Jobless Turnkeys Punished by Delay in Prison Openings

Danny Garcia came home to East Los Angeles from Vietnam in 1968 with a Purple Heart and a burning desire to be a cop, only to be told that at 5 feet, 3 inches he was too short for the Los Angeles Police Department.

“I made a joke out of it,” he said. “I asked them if they needed anybody to check flat tires. But it really hurt.”

He found other work: electrician, liquor salesman, Red Cross. He did OK--he and his wife bought a home with a big front yard and a swimming pool in Whittier for their three daughters, but his jobs were just jobs.

And then one day last fall, with his 40th birthday looming, Garcia bumped into a state Department of Corrections recruiting officer who told him that the state did not care about the height or age of the correctional officers who staff its prisons. Here, at last, was a chance to be a lawman.

Dream About to Come True

At first Garcia laughed it off. He was too old. Then, anxiously, he took the plunge and scored the highest possible total on the written, oral and physical tests. The dream was about to come true. He was told that he would enter the department’s six-week training program by April or May.

But these days Garcia is still hanging around his house, waiting and growing increasingly bitter. He is one of about 340 men and women whose lives have been thrown into limbo by a prolonged political squabble over where to place a new state prison in Los Angeles.

The state recently completed new prisons in San Diego and Stockton. But under a 1982 state law aimed at forcing Los Angeles to accept a new prison, the San Diego and Stockton facilities cannot open until the Legislature passes a bill formally designating land for a new prison in Los Angeles County.

The problem is that the only Los Angeles site acceptable to the state is across the Los Angeles River from East Los Angeles, where a coalition of Eastside politicians and community activists have exploded in opposition, gaining support from key Senate Democrats and effectively blocking the state’s plans. Negotiations on alternate Los Angeles sites have gone nowhere.

The lack of a solution has angered Gov. George Deukmejian because the state’s prison system, which now tries to cram 63,000 prisoners into facilities built for 35,000, desperately needs to begin using the 400-prisoner women’s facility at Stockton and the 2,000-prisoner men’s prison in San Diego.

Danny Garcia’s anger is more personal and fueled by a longer history, a history that he feels shaped him toward being a lawman.

He is the great-great-greatgrandson of a Civil War captain from New Mexico. He grew up admiring some of the cops from the Hollenbeck police station in East L.A. He was moved by a certain patriotic fervor--he can remember watching George Putnam’s TV commentaries as a kid. He dropped out of Roosevelt High School 10 weeks before graduation to enlist in the Marines.

“I was only 5-3 but I could carry an M-16 and carry 100 pounds on my back--I was a radioman for my company--but when I came back here the Police Department told me no. Same thing with the Fire Department.

“To have wanted so long to do this, and to have been finally afforded the opportunity to compete, and to score like I did and then have it put on hold--it’s like telling your kids it’s going to be Christmas and suddenly you have an earthquake and there’s no Christmas.

“It hurts me as a father, to see the way it affects my kids. They were so thrilled, and now it’s like I’m all talk. They don’t understand that I have no control over this. I think I’m losing my credibility with my children, and that hurts.”

The inability to staff the newly built prisons has sharply slowed the prison system’s placement process. About 200 men and women have, like Garcia, passed the acceptance test but have been blocked from beginning training for their jobs, according to Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Gore. The starting salary is $19,548 per year, although guards can eventually make as much as $32,424.

Another 140 people who had gone through academy training and been assigned to the San Diego or Stockton prisons are working temporary assignments at other facilities until the dispute over the Los Angeles site is resolved, Gore said.

It has cost the state about $1.8 million in living expenses to finance those temporary assignments, Gore said.

“Some of them had already moved down (to the yet-to-be-opened prisons) and had to leave their families there while they went to work at another prison,” he said. “We have some genuine hardship stories, people close to losing their houses.”

The plan to build a 1,700-inmate prison near the Eastside has become one of the strongest rallying points in the recent history of local Latino politics. Democratic Assemblywoman Gloria Molina, who represents the area, began rallying neighbors in 1985 and within a year had gained support from a broad coalition ranging from chambers of commerce to churches and activist groups. Latino leaders from as far away as San Diego and Santa Rosa have denounced the prison plan, contending that the Eastside already has more than its shares of jails and other unattractive government facilities.

All of which bugs Garcia, a stocky man with a mustache and touches of gray around the temples, who feels that he is as deeply rooted to East L.A. as anyone and contends that the site proposed by the Department of Corrections is not close enough to the Eastside for anyone to worry about it.

“It’s not in East L.A.,” he said, referring to the site’s location near 12th Street and Santa Fe Avenue. “When you grow up around Brooklyn and Soto like I did, that’s East L.A. The prison site is on the other side of the (Los Angeles) River. That’s where East L.A. starts. This isn’t in the backyard of East L.A., it’s in Central Los Angeles. Gloria Molina ought to be just as worried about the homeless people the city is going to put up (on vacant property at 4th Street and Santa Fe). Those people are a danger to East L.A., aren’t they?”

Garcia quit his last job two weeks ago and does not know when he will start working for the state, “but come hell or high water I’m gonna be a correctional officer.”