TWA Gives Juvenile Inmates Training as Reservation Agents

Starting this month, people who call to reserve a flight on Trans World Airlines may find themselves talking to a reform school inmate with special training.

“When the customer calls, they don’t know I am locked up. They are calling TWA. I am TWA. They expect someone professional,” said Eric Martin, 18.

Martin is serving two years for assault with a deadly weapon at the Ventura School, a California Youth Authority institution in this city 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Twenty-five of the 30 inmates who completed the six-week course last week will start processing reservations Jan. 22, said Sally McElwreath, TWA director of corporate communications.

“It will give them a chance not to go back to whatever got them into this place,” said Clyde McDowell, superintendent of the school.

Inmates will work a minimum of two hours a day and earn $5.67 an hour, program administrator Frederick Mills said.

Fifteen percent of the inmates’ paychecks will go to the state restitution fund for crime victims, 20% to the state for room and board and 45% to a forced savings account, to be given back to the inmates when they are released. That leaves the inmates with about $1.13 an hour to send home or spend at the school’s canteen.

TWA has spent more than $100,000 on telephones, computers and the training course, which normally costs $2,000 to $5,000 for each reservation agent, Mill said. TWA pays the school $200 a year in rent.

About 200 of the 665 inmates at Ventura School, including convicted prostitutes, burglars, robbers, murderers and rapists, applied for the program. The average stay at the institution is 17 months, Mills said.

Inmates will handle about 175,000 of the 37.5 million calls TWA receives each year from around the country, company officials said.

Applicants with a history of credit-card fraud were not considered for the program, said Irwin Weinberg, manager of reservation operations planning for TWA.

Precautions against fraud include having two TWA officials on duty at all times and visual monitoring of the facilities.

“We know the responsibilities and consequences,” said Shelly O’Neill, 19, serving time for an auto theft conviction. “We are more aware of what happens if we get caught.”

“If these people have shown us good work in the annex, then it is to our benefit to hire them” instead of training new people, Weinberg said.