Introduction:

Welcome to Policy Chats, the official podcast of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. I'm your host, Rachel Strausman. Join me and my classmates as we learn about potential policy solutions for today's biggest societal challenges.

Joining us today is Executive Director of the Western Riverside Council of Governments, Kurt Wilson. My fellow classmate, Esa Hasan and I, chatted with him about community development, disproportionate minority contact deficiencies within the criminal legal system, and regional governance and collaboration.

Rachel Strausman: 

Thank you so much for joining us today, Executive Director Wilson. We are so glad to have you here.

You have such a diverse array of career experiences, you're a local government expert, advocate and educator from working as a city manager in Ridgecrest and Stockton to now being the executive director of the Western Riverside Council of Governments, which is why we are so grateful to have you here, executive director Wilson, to discuss a variety of policy issues in California from equity to justice to local government. So getting right into it.

One of your many diverse career experiences is being the director at the Office of Community Safety and Violence Prevention for the City of San Bernardino, among others, and including as well the executive director for the California Department of Rehabilitation. So what inspired you to pursue your career path and how have all of the roles you've held in the past enabled you to make significant contributions to public service and community development?

Kurt Wilson: 

Great. Well, first, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Especially since UCR is down the street from our offices, it's always good to be connected in some sort of way. So for me, the public side of things began pretty early on. As soon as I finished with high school, I ended up on a local commission, just sort of by coincidence, just some people that I had known, just sort of inadvertently set that ball in motion. A neighbor of mine named Dan Lopez, and then
mayor of Rialto at the time, a man named John Longville. That sort of started that process, working away through getting started there. And then I ended up on the city council when I was in my twenties. So there was the same thing, election was coming up and I ran for election and I was fortunate enough to win that election. And that's how I began the service on that side of things. Once I was done with the city, I ended up, I was still doing a lot of private work, but that's really where I ended up over at the city of San Bernardino.

One of the things I had done when I was in Rialto was to work with a group of people who was starting a police activities league and a boys and girls club in the city. And we had no idea how to do it. So I had previously served on the board for the boys and girls club over in San Bernardino. So I went to them and basically said, Hey, how'd you do it? And they said, look, there were these three guys. They went through one of those founding members for San Bernardino was a gentleman named Pat Morris. And by this time he was a spirit court judge. So he actually spent 30 years on the bench.

And that was really my first interaction with him, was trying to pick his brain about how they managed to pull this thing off. So in doing that, sort of fast forward, he decided to leave his role on the bench because he lived in San Bernardino and his heart was in San Bernardino for him and his whole family. They were very concerned with a number of things going on. He had a history, a very prominent role in getting drug courts and the whole care court system here in California. But having been the presiding judge and people really expected this law and order piece. Just as he was about to take office, the city was going through some pretty dramatic and very publicized issues around violent crime. Most prominent was a young girl, I believe she was 11 years old, who ended up- she was shot and killed, but while she was actually in her house. So she was sitting in her house, just doing what you do at home. And a bullet ended up coming through. So there was a lot of pressure there. So he decided to put a very serious emphasis on it. So through some of his colleagues, we ended up connecting and I ended up agreeing to go over to work on things there. So I sort of ended up there because the opportunity itself was very interesting. Had a lot of confidence in him, even though I didn't know him very well at that point. I had a lot of confidence in what he had done. His family, the whole bit, was just a very solid group of people who were very committed to their community and sort of the benchmark of public service and everything that they did. In fact, his son came over to be his chief of staff, his son who was also an attorney, which was a very heavy lift because due to the nepotism policy in the city, his son wasn't allowed to be an employee. So the demonstration they had about public service was so deep that he literally left a high paying job in a well-established career just to be supportive of family, which put them in a very unique position. One of the things that came up from that time was a focus around parolees, sort of looking at the number of parolees that were in the city, why that was, how they got there, that sort of thing. So I ended up spending a lot of time around parole and just sort of understanding how parole worked. And in that process, I made some contacts with some folks in the parole side who were phenomenal people. In fact, a guy named Willie Bolda reached out to me once out of the blue just to say, hey, Senator, he knows on our radar, we'd like to come talk to you. Coming from that, the governor at the time was Arnold Schwarzenegger. He ended up creating a position for me within CDCR. And in fact, my wife and I took a dual appointment. For her it was education and for me it was CDCR. So we went and that's how I ended up doing that side of the house, was as an appointee and working through that side originally as a chief within CDCR and then later switching to be the executive director for what was then called the correction standards authority. That was a new name.

And then it has changed names again since then, but that included everything from juvenile issues to regulatory oversight of jails, police stations, lockups, the whole bit. So taking care of the state's issues and the federal issues as well, because the feds didn't have the staff to do some of those things. So I had just this amazing group of folks who would go out and do those things. So on one hand, you know, we had a team that would go out and sort of inspect jails and make sure they were in compliance with all the rules and that the inmates were appropriately treated. That same staff would sort of do the reports. So you can, you know, if you have curiosity about what the stats really are about who's locked up or for how long or what group or demographic the whole bit, they would compile all those things. And then a different side would focus on grant funding and all the care things. Everything around either federal initiatives or state initiatives, essentially really trying to focus on the best interest of younger folks. In fact, we had a second board, which was specifically around juvenile justice and delinquency prevention. So it was an interesting mix of folks who were all trying to get to the same thing of getting better outcomes for communities throughout the state.

Rachel Strausman: 

That's amazing. Thank you so much. I think it's very interesting that you've been able to have such a, I said it previously, but diverse career with so many different experiences, kind of getting the opportunity to work in the private sector and the public sector and for local governments and more state authorities. But with that, I'm gonna pass it off to Esa for the next question.

Esa Hasan: 

So focusing specifically on your role as executive director of the Corrections Standards Authority at the California Department of Rehabilitation, what role does it play in the criminal legal system?

Kurt Wilson: 

Within the criminal justice system, there are so many different components. So, you know, the component we all think of is frontline officers who are on patrol and do some of those things, which is sort of the backbone of the frontline criminal justice system. And I've got a background with that part as well. So I have an appreciation for the work that everyone does sort of day in and day out. And then taking a look at say the prison system itself, there are often a lot of criticisms about who's incarcerated or how many people or for what offense they're incarcerated. A popular term that critics use is the school to prison pipeline. Worrying about really how difficult it is once you are criminal justice involved, how difficult it is to separate from that and a number of factors to go along with that.

Ironically, a lot of times the focus where the criticism is with the prison system itself of saying, hey, how do you get those folks? But in California at least, those who were housed within the institution are not selected by CDCR. They're there because the county sent them on a bus to go deliver them. So once someone has gone through their process, they start up in the jail once they're accused. And then if they're convicted, for an offense that's serious enough, they're gonna work their way to the prison system. So they literally just go from the jail to the prison. So the prison side literally just takes anyone who comes on the bus. So from a policy standpoint, those who are looking to affect change would likely have better results looking a little earlier in the process. In some cases, there are questions around how policing is done, for example. Or in other cases, it's around how sentencing is done.

We've gone through a number of periods of time throughout our history, not so distant history, where we had certain types of crimes that were more common for certain groups of people or certain demographics. And the enforcement, the penalty, associated with those crimes didn't always follow a logical path. So it would seem that one group would get very little punishment or another got a very significant punishment. And it would all often fall along demographic lines that were concerning. In some counties, there are concerns around, sort of, the prosecutorial piece. That's always a difficult one, remembering that prosecutors are elected in California, and they have certain obligations for the people who elect them. They expect certain things of them. So if you are in a county where the people who put you into that office expect you to take a particular stance, that's likely what you're going to do. So it puts things in a more precarious place that way. In terms of the Corrections Standards Authority, probably the most significant role, well, two pieces. One would be in terms of the actual housing. So it's one of the groups that goes in to make sure that conditions are appropriate. So there was a time in our history, and I would argue that still in some areas of the country, it's the case that once someone is convicted of doing something, we sort of throw them away. Say, get over there and then we pay no attention to sort of their care and feeding or what goes on with them. And then when they come out, having been in that environment, we're somehow surprised that things didn't get better, that they didn't somehow make this change and now they're going to be on this great road.

California has put a significant emphasis on the quality of care, sort of balancing. There's a punitive piece, but there's also a human piece. That line shifts politically, depending on sort of where you fall in that, but California tends to embrace that piece. And on the prison side, it had some, we'll call it encouragement, from a three-judge panel of federal judges who were concerned about the conditions inside. So, with the Correction Standards Authority, or now the Board of State and Community Corrections, one of the things they do is to ensure that things are done properly, not only for the safety and wellbeing of those who are housed within those facilities, but they also look out for the best interests of everyone else, that the institution itself is following a clear set of plans that protects the public, that protects the staff that are inside, and the idea of sort of keeping everybody safe. So in that respect, they're sort of the regulator. When someone is on supervision, so they're on probation, there are a bunch of rules that come along with it. So if you're an adult, there's a penal code 3003. You said, look, here's the county you're gonna have to go back to, and then you do this and you do this. For juveniles, it gets more complicated because in addition to the regular rules that say, you should go back over to this place while the juvenile probationer is subject to some of those restrictions, the parents are not. So if the parents, for one reason or another, say, hey, I'm going to move now to out of state, I'm going to Texas or Arizona or whatever it's going to be, that creates a unique situation where arguably, in most cases, the best scenario for that juvenile is to have a safe and structured environment, and if those parents are able to provide that and keeping them together makes a lot of sense. So another role that the group played at that time was that the interstate compact for juveniles, basically an agreement between states for how they would handle those things, because that individual still required some supervision, but it was no longer going to be realistic to happen in state. So there's sort of a partnership so that even though the person is no longer in California, they can still be supervised. and sort of go on and have the structure around them to have the best outcomes that they can.

Then the grant funding piece is really around trying to find innovative programs or to avoid programs that actually cause harm to help along the path. And that's really folks who are ideally not yet criminally involved. They haven't yet been placed in handcuffs and gone down that road because the data is quite clear that it is much, much more effective and much, much, much cheaper to make a slight course correction earlier in the process. That, however, creates a political challenge of not everyone is on the same page in terms of when it's appropriate to use public resources to start that process.

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Rachel Strausman: 

It's very interesting that you brought up, kind of like, these collateral consequences of convictions, like struggling with access to housing or employment post incarceration, but I haven't had the opportunity to hear a lot about collateral consequences for juveniles and their experiences going out of the criminal legal system. Have there been a lot of promising policies in California specifically on addressing those collateral consequences beyond what you've already discussed, or is it something that's still an emerging issue that needs to be addressed?

Kurt Wilson: 

It is. So for the advocates who work in this area every day, they know it far better than I do. But they work their way through these processes. One example I can give you is something called Obi’s Law, which is here in California, and it was passed after an incident related to a gentleman by the name of Obi Anthony. So Obi was a young man in South LA. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder, a whole slew of things. He said a long, look, it wasn't me, it wasn't me. He was not successful in that. He would argue he did not have the best defense at the time. I think he's right. And there were a whole series of things that happened that failed him. Ultimately, the person who was accused of being his co-conspirator was housed in a different facility, ended up getting into a confrontation with another inmate, which resulted in the death of the other inmate. And since he was already in the situation that he was, he was suddenly a death row candidate. That brought in some other folks, some additional resources to do the homework and kind of figure things out. Through their efforts, they were able to prove quite convincingly that the conviction didn't make any sense. His initial conviction, that couldn't possibly have been him. And then ultimately, Obi-Anthony benefited from that. So the good news is he was exonerated and sort of in grand fashion. So it wasn't just like a technical, well, we couldn't prove it. It was- there were some very egregious things that happened in this case that, very shameful. It's actually a story I recommend you look up. And he was finally released. But the bad part is this all, the crime happened when he was right around 17, 18. So he stepped foot into the state prison for the first time when he was 18 years old. And he spent the next 17 years, it was like there. So, you know, he's had some irreparable harm. He's just, you know, he's a remarkably intelligent, articulate guy. I've spent some time with him. He's sharp, but the impacts are very, very clear that they're still there.

In his case, so for a regular person who comes out of the prison system, the idea is you've been away for a very long time. You get out and all of a sudden even cell phones are a new thing because we still have folks inside now who literally have never seen one on the outside. Because that's how long they've been in there. So trying to find your way around this bus thing or phones or uber, computers or you know all this stuff is all new. So there are a series of things that the state puts in place. California is unique in placing everyone who comes out of the prison system on parole. So they have that pipeline, regardless of how long you were there, the whole bit. If you come out of the state prison system, you can go on parole, you get a parole agent, they say, report here, do this, do that. And you get access to all these tools and these resources, all intended to help you reintegrate, recognize that it's been a minute. You've got all those things. In his case, he needed those same things because he'd been away for 17 years. But because he was not on parole, he was not eligible for any of those things. So in his case, here he got out, needed all these things and there was literally nowhere for him to go to get it. So the Obi’s law concept was a small step toward making some things available, but he very clearly needed services that would have been available to him had he gone out and got on parole.

Rachel Strausman: 

Wow, thank you for sharing that. I think that sheds light to how difficult it is to make. policy decisions about the criminal legal system, because at the end of the day, you can boil it down to politics, but it's truly affecting people's lives. And it's a really heavy, important issue. So kind of shifting gears a little bit to what you were talking about, disproportionate minority contact deficiencies are an unfortunately prevalent issue that have persisted in our criminal legal system for a while. Could you please explain the impact of this issue and what has been done or can be done to resolve it?

Kurt Wilson: 

Sure. So part of the change that happened, so even when I was at the state of, well, right as I was getting to the states, DMC was actually Disproportionate Minority Confinement because the concepts was limited to those who were incarcerated. And then later, with the benefit of additional research, that's where it became Contact, recognizing that there's sort of a chain of events. And again, the earlier you can you can identify something, the better the outcome is going to be, the better chance you could make some sort of positive impact with it. And it's that initial contact. That's the issue. Once you're in the habit of, of, of having negative contact with law enforcement, there are certain things that happen. You go down that road and that's the part that's so difficult to get out. So the idea of keeping statistics is sort of born of that idea of saying, well, let's take a look. And on paper, it sounds very simple that, hey, it should be exactly the same. If the community is represented by this percentage of this demographic, that's exactly what we would expect to see in terms of contact. Unfortunately, it's more nuanced than that. Because if you look at just everybody who's in the community, I'm looking outside the window now and looking at downtown Riverside, not everybody that I'm seeing has the same likelihood of having particularly negative contact with law enforcement. So there's some other layers there.

Now there are many, many examples where the culture of a particular agency has taken specific steps to target a certain group and that bears out in the stats. But there are others where that may not quite be the case and the stats are a little more cloudy in terms of figuring out what that looks like. It's a fairly recent thing in California to universally collect the type of statistics that we collect. So we'll see what that looks like in the longer term. But the issue is whether that's the core problem or whether it's a symptom of a problem. So if you are patrolling and you are targeting a particular group, that's a problem. And the whole concept of DMC is supposed to sort of expose that so that we can make a change. So that's no longer the case. But if you are patrolling based on objective factors, it may not always come out exactly even in terms of those demographics. So I think those statistics by themselves are a very good start. And I think if something comes up there that doesn't quite seem right, I think the most useful piece is to dig further. In the cases where culture is the issue, it's not hard to find. If it's an agency where that's what they're doing, or they have this group of officers, or they're doing so and so, the pattern is quite clear. So by taking a closer look and having access to the information to take a look, it's not so difficult to find. But the idea that people should be able to enjoy the same freedoms, the same rights, the same Fourth Amendment protections against certain seizure and all the constitutional protections that we all enjoy, that makes sense. But everybody should be able to do that. The question is at what point, sort of, where do we find that balancing point?

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Esa Hasan: 

Thank you. So one of your many accomplishments during your time there was addressing these disproportionate minority contact deficiencies to awareness, training, and equitable grant distribution. How did these initiatives contribute to promoting a more equitable and just system?

Kurt Wilson: 

Part of it is resources. So we have communities, you know, so whether you're talking about a city, a county, a state, not everybody is on the same playing field. In many cases, there is a resource gap that is quite profound and easy to see. You can see the difference when you go into a poor neighborhood. And it's not just, okay, I expect the house to not look as pretty. You'll see a lot of other factors. You can see the same things, you know where you're going. You'll expect to see all the different things you expect in terms of the number of people on the street, the number of vehicles, what people are doing, the types of vehicles, how people are dressed, what time they get up in the morning to go to work. All those things are sort of indicative of it. But in terms of how to fix it, even if a community recognizes a problem, it's not good enough because they've got to find a solution and figure out how to pay for the whole thing. If the issue in a wealthy community is, or let's say a middle, upper middle-class community where there are a lot of commuters, so the parents are gone, they've got to go work, and then the kids have some time, and for whatever reason, they end up getting into some trouble. That community is likely to say, you know what, we're going to figure out an after-school program, we're going to do a Boys and Girls Club, we're going to do so-and-so, we're going to do these things to sort of address that time period, and we're all set. And a lot of times, they'll have a lot of success with that. The same thing can happen in a poor community. Parents are gone the same amount of time or more, because if you're in a very poor community, one job is not enough to be able to make rent. You may have higher density. Maybe you have, you know, two families have to live together or two generations or more. You have something else because you're just trying to sort of make ends meet. If you don't have the benefit of your own vehicle and you have to rely on public transportation, that takes a lot longer. You've got to leave for work a whole lot earlier than the person who's got access to a car. You've got those same things. They may recognize the same issue and say, hey, it would make sense if we could do so and so, but that community just doesn't have the resources. They can't get it done. So even though they may have a similar problem, the one that lacks the resources is unable to take action unless something else jumps in. And that's where you do the philanthropic side comes in or in that case, the state comes in to be able to fund some of those things. And by being able to do that, it creates those opportunities that a particular group is probably gonna be deprived of otherwise.

Rachel Strausman: 

Thank you so much for that. That's all very fascinating to hear about. And this has been such a great discussion on the criminal legal system and justice in California, but kind of shifting now more to your recent role as executive director of the Western Riverside Council of Governments. Could you please share some insights into how your experience in this position has influenced your perspective on addressing equity in regional governance and collaboration?

Kurt Wilson: 

Yeah, I'd say that so the concept of equity is viewed different ways by different people. So people who tend to view themselves as being comfortable, they've got everything set, the system is working quite well for them, sometimes take a different view than people who view  themselves as in need of something or falling behind or doing some of those things. The tricky part comes when you're trying to make the change. So public policy wise, you've sort of got to get that critical mass of people, of the right people to sort of make that change. And getting there, you know, so often it's voting people. It means you've got to get to that piece. But getting to that means you've got to get enough of those people who vote, who are stakeholders, residents, business owners within that community to say, yes, I want to make this change. A lot of times I see the difficulty in that the approach comes forward with the idea that- it comes across almost like Robin Hood. So if you're the poor who's expecting to benefit and get something from it, Robin Hood's a hero. If you're the person from whom those things are going to be taken, you have a very different view of Robin Hood. A lot of equity efforts fail because they're presented in a way where there's a clear winner and subsequently a clear loser. The person who feels as if they're being attacked or that they're likely to lose is inherently going to push back. We see that in issues of race, we see that in issues of policing, all of our social issues, it's a very similar theme where we're not starting from the same place. By understanding that from the get-go, you're able to come up with some concepts to make a little bit more sense. So if you think of sort of businesses, there's a whole other group of businesses called business to business. They don't sell to the end user. They sell to the other folks. So a cog would be similar to that. We're sort of the business to business of local government. We don't serve directly the people who live in, in this case for the city of Riverside, but we do serve the city itself. And then that's who serves them. So we're sort of a partner that comes along to provide support. We can work on issues of economy of scale or technical expertise, whatever it is for any of our folks, so all these different public agencies, the concept of equitable distribution of resources, for example, comes up quite a bit because cities in one area don't have the same needs and often don't feel like they're treated the same as a city in a different area. We have some cities that are clearly poor or more wealthy than other cities just within our region. And if there were a goal that everybody agreed on for what we were trying to get done, we can do that. So to the extent that we have things, we do some things around transportation, for example, which are very equitable. But the only reason that's possible is because that's what everybody has agreed to. Those are the ground rules. In the event that we were to take a more narrow definition of equity, for example, we would have some difficulty because not everybody would be at the same place to figure things out.

So one of the takeaways in working with this many different groups is to recognize that it's not that the answers are right or wrong, because it's literally the elected officials. It's what they say it is. That's their role. That's their job. They get to make that determination. But if you're dealing with a group who has a different interpretation and is making a different determination, it's not realistic that you're going to be able to get to that outcome because you're going to have winners and losers. And losers will always push back.

Esa Hasan: 

Thank you so much for your response. We have just one final question. Given your experience, what advice would you give to aspiring public policy professionals hoping to join the field of public policy?

Kurt Wilson: 

I would say recognize that things have changed. So in the old days, the career advice for everyone was, you wanna go work for company X or city X. So go figure out what they're like. In fact, advice used to be: go to the parking lot and look how they're dressed, and that's how you should dress and you want to do that because the idea that you can blend in, because that's what they want. That is an outdated approach. And while there are still areas where that's the case, there are much less now. But now I would recommend spending the time to figure out who you really are instead, your interests, your strengths, your weaknesses, your preferences. And instead of saying, I'm going to do the square peg in a round hole, I'm going to make it fit for this particular organization, be open to finding an organization that's going to be a better fit for who you really are without having to contort into that spot. Once you're in the job, yes, you do have to comply and you've got to do all those things. But if it's a reach, there's going to be this unending level of tension and it's going to impede your growth. It's going to, you're going to, you're going to peter out quicker. Either you'll burn out, you'll get bored, or you'll just be frustrated, you’ll feel underappreciated, you'll have all those different things because you're not able to be your true and authentic self. And instead, if you can figure out who your true and authentic self is, and then figure out a role that is compatible with that, I think you're gonna have a much happier time, a much better career. But the takeaway is it may not be that place that's right next door. It may mean that you've got to go somewhere else or do something you didn't initially plan on. There's some trade-offs that come along with it, but if you can find that sweet spot, you can be happy. So regardless of what your career is, there are some people who do, even careers that we say, man, I would just hate to do that. I would never want to do that. And there are some people who do that job with a smile and they're happy. You can be happy in whatever it is you're doing, but only if you've aligned with who you really are and you get to truly bring forward what you want to bring forward.

Rachel Strausman: 

Thank you so much for that. I think our audience will definitely appreciate that advice. And it's always reassuring to hear that, you know, stay true to what you really are interested in. But with that, we've had the opportunity to discuss a variety of topics ranging from understanding the stories of the people behind the policies and the importance of that to looking at the data and the research correctly to overall understanding how to succeed in the policy world and the mechanisms and drivers of the systems that are in place today. So with that, thank you so much for joining us today, Executive Director Wilson. We truly appreciate you taking the time to share your insights with us and our audience.

Kurt Wilson: 

Thanks for having me.

Outro: 

This podcast is a production of the UC Riverside School of Public Policy, and our theme music was produced by C Codain. For the latest updates on the School of Public Policy, be sure to check us out at UCR underscore SPP on Instagram, or for more episodes and content, visit our YouTube channel. I'm Rachel Strausman. Till next time.