S.F.’s probation chief has unlocked a new era for offenders

Wendy Still, San Francisco’s chief adult probation officer, in the Adult Probation 5 Keys Charter School Learning Center. Wendy Still, San Francisco’s chief adult probation officer, in the Adult Probation 5 Keys Charter School Learning Center. Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close S.F.’s probation chief has unlocked a new era for offenders 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Wendy Still hasn’t been able to single-handedly change California’s “lock ’em up” mentality — but she sure has tried.

San Francisco’s probation chief retires Wednesday after an illustrious 25-year career in which she worked to reform the state’s criminal justice system from the inside, taking on fights over issues ranging from how women are treated inside prisons to how much is spent on corrections in California. In her final years as a full-time public servant, she has embraced rehabilitation over punishment and turned around the city’s largely ignored probation department.

Since joining the San Francisco probation department in 2010, Still has leveraged state and city resources to modernize the agency, employing new techniques and technologies to help the city’s offenders succeed once they are released from prison or jail.

By choosing what programs are right for individual offenders, Still significantly reduced the number of men and women on probation while also cutting the rate at which former offenders fail and return to custody — there are 37 percent fewer people on probation than in 2009, and the number of probationers returning to state prison has fallen by 83 percent over that time

She’s spearheaded a number of creative programs that are being held up as models for other cities, including the creation of a one-stop shop for criminal offenders to meet with their probation officer and connect with services. Other efforts include a partnership with the sheriff to open a place at the County Jail where state prisoners can start their reintroduction back into the community before being released from custody and the establishment of a house where mothers can serve their jail or prison sentence while living with their children.

Multitasking

She’s done all that while juggling work at the Department of Homeland Security, where she conducts civil rights investigations into allegations of mistreatment of immigrant detainees, and her participation in a three-year study on alternatives to incarceration at Harvard University. She was recently named one of nine “Public Officials of the Year” by Governing magazine.

“I don’t want to overstate it, but she’s kind of like a Joan of Arc of reforming the criminal justice system,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who has butted heads with the probation department. “She is one of my favorite people. She really has been a force, not only in San Francisco but in statewide and national reform efforts.”

For decades before Still’s arrival, Adachi said, the city’s probation department “suffered from a lack of resources, staffing and accountability.” Still arrived as the state was embarking on a new realignment policy, in which thousands of prisoners and parolees shifted from state oversight to county jail and probation, that required more collaboration among local officials.

“I found she was very collaborative in her approach, very good at sitting down — with the sheriff, the district attorney, the public defender, the courts, who all have different approaches — and extracting from us our common ground so we could could move forward,” Adachi said. “She was a mediator, but also a fierce advocate for her department, and she navigated the political waters in San Francisco well.”

Still learned how to maneuver tricky political landscapes during her two decades at the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. While there, she had stints running custody operations and business services at three separate state prisons, overseeing 10 prisons and 40,000 prisoners, crafting and managing the state prison system budget and instituting various reform efforts. Those included overhauling the prison system’s female offender programs and overseeing programs aimed at eliminating institutional sexism among both staff and inmates.

Found her path

Still, who graduated from high school at 16 and at 18 took her first job with the state of California as a “business officer 1,” doing basic contracting and leasing work, didn’t start out with any ambition of going into the criminal justice system.

“When I started, my whole aspiration was to be a business officer 4 when I retired,” she said. “But when I got to corrections, I knew I would do life there. ... From the second I got there, I could see that you could have a positive impact on people’s lives. Anything you wanted to do, they had the need.”

That attitude is rare in corrections, and was even more unusual in the early 1990s, when Still started at the prison agency. It was the beginning of an era in which lawmakers and voters passed law after harsh law increasing sentence lengths and leading to the biggest incarceration growth in the state’s history. During Still’s 2½ decades at the prison department, it went from 12 to 34 prisons (one has since closed).

“As we opened them up, they became overcrowded simultaneously,” she said. “I went into the prison system as everything was blowing up — it was the 'tough on crime’ mantra.”

But it didn’t take long for Still to embrace another approach.

“When I was chief deputy at Solano prison, I saw the 5,000 men there and remember thinking, 'What a waste,’” she said. “I knew we just had to do something differently.”

That philosophy, combined with a rock-solid work ethic and the ability to function on very little sleep, helped propel Still to success. Matt Cate, who ran the state prison department from 2008 to 2012, said Still “broke a lot of ground at the department” by embracing forward-thinking programs, such as risk assessments developed to help sort out what an inmate needs to succeed.

“Wendy showed a lot of guts,” Cate said. “She wasn’t just somebody beating the drum for less people in custody and more people in programs. She was saying specifically, 'Here are ways we can safely reduce incarceration; these programs work for these people.’”

Working doggedly

It wasn’t always clear that Still, who achieved her success while raising two children with her late husband and working her way through college and graduate school, would go this route, said her mother. Shirley Smith, who described her daughter as “shy.”

“She was the youngest of four children, so she kind of was always following after the older children,” she said. “In high school and and even when she first went to work, she was quiet. There wasn’t anything really unusual about her. But then all of a sudden she was so industrious, she just kept taking her college classes, and that was kind of the beginning.”

Still has always been devoted to her family, Smith said, and has brought that perspective to her work. She is sure that, even with her retirement, her daughter won’t stop pushing for reform.

“I think she is still going to be very busy. ... She loves helping people and she seems to have been real sensitive to the problems of prisoners and parolees, and focusing on their families so that it doesn’t start the children on the same path,” Smith said.

Marisa Lagos is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mlagos@sfchronicle.com Twitter @mlagos