Bragg invests $3million to help recently arrested New Yorkers

NEW YORK — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will launch a $3 million program stationing so-called “court navigators” at criminal arraignments to offer voluntary resources to people who have just been arrested for a crime. The district attorney’s office tapped The Fortune Society, a Queens-based nonprofit that serves justice-involved New Yorkers, to form a network of navigators who have prior involvement with the criminal justice system and other relevant personal experiences. Navigators will staff Manhattan Criminal Court seven days a week during the court’s operating hours, from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. There, they will engage with people who are being arraigned and with their families to help them access emergency housing, food, transportation, health services or anything else they might need.

“We’re going to do everything that we can to advance public safety, and we want that public safety to be enduring,” Bragg said. “Addressing people’s needs is the way to get enduring public safety.”

The program is expected to launch early next year.

Context: The court navigator program is part of a $9 million mental health initiative to address recidivism, which Bragg announced last December.

His office previously awarded nearly $6 million to The Bridge to create a network of neighborhood navigators to engage people living on the street and connect them to the city’s landscape of social services.

Both programs are funded by the DA’s Criminal Justice Investment Initiative, a $250 million pool created with money seized from major international banks in the course of criminal investigations.

Stanley Richards, The Fortune Society’s incoming president and CEO, said Bragg’s initiative fits into a broader pattern of DAs “beginning to leverage their office to say, ‘Public safety is more than just prosecutions. Public safety is more than just incarceration. Public safety is working further upstream, so that we can get at some of the root causes that create the need for incarceration.’”