Mentor Spotlight: Paula Wolff, MA'69, PhD'72

CURRENT ROLE: 

Director, Illinois Justice Project

UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE:

Bachelor’s degree in government, Smith College

PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT:

• Senior Executive, Chicago Metropolis 2020 and Metropolis Strategies
• CO-Chair, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s Public Safety Transition Policy Committee
• Lecturer, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
• Director of Policy and Planning, Office of Governor James R. Thompson
• Director, Illinois Governor James R. Thompson’s Transition Team
• President and professor, Governors State University
• CHAIR, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar’s Transition Team

Throughout Paula Wolff’s career in government and politics, she’s had the opportunity to help shape public policy in many areas including public safety, education, and health. So, when Wolff was in search of a new role and focus, she narrowed her scope to what mattered most.

“I thought about what policy in Illinois needed the most work,” she says.

The quest led her to pursuing criminal justice reform. She wanted to tackle mass incarceration and the way people are treated in the criminal justice system. Today, as Director of the Illinois Justice Project, Wolff has found purpose in righting the wrongs of the past, including policy she helped shape as an adviser in the Illinois Governor’s Office during the nation’s push to be tough on crime.

Wolff, a University of Chicago double graduate and a Harris Public Policy mentor, now leads the civic organization that works with others to develop and implement policy and programs to reform the criminal justice system by addressing childhood trauma and reducing youth and adult violence, crime, and incarceration.

“Maybe in some way I was expiating sins that I didn’t realize I had been committing,” Wolff says. “The kinds of policies that we had developed in the Governor’s office were not the right policies. There was focus on increasing punishment and incarceration—it was pretty standard for what everybody was doing at the time.”

Wolff says there is research today on mass incarceration and the effects of trauma on people, which didn’t even exist when she worked in the Illinois Governor’s Office from 1977 to 1991 as Director of Policy and Planning for Governor James R. Thompson. There, she directed policy for all areas of state government while she and her staff served as liaisons to 57 state agencies.

"When I was in the Governor’s Office, Illinois and states around the country were really increasing the penalties for criminal activity and expanding the definition of what was criminal behavior,” Wolff says. “And the result of that was six-fold growth in the number of people who were incarcerated between the ‘70s and 2000.”

She turns to research on brain development and trauma that informs her work today. In the 1980s and 1990s, the United States was experiencing the increased incarceration of young people, she says.

“The human brain doesn’t fully develop until somebody is 24 or 25 years old. So there is a real opportunity to rehabilitate people when they are younger instead of having very harsh punishments for juveniles and young adults. Instead, we should address the underlying issues—like exposure to trauma and violence—that frequently cause them to go into the justice system.

“Another variable I was unaware of in the time I was in the Governor’s Office was the extent to which the policies would hurt people of color,” she says.

She says a resources gap contributes to the problem, including lack of opportunities in the legal economy, poverty, poor educational opportunities, or no educational opportunities at all.

“We don’t have enough resources in the community to prevent people from going into prison, and that ranges from behavioral health treatment to substance abuse treatment,” she says.

Her trajectory in public policy and wide range of careers that brought her from state politics and government to higher education, as both a professor and President of Governors State University, gives her a unique lens that she applies as a mentor to Harris students.

About the time the Harris School of Public Policy was founded, Irving Harris, for whom the school is named, asked Wolff if she would serve as a mentor. She encourages all of her mentees to spend time in government and to not be afraid of being a generalist, and to use those skills across a number of policy issues.

Wolff still keeps in touch with mentees, including one who found a letter from her several years ago. The mentee, Beth Swanson, MPP’02, a Vice President of Strategy & Programs at the Joyce Foundation, recounted the details of the letter Wolff wrote to her when she was a Harris student.

“This is before we were doing emails,” Wolff says.

Given Swanson’s interest in education, Wolff recommended in the letter that her mentee reach out to three people: Arne Duncan, the former Chicago Public Schools superintendent who went on to become the Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama; Valerie Jarrett, a lawyer who went on to be President Obama’s senior adviser; and former First Lady Michelle Obama, who was running the Chicago office of nonprofit Public Allies and then held leadership roles at the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“They were just people then,” Wolff says. “They weren’t the illustrious public servants that they have grown up to be.”

As Wolff continues in her work to reform the criminal justice system, she says Illinois is seeing progress. Ten years ago, the number of youth projected to be incarcerated in Illinois was 2,600. But today there are fewer than 400 youth in prison in the state, and three juvenile prisons have closed. The imprisoned adult population has decreased too. But Wolff says much more must be done to reduce the number of people incarcerated and to increase successful re-entry to communities since more than 40,000 people leave jail or prison in Illinois each year.

For someone who loves policy, Wolff’s purpose is clear.

“We still don’t have a perfect union,” she says. “There are still a lot of policy issues in this country that are unresolved or are resolved in ways that are unequitable or unfair. Trying to make policy more equitable and fair is what drives me.”