Kings County, NY - Most people see the district attorney as a person whose primary duty is to put criminals behind bars. Addressing a group of teen volunteers from Kings County Hospital, however, Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes said that his ultimate goal was to help children from ending up on the wrong side of the law.

“I look forward to a day when these children - your children and grandchildren - enter the criminal justice system not as defendants, but as police officers, court officers, correction officers, lawyers and judges,” he said.

Although he has spent years as a prosecutor, he said he is acutely aware of the fact he very well could have been a criminal himself. As a child, he came from a broken home where his father, an alcoholic, often beat his mother. The experience, and the attending anger, frustration, and despair, are things that he shares with “thousands of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women who constitute the majority who pass through prison in New York.”

He lamented that New York has “the unfortunate distinction of imprisoning more men and women than anywhere else in the world.” Hynes credits his faith and his mother with keeping him from becoming one of those people who pass through the prison system.

He also told the volunteers about his work at the Family Justice Center, a one-stop justice facility for victims of domestic violence and sexual predators. In the end, he told the volunteers his duty is not only to punish the guilty, but his obligation, and that of the entire community, is the divinely mandated obligation “to guide our children on the right path to peace, justice, and success.”