Gatekeeper To A Better Life

Prosecutors reentry program get high marks
The easy part of being Brooklyn's district attorney is sending bad guys to prison. The hard part comes when they return to the scenes of their crimes for repeat performances.

Charles J. Hynes has said as much since he was first elected to the job in 1989, and he has encouraged ambitious young prosecutors to bring him bright ideas for persuading parolees to listen to their better angels.

If that could happen, Mr. Hynes reasoned, crime-weary Brooklynites such as himself could know safer streets. (His own home in Flatbush has been burglarized three times and his children have been mugged.)

Accordingly, Mr. Hynes quietly put one such bright idea to action in 1999, a program called Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together, or ComALERT.

The brainchild of Patricia L. Gatling, a narcotics prosecutor who rose to become Mr. Hynes' chief assistant and who today heads New York City's Human Rights Commission, ComALERT is the nation's first comprehensive prisoner re-entry initiative created and led by the very authority that locked up its clients in the first place.

New York Law Journal