At the risk of overstating the obvious, the world was a different place 27 years ago.

There were no cellphones, DVDs were unknown, and VCRs were budget-busting toys. "Green" was just a primary color, the Cold War was still raging, and the Reagan era had just begun.

And Charles Allen Chatman was sentenced to 99 years for rape.

On Jan. 3, Mr. Chatman became the 15th man in Dallas County to be released from prison, exonerated by DNA evidence. This will probably be categorized as old news by some readers; others won't even recognize the name or the case. And, for me, that's troubling.

Meeting recently with Judge John Creuzot, who signed the dismissal of Mr. Chatman's charges, I learned some of the incidents surrounding Mr. Chatman's release: his unfamiliarity with a knife and fork when he was taken out to eat, his lack of knowledge about what a cellphone is and, perhaps saddest of all, the fact that he hadn't seen a dentist in those 27 years.

Mr. Chatman's remarkable journey from incarceration to exoneration is an episode in a much larger story of the burden under which poor communities struggle – and how injustice further complicates that struggle.

A quasi nonprofit cottage industry has developed around what is labeled "the re-entry population": formerly incarcerated residents returning to communities poorly prepared for them and for which they are equally poorly prepared.

According to the Urban Institute, most of those released from Texas prisons are male and African-American; the average age is 34. Their crimes ranged from drug offenses to property crimes, violent offenses and parole violations. About a fourth of the nearly 59,000 falling in this category have been imprisoned at least five years.

They need jobs, education, housing and a nurturing environment. In our poorest communities, the scarcity of opportunity, the presence of the same temptations and pressures of the street combined with their new responsibility for their lives can be challenges that set them up for devastating failure. If they are not effectively restored, the streets will reclaim them.

This is a daunting challenge that many throughout North Texas are seeking solutions for – with varying degrees of success.

But Charles Chatman and others like him are an entirely different profile. Someone who's been exonerated from a prison sentence through a determination of innocence faces the same challenges as others re-entering society, regardless of his innocence.

Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project have been the catalyst for freeing more than 200 such inmates across the country. Nationally, on average, these exonerees served at least 12 years and were 26 when convicted.

Thirty of those wrongful convictions have been in Texas, half of those in Dallas County. District Attorney Craig Watkins should be lauded for his vigorous efforts to address the travesty of these people's ordeal.

They have lost years of productivity, in some cases relationships with family members and, much more significantly, freedom. The horrible fact is that there will be more.

Texas is one of 28 states that provide some compensation to exonerees. But financial help is not enough. Job training, assistance in obtaining medical, legal and counseling services, and an instantaneous public recognition of wrongful incarceration must be a part of redressing this wrong.

Society rightly demands that those who commit crimes owe a debt that must be paid. But where that right has been unjustly or mistakenly demanded, society has an obligation to make immediate and comprehensive restitution. We impose a terrible burden on the falsely imprisoned. And we compound a problem that we already struggle to address: the restoration of the lives of residents to productivity in a time when we don't have lives to waste.

The Rev. Gerald Britt Jr. is vice president for public policy at Central Dallas Ministries and has worked on civic affairs and social justice issues as a community leader in Dallas for more than 25 years. His e-mail address is gbritt@centraldallasministries.org.