Ailing Prison System Finds Friend in Criminologist

All around California most mornings, hours before the coffee begins to brew, Blackberries belonging to leaders of the state prison system start humming with e-mail from Joan Petersilia.

The messages are rarely short. After decades of watching California corrections slide into disarray, Petersilia has lots to say.

What’s remarkable, says the renowned criminologist from UC Irvine, is that important people inside government are willing to listen.

For the last 15 years, those who managed the nation’s biggest prison system mostly ignored outside experts. The bureaucrats knew their business; they needed no advice.

But this is a different day. For 15 months, Petersilia has been advising the man in charge of fixing the state’s dysfunctional prisons, Corrections Secretary Roderick Q. Hickman.

With her blend of academic smarts, diplomatic skills and real-world know-how, Petersilia has been embraced as a sort of guru who can help California fulfill one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most ambitious mandates: creating a corrections system that corrects, rather than merely locks up, lawbreakers.

That mission is anchored in the belief that today’s approach -- producing parolees who typically stumble and return to prison -- is failing taxpayers and convicts alike. Unhappy with such results, most states are charting a new course, acknowledging that helping prisoners make the delicate transition from cell to sidewalk is an investment in public safety.

After decades spent studying parole, Petersilia knows this turf well, and she has been hired to help California rethink its approach. It is an opportunity she relishes. But change, she warns, will not come quickly.

“This is not rocket science; it’s harder than rocket science,” says the pragmatic 54-year-old mother of two grown sons. “It took us 20 years to create this monster. It would be foolish and dangerous to assume we can fix it overnight.”

The pace of Petersilia’s schedule belies her own axiom. On any given day, she rises at 3:30 a.m. in Santa Barbara, often hopping a flight to Sacramento for a prison powwow. She lives her life as if there is no time to lose. Because this, she says, is a rare moment for which her entire career has prepared her.

Born in Pittsburgh, Petersilia is the third of four daughters of an Air Force general who moved his family hither and yon before retiring in Pacific Palisades. An effervescent brunet, she attended Santa Monica High School, where she was a cheerleader and self-described “party girl” who nobody figured would go on to earn a doctorate.

Her choice of criminology was almost accidental. Initially, she recalled, that “1970s belief that we could all make a difference” had her mulling a career helping the blind or deaf. But one day she stumbled into an Ohio State University class taught by a famous criminologist, Simon Dinitz, and she was hooked.

At first she believed her place was on the front lines. As a graduate student, she picked up female parolees at the prison gate, drove them to a halfway house in Cincinnati and helped them regain their footing in the community.

“The passion of those people at the halfway house was amazing, inspiring,” she said. But something else was more compelling: “I kept asking myself, is all of their effort, all of the money spent on corrections, really making a difference?”

That curiosity -- a desire to figure out what works -- has shaped her professional choices ever since.

Her first stop was Rand Corp., the Santa Monica think tank, which in the mid-1970s was launching its now-famous criminal justice program. Over the course of 20 years there, Petersilia worked on probation, policing and a host of other projects.

Peter Greenwood, who hired her at Rand, recalls his colleague as “the same dynamic, energetic, organized person” who fires off e-mails in the pre-dawn today.

“If you were playing ‘Survivor,’ ” Greenwood says, “she’d be the one they’d elect captain of the lifeboat.”

The Rand years were a gratifying time, with Petersilia and the criminal justice program, which she headed from 1989 to 1994, in demand across the country. But by the early 1990s, she recalled, “nobody would pay attention to us in California. The pendulum had begun to swing.”

With its inmate population soaring, the Golden State grew preoccupied with building prisons. Legislators scrambled to outmuscle one another by proposing tougher sentencing laws, such as the “three strikes” measure adopted by voters.

Disillusioned, Petersilia landed a position in UC Irvine’s Department of Criminology, Law and Society in 1994. There, she has become a popular professor while also advising other states on prison reform.

Last year, her home state, its jampacked prisons awash in scandal and violence, came calling in the person of Kevin Carruth, undersecretary of corrections. An old acquaintance, Carruth flew to Irvine and spent the day lobbying Petersilia.

“She’s a world-class researcher and one of the most respected criminologists in the country,” Carruth said. “It would be foolish for us to not tap into that knowledge.”

Petersilia hesitated, recalling the cold shoulder she and other academics had received, even as California’s prison system spiraled downward. What sealed the deal, she said, was her belief that those in charge of corrections today “don’t believe they have all the answers.” At meetings of the agency’s top executives, Hickman gives her a seat at his elbow and consults her on whatever topic may arise.

Her priority is to scour the nation for programs with proven results and decide which to import. She is also creating a research center for corrections, likely to be based at UC Irvine.

Signing on with the corrections team came with a price. Petersilia gave up a sabbatical at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government this year and has put more than one vacation on hold. But she still makes time to hike the hills of Santa Barbara with her husband, and recently was spotted belting out favorites from her seat at a Rod Stewart concert.

So far, Petersilia has no regrets. “I used to break down the door to get these people’s attention, and now they’re inviting me to the meetings,” she said. “There won’t ever be a moment like this again.”

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Steeped in subject

An avid cyclist when she has time, Petersilia met her husband, retired engineer Steve Thomas, on a biking trip. She has two grown sons, who are developmentally disabled, from a previous marriage and has long been active with the Special Olympics.

* Though a registered Democrat, she eschews political labels: “I let the data drive me. If you do that with corrections, you’re pretty much going to be middle-of-the-road.” She is a former president of the American Society of Criminology.

* Petersilia has been invited to spend next year on the faculty of Stanford Law School. At UC Berkeley, law professor Frank Zimring, who once taught a course with her, says: “She doesn’t carry around a large ego that can take up too much space in reform efforts. Joan has no personal ambition to carve her initials anywhere. What you see is what you get.”

* In 2003, a book by Petersilia, “When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry,” was published. It underscored a national statistic often overlooked in the debate over crime and punishment: About 95% of those behind bars eventually get out.

Los Angeles Times