Charles J. Hynes has served as district attorney of Kings County (better known as Brooklyn), New York, since 1989. Here, he discusses his interest in community prosecution and his views about criminal justice innovations.
Why did you get interested in community prosecution?
It goes back to the decision I made to run for D.A. in 1989. I lived in Flatbush for 30 years. I grew up in the neighborhood, and I raised five kids there. It was a wonderful neighborhood. It was safe, serene; there were beautiful trees, Queen Anne homes. When I left local law enforcement and was appointed as the statewide nursing home prosecutor by Governor Carey, I lost practically all contact with law enforcement other than the fact that I began to notice changes—incremental changes—in the neighborhood.
By the time I ran for office my house had been burglarized four times in five years. Three of my five kids had been assaulted. I took to going to the store—I always get up early—at 6:00 a.m. with either a baseball bat or a golf club. It was a very dangerous neighborhood, and I didn't know why. But I thought I could a better job than the people who were running to succeed [my predecessor] Elizabeth Holtzman. I had measurably more experience in criminal justice. I had run a statewide office, and I’d been Fire Commissioner of New York City, and then corruption prosecutor. ...
By 1989, Brooklyn was the fifth most violent municipality per capita in this country. We had 700 to 750 murders in 1988-89. By 1991, a year after I became D.A., we had 129 children shot to death in Brooklyn—with 22 more killed by various other means. I resolutely told the audience at my swearing in that I would reduce crime in two years. My wife said I was nuts. But I didn’t take this job to sit back. I’ve never been reactive. So my first job was finding the reason for the crime, and to me, it was obvious: it was drug-related. Drug-related crime had exploded the criminal justice system. The engine, of course, was crack.
Crack and its associated crime wave had created an explosion in the number of assistant district attorneys, police and prison beds. Just to give you an example, there were 129 assistant district attorneys in this office when I left in 1975. There were 440 when I came back. ...It was out of control. Looking at the way in which government was responding, the more people they brought into this—the more cops, the more assistant D.A.s, the more judges, the more everything—crime rates proportionately seemed to rise. It was nuts.
I had some very, very smart people who came back to this office, and we began to take a look at solving the problem. I brought in Susan Powers, who was then at Vera [Institute of Justice], and she persuaded me to design a drug-treatment alternative to prison program called DTAP. We launched in October of 1990, and we took non-violent prison-bound drug addicts—even those who were selling for their own habit—and screened them out carefully then put them into long-term drug rehabilitation. ...
One of the best parts of the design was a job-development piece. That has been extraordinarily successful. As you probably know, across the country drug-rehab maybe is 10 percent successful. In this model, it’s been doing as much 70 percent.
And when Anne Swern [my counsel] took over, she redesigned the model so that people began to plead guilty up front. It seems to have a very, very strong incentive for people to stay in the program. She also designed somewhat of a second-chance program where we could take a look at people individually and if they were worth the effort, we would put them back into drug treatment.
And how did community prosecution emerge from this?
What was clear as we began to crystallize our thinking was that if we did not have community involvement, it wouldn’t work. If we couldn't get the community to stop barricading themselves in their homes and couldn’t get them to come out and help us, then it was skewed. We could design all sorts of programs, but unless we had the community, we were going nowhere.
The police were already developing community policing strategies, so we started focusing on community prosecution. We took a look at the county: 84 square miles, 2.5 million people and we hit on the idea of restructuring the county into zones—basically, into five cities the size of Syracuse. By dividing the population into five zones and by reducing the land mass, you had some control over what was going on.
Because we were working in a smaller area, we could develop better contacts with the police commanders, the community leaders, the political leadership, the education and religious leadership. The key is to have religious leaders involved. ... When we finished the design—and it took awhile to get the courts involved because we had to convince them that every crime committed in this area should be prosecuted by the team of prosecutors assigned to that zone. Structuring it that way would speed up arrest to arraignment time, the disposition of the case; we’d also have a better handle on the flow of the case. It also gave us the benefit of identifying people who might be candidates for our DTAP Program.
You’ve developed a lot of innovative programs during your tenure. How do these programs tie in, if at all, to your work around community prosecution?
As we began to expand the notion of community prosecution, one of the keys to the success of it was building new programs that had the effect of absorbing any crime-rate increases. The crime rate is going to rise again, whether it’s the impact of the economic downturn, the loss of jobs, substance abuse in schools or the discovery of a new drug of choice.
And what I have argued is that we have to have programs in effect that can absorb the crime rate. There are any number of these programs we have in place to divert people out of the criminal justice system so we can concentrate our resources on those people for whom we haven’t found a solution—those violent individuals who must be punished by imprisonment.
And the key to building our new programs was establishing a very solid relationship with the communities, who would help us identify problem areas. We send people—prosecutors and community liaisons—to precinct council meetings, to community board meetings. We also have a very, very defined presence in the schools for our education program, Project Legal Lives. We send assistant district attorneys into every elementary school in Brooklyn who wants one at the fifth grade level. We have about 335 fifth grade classes that we attend. We picked that year because our research told us that was the year of choice. The assistant district attorneys are there 10 hours a month for the entire school year. We teach them that it’s wrong to hate anyone for being different, that drugs are about death. We’ve been doing that for 12 years.
When you talk to other district attorneys about community prosecution, what do you say?
There’s no downside to community prosecution. I preach this to my colleagues in the other parts of the country, many of whom believe that your sole role is to prosecute. The cops bring you the case and you do the prosecution. Well, I can't explain why I think that’s wrong other than to say it’s absolutely wrong, any more than I can explain to them how important it is hire social workers.
I started the first domestic violence bureau anywhere in this country. I mean bureau size—not one individual, but a bureau, 40 assistant district attorneys. I wanted the world to know that I regard domestic violence at the same level as other bureaus, like homicide or rackets or fraud.
The first couple of years, our kids were being burned out. They couldn't deal with it. You know, I grew up in that kind of environment. I know a lot about it and I know the reasons why a victim won’t prosecute, even for a professional like my mother, a real estate broker. Her father and I were living in the same apartment, and there was great fear of what was going to happen to us physically if she told.
And so someone came up with a great idea. It was: hire a social worker. Now we have 26 social workers. But not only are social workers involved in domestic violence, they are involved in violence against children, sex-abuse victims.
I have a truancy program that's been so successful that Mayor Giuliani expanded it throughout the city. In Brooklyn there are seven TRACK Centers. The TRACK Center is a place where representatives from the City agencies who work with children are present to address issues that are impeding students' attendance. At the Center, the parent/guardian of every truant brought there by police officers, is contacted, informed of the incident and asked to pick up their children. At the Center, the parent/guardian has the opportunity to meet with a social worker from my Office, and are provided with resources and support services. The social worker at each TRACK Center makes appropriate referrals and stays in contact with the schools for follow-up. The recidivism rate for truants in our program is in single digits.
But again, every program we've been involved with, every expansion, every new idea, has an anchor in community-based prosecution. Frequently community members ask for assistance with issues that are important to them. When the community sees us addressing their concerns and that our approach to criminal justice is very, very different, they respond with renewed confidence in the criminal justice system. We have 100,000 fewer index crimes in this town, and we have a good plan to absorb any increases in the crime rate. We’ll be able to absorb the increase and concentrate our resources on the people who really need to be sent to jail. Again, the community understands that. When I go out to the community, people are very receptive. I used to begin with, years and years ago, saying "The next time some politician tells you there is a jail solution to crime, don't listen to him. He’s treating you like a child. What you really have to understand is that we have to work together in an intelligent, focused approach, to reduce crime."
What do you say to other district attorneys who say, "Community prosecution sounds like a good idea, but it also sounds soft. At least with jail, even if it doesn't work, it sounds tough."
I had a conversation with one of [Gov. George] Pataki’s chiefs of staff. I said, "I’ll give you the names of 100 people in Attica [Correctional Facility], and you can write them a letter and ask them if they think I’m touchy-feely." I tell you, I throw the key away on sociopaths and people who are drug profiteers, and I have no interest in their early bed-wetting or any other sad story. I’ll tell them, "This is the plea, you’re going to prison, and if you don’t like it, then go to trial." But you can't do that unless you focus on diverting individuals who should not be incarcerated or those best served by an intervention designed to prevent future criminal behavior cases who shouldn’t be in the system.
The easiest thing we do is put people in jail. That is not a difficult thing, if you’ve got your prosecutors trained well. The real challenge is to keep public safety at a level that is acceptable to the people you represent, and I believe that fundamentally you do that by recidivism reduction. Every time you reduce recidivism you knock down another layer of crime problems.
... What I just tell my colleagues is you’ve got to tell these people that being tough doesn’t mean you have to stand up and beat your chest. Yes, send violent people to jail for a long period of time—frankly, try to get consecutive sentences for sociopaths—that certainly gives you the credibility that you need with the community to have them accept these alternative programs designed to reduce crime and recidivism.
You’ve divided the borough into five districts or zones but those districts are still probably bigger than most cities. And there are so many different ethnicities and languages. How do your prosecutors maintain working relationships with members of such a large and diverse community?
The key is to hire personnel with diverse backgrounds. I ran and won with the support of two groups in particular: the Jewish community—a broad spectrum of it—and the African-American community. That was my support, and it was all about Howard Beach.
I said during the campaign, "I’m committed to hiring with a keen eye to diversity." And that’s what I’ve done. You can walk around this building and it will be readily apparent. There are many more women working here than when I started. There were also virtually no people of color, and I changed that. ... If you are running an office that doesn’t reflect the diversity of your community you have no credibility at all. And you have to work on it constantly, obviously.
When this poor fellow from Bangladesh was murdered the other day, we immediately sent people out to a community meeting. We earned credibility because right on the morning of the murder we had flyers in Bengali all across this county saying, if you get approached, if you get harassed, if you have any problems, contact this hotline number, and we will respond immediately. So we had credibility.
The key, though, is to have a hiring committee that really understands how critical it is to go out there and get qualified people who reflect each community. And to remain responsive to all the individual communities.