoning our children, violent offenders and other sociopaths. But I believed then, as I continue to believe now, that we cannot incarcerate our way to a public safety solution. Upon taking office, I immediately put into action a plan to utilize every means available to me to reduce the rate at which we were incarcerating our citizens. The key components to this plan were crime prevention initiatives implemented through education and early intervention programs; alternatives to incarceration for those who had already entered the criminal justice system; and re-entry strategies for those individuals returning to our communities from prison.

My programs have included Project Legal Lives, a law-related educational curriculum aimed at Brooklyn’s fifth graders; a comprehensive Truancy program, which provides counseling and referral services to both students and parents; a Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison (DTAP) program, which has been independently evaluated and determined to be the most successful of its kind in the country; and ComALERT, a re-entry program to assist those returning to our communities from prison. In addition, I have diverted countless defendants from jail and into mental health counseling, anger management programs, substance and alcohol abuse programs and other alternative sentencing measures.

I often say that one of the easiest things I do as District Attorney is to put people in jail. The real key to the success of my job is measured, in my view, by how many lives can be saved from that fate. For additional information visit www.brooklynda.org. To have your questions answered in a future column, send them to asktheda@brooklynda.org.

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