The Middlesex County District Attorney's office now has its first director of racial justice initiatives. With so much scrutiny on the criminal justice system, Middlesex D.A. Marion Ryan created the new position to add an additional dimension to how the office handles racial issues. She's hired Antonia Soares Thompson to take it on. Ryan and Thompson spoke with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: D.A. Ryan, why did you decide that you needed this position, and why do you think Antonia Soares Thompson is the right person for this job?
District Attorney Marian Ryan: Over the last year, as well as dealing with the pandemic, we've obviously been dealing with events we saw across the country and really focusing on racial equity issues and how we apply that lens in our work. We've done a lot of work in our office with our communities, with our partners, and really saw the need to have a person in this newly created role whose focus would be making sure that we have prosecutors who are really conversant on the issues of racial justice, the development of policies and practices for our law enforcement partners in the 50 core communities that we serve, really having a voice that's always causing us to look and see how can we do better in eliminating racial bias as we are administering criminal justice. We have created, this year, an anti-hate, anti-bias task force. Antonia will be joining us on that and helping us to look at incidents across our communities.
Once we knew what we wanted that person to do, we took a long time really doing a search, a very large search. Antonia is perfect for this. She has a very rich and deep reservoir of experience working in the criminal justice system and, most importantly, working with families, working with youth, working with diversion and restorative justice. She is a great fit for this, and we're really thrilled to be welcoming her here.
Rath: Antonio Soares Thompson, tell us a bit more about about that — your past work and your reaction when you were approached about this job.
Antonia Soares Thompson: First, I'd like to thank D.A. Ryan for creating this phenomenal position. I'm very humbled that she chose me to do this work. Since I graduated from law school, I have always been interested in criminal justice. First I was a public defender. Then I taught law students about litigation and courtroom experiences. So I'm very vested in the love of the law, but also in working with disengaged youth and disenfranchized communities. This was just the perfect job for me, because it checked off all of those things that I'm really interested in. And as D.A. Ryan just spoke about, this last season that we have gone through where we have seen a call to action across the country to deal with the systemic racism and other issues within our criminal justice system, this is just a natural progression for all the work that she's been doing in Middlesex County. So I'm very, very excited to join her team.
Rath: Coming into this, what are the biggest issues that will be under your purview, that you think you'll want to address head on right away?
Soares Thompson: First, it's understanding the culture of our community, of our office. None of us are experts at this. This does lend for us having honest and crucial conversations and building relationships. I look forward to meeting the rest of the team, figuring out where do we need to fill in gaps in understanding and educate ourselves to make sure that when we look through this racial lens, we're putting it in the context of others' histories, others' cultures. Cultural competency is going to be really important at the beginning. So I really look forward to joining the team, learning from my colleagues and then also creating this journey together, because none of us all have the perfect answer. It's something that we're going to do as a team.
Rath: D.A. Ryan, in terms of this position, how much independent authority will Director Soares Thompson have? How much power will there be in this position?
Ryan: Antonia is well suited for a very wide portfolio — learning about the communities, dealing and working with our staff and making changes that will help us to do our job better. We really see this as continuing our reimagining of how prosecutors deal with issues of racial justice.
Rath: Talk a bit about how you would imagine a DA's office that is more community facing in the way you're talking about.
Ryan: I think some of those things have begun with our anti-hate, anti-bias task force. I think in Massachusetts and in Middlesex County as well, we often think that the kinds of things that we read about or hear about don't happen here. We created this task force because we knew there's been an uptick, we've seen an uptick. We have to call that out and we have to be clear that we will not tolerated [acts] motivated by hate in our homes and in our counties. People have a right to be safe. So we've begun our work with those stakeholders, and also really working with humans rights commissions, figuring out how do we first of all identify what's out there. And then I'm a great believer that education is the way you change people's hearts and you change conduct. We've been doing that work, and we're going to greatly continue that work.
Rath: Director Soares Thompson, I'm really curious, especially, about your background in working with youth, because right now we have a lot of young people who don't have as much trust as you would want to have in the police.
Soares Thompson: Absolutely. The last couple of years, I've been very intentional in doing restorative justice work and working within the school systems, and also within the courts, as a diversionary program for youth that are either at that cusp of becoming involved with the juvenile justice system or just going through that adolescent time in their life when they're making poor choices. I feel using restorative justice, which is something that is being used here in Massachusetts, is just a wonderful way to educate our youth on how to make better choices, but yet be accountable to the consequences of their actions. Instead of it being all about punishment, because we know punishment really does not change the way or the behaviors, looking in this restorative way of empowering youth to make better choices, become better citizens. So I look forward to continuing that work in Middlesex County and empowering our youth to have a voice to be engaged in the process. I always hope that they would come into the court system and become the D.A. or become a prosecutor or a defense attorney, or even a police officer. So although that distrust is there with our young adults and they've been seeing this across the country and all the protests and things that have been going on, I'm very hopeful that if we as prosecutors can engage with our youth in these ways and then create these diversionary programs that empower them to be successful, then we definitely will see a turn.
