Probation trailblazer Lopez moving on
WEST CHESTER >> For months, Jennifer Lopez had — metaphorically, at least — a pebble in her shoe.
She had worked for the Chester County Adult Probation Department since 1990, making her way up the ladder of the office that oversees the lives of those convicted of crimes of all nature — violence on the streets, drug addiction in the home, physical abuse in the community — until she reached the rank of deputy chief of the department.
Not only a leader in the office, however, but Lopez had achieved recognition in the wider criminal justice community, being part of new pathways for probationers both statewide and nationally.
She had, as commissioners’ Chairwoman Michelle Kichline noted last week, served as an ambassador for the county’s probation work, as well as having helped plan and organize innovative programs such as the county’s treatment courts and the Women’s Reentry, Assessment and Programming Initiative (WRAP) which earned the county notice at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and was a noted speaker at a multitude of professional gatherings.
“Her programs and her innovations and her leadership are known far outside these walls,” Kichline told the dozens of people who gathered on Friday to bid Lopez farewell.
But despite all of that acclaim, there was in Lopez’s mind a sense that something did not fit right, she explained during a break in the party that her colleagues in and out of the office threw for her on her last day of work for the probation office — that nagging feeling of a stone poking her in the foot with every step she took.
“I started waking up to the fact that as hard as we try in this system, we don’t always make things better for people,” Lopez said, noting how her children — progressive political activists — and her husband Jorge Lopez had helped her see things differently.
“We incarcerate too many people. Things are out of balance. And nothing is really going to change unless we change, change the underlying principles on which the system is built. We have to prevent people from coming into the (criminal justice) system,” not simply find new ways to punish them when they do, she said.
Tears welled in Lopez’s eyes when she thought of the people with whom she had worked for those three decades — fellow probation officers, Common Pleas Court judges, law enforcement officers, defense attorneys, social workers — all of whom dedicate themselves to their work, she said. “I really do respect what everyone in this system does,” she said after being lauded by those colleagues for her work. “I just feel that the change that I want to be a part of is going to happen outside, in the community.”
Last month, it was announced that Lopez, 53, of Honey Brook, would take on the new challenge of being executive director of the Friends Association for the Care and Protection of Children, a 197-year-old non-profit agency based in West Chester that focuses on keeping families whole and healthy.
As such, Lopez will be responsible for managing the organization and providing strategic planning to enhance the agency’s mission of ending homelessness in Chester County.
“We are thrilled to have Jennifer on board, and we are confident that she will bring a fresh perspective to the organization while continuing the high quality of service that Friends Association provides to families facing homelessness in Chester County,” said Brian Boreman, Friends Association Board President, at the time of the announcement. She begins work Jan. 21.
In brief remarks to the 100 or so people who filled a conference room on the third floor of the county Justice Center to say farewell to her, said she would carry the words often attributed to the English theologian John Wesley with her when she left: “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
Later she added, “We can solve some of these problems” — poverty, abuse, addiction, trauma — that fill the prisons and waiting rooms of the criminal justice system,” she said. “We, in the non-profit world, are the very last one to give up. I want to be part of that.”
The change in her career came as a bittersweet note to those who have worked with her, those who spoke at the ceremony on Friday. It serves as a harsh dose of reality because her absence would be felt, they said, but sweet because they realize she will be continuing her own passionate work for the unfortunate.
“I am very happy for her next phase,” said President Judge Jacqueline Carroll Cody, who helped form the county’s Drug Court program that Lopez was instrumental in implementing for 20 years. “We in the criminal justice system can’t do it all, and I think that she is going to make a big difference in the world.”
Others speaking included Kichline, who presented Lopez with a citation honoring her service from the three commissioners; Chief Probation Officer Christopher Murphy, who said his office was “blessed” to have had Lopez’s contributions; Judge William H. Mahon, who oversaw the treatment courts for several years and worked side by side with Lopez, and Judge Ann Marie Wheatcraft, who saw the commitment that Lopez gave to the her idea of service first as a prosecutor in the Drug Court program and now as the supervisor of the treatment courts.
Lopez, Wheatcraft told those assembled, “has always been one step ahead of me, and really one step ahead of everyone in our county’s justice system.
“She has taught us all that the people who come to us through the criminal justice system are worthy of our help ad our respect rather than our scolding and our disdain, Wheatcraft said, her voice choking with emotion. “Jen has helped us to see that the offenders who exasperate and confound us are products of their life experiences, not people who just won’t see.”
Wheatcraft said there had been signs that Lopez was unsatisfied with the work being done in the overall system, and recalled times when the two would butt heads and Lopez would tell her flatly, “I love you but you are wrong.
“I am afraid that our system is not changing as quickly as Jen thinks it needs to,” Wheatcraft concluded. “But we will all continue to apply the valuable lessons she has taught us. And I know in the end we will all be aware that Jen has always been right.”
To contact staff writer Michael P. Rellahan, call 610696-1544.