The standing District of Attorney of Middlesex County, Marian T. Ryan, took time to speak with The Somerville Times to share her thoughts on issues facing the county. — Photo by Jeremy F. van der Heiden.

By Jeremy F. van der Heiden

This is the first part of a three-part series for The Somerville Times interview with Middlesex County District Attorney Marian T. Ryan.

Marian T. Ryan, the standing District of Attorney of Middlesex County who grew up right here in the City of Somerville, recently sat down with The Somerville Times to discuss goings-on throughout the area. Ryan was born in Cambridge, raised in Somerville and attended school at St. Joseph’s in Union Square before moving on to Emmanuel College and then the law school at Boston College.

In her third year at Boston College, she started defending in district criminal trials Committee for Public Council, later moving on to the District Attorney’s office. Before being appointed as an Assistant District Attorney, Ryan was handling cases in superior court as a trial team captain, heading up the domestic violent unit, child abuse unit, elderly and disability unit in that time.

Now, Ryan has just under 35 years worth of experience as an ADA, and was appointed to the DA position when Gerry Leone stepped down last April. In her first campaign for a publically held election, she will be competing against County Clerk Michael Sullivan.

In this first part of our interview with DA Ryan, we discuss her background and a few aspects of her position on certain adversities facing Somerville, as well as what must be done.

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The Somerville Times: You served as a defense attorney briefly and said you then quickly fell in love with the DA’s office. Do you find that you enjoy the prosecutorial side more than defense?

D.A. Ryan: To do a good prosecution, you have to kind of put yourself into what the defense is going to say, so the intellectual piece of it is still the same. I love doing these types of cases, putting the investigations together, I love it every day. I’m very lucky.

TST: What do you feel needs to be done to reduce the rate of violent crimes in Somerville?

D.A.R: That is a huge question. One of the things you learn in the experience of being a prosecutor for a long time is it’s never one thing – you really have to have a coordinated approach … my goal is always to be as preventative as possible. In Middlesex County, we have between 30,000 and 40,000 cases a year. The challenge is to figure out what the root of that is, and what we can be doing to deal with that.

If you know, for instance, addiction is the root of some things, then trying to be in front of that and doing some prevention, outreach and treatment programs, you get people before they get to that piece. If you know that people have committed a crime because of an addiction issue, you want to be holding them accountable for what they did and give them treatment to ensure they don’t redo that type of issue. That is one of the things that I’ve worked a great deal on, for instance the drug courts.

In our office, we have a nonprofit partnership in which we flood schools across the county with prevention and intervention programs for kids, parents and staff. I’ve done a lot of them right here at the [Somerville Public] High School and the idea is to catch the kids before they fall into that path.

You really have to be doing a lot of things at the same time, because while you’re doing prevention and intervention with the middle school kids, you might be treating someone with a real substance addiction differently, and on the other hand you have people making a good living off of moving vast quantities of drugs, and we’ll want to deal with them differently.

It’s never just an easy fix – it’s always that coordinated effort.

TST: Somerville has a high rate of children in households living below the poverty line, placing them, statistically, at greater risk of addiction, homelessness and other problems down the road. Do you view this as a potential indicator of issues to come in the future?

D.A.R: There are two sides to that. We all know kids. I grew up in Somerville and knew kids that had everything against them, and despite that went on to be incredibly successful. I certainly do not think that is necessarily a predictor of people’s ability.

When I was growing up in Somerville, it was a very blue Collar, middle class, nobody had a lot of money, and there were certainly … at-risk factors that lots of kids I grew up with had and still grew up to be incredibly successful … You know I look at this graduating class [in Somerville] … there are incredibly impressive kids in that senior class, and I’d bet, when the number shake out, some of those kids are the ones with at-risk factors.

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District Attorney Ryan went on to note that few things can compare to an involved adult in at-risk children’s lives, and that it is difficult to accurately gauge what would be to come given a specific individual’s background.

In the next parts of this series, we will dive into Ryan’s thoughts on Middlesex County at large, the state and her ideologies as they relate to policy, law enforcement and some of the more popularly discussed pain points such as the war on drugs and the nation’s prison system.