Hotel for Ex-Cons Only One With Its Own Parole Agent

Five years ago, Syed Ali bought a run-down, four-story hotel on the edge of MacArthur Park that had been scorched by fire and infested with rats. After pumping $1.3 million into the hotel’s renovation, Ali put up a sign in his office that read, “I do not look back!”

That, he says, is what he tells his tenants--85 ex-convicts.

The Hotel Ferraro at 6th and Alvarado streets is the only one in California that has its own parole agent on the premises to find jobs, trade school courses, financial aid and other assistance for parolees with nowhere else to go.

For Ferraro resident David Hicks, 26, who served a year and a half at California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo for trespassing while on a suspended sentence for strong-arm robbery, there is no alternative.

“There are a lot of people that need help and this place does help them. It gives them a place to stay, have a shower, it gives them a chance,” Hicks said. “Here, they’re more stable, they can go through job-search programs. If they’re out there . . . they wouldn’t have a chance.”

Parolees get a place to sleep, a place to shower and two meals a day, all for free. The state normally gives departing prisoners about $200 “gate money”--barely enough for a week’s room and board at the Ferraro and a set of clothes.

When Ali opened the hotel in time for the 1984 Olympics, he found himself providing so many beds for homeless parolees on general relief vouchers that he decided to approach the state for a more efficient arrangement. The Department of Corrections now pays Ali $22.50 a day per parolee, on a two-year, $1.4-million contract that nets the hotel owner $150,000 a year.

“If they were turned loose and told there was nothing anybody could do for them, they might resort back to criminal activity,” said Mike Van Winkle, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections, “and that costs more than the amount it takes to house them temporarily until they can find places to stay.”

Nearly 600 parolees--convicted of crimes including robbery, drug possession and car theft, but not murder--have stayed at the Ferraro since February, when the state appointed parole agent Robert Hodge to work full-time at the hotel in an attempt to keep parolees out of trouble.

Finds Jobs for 110

Since then, he has been able to find jobs ranging from plumber and butcher to truck driver and cook for 110 of the 600 resident parolees who have stayed there. He has also placed 25 in schools teaching television repair, auto mechanics and word processing. One resident, he said, ended up learning how to be a mortician.

Despite a fading coat of orange paint, iron bars covering some of the lower windows give the building a severe appearance. Nonetheless, most of the hotel’s neighbors said that Ferraro tenants do not cause any trouble, despite dozens of arrests there this year.

No visitors are allowed in the rooms, bare-walled and drab, apart from an occasional brightly colored bed cover. There is also a midnight curfew, and rules are enforced by room searches and bed checks by the staff and Hodge.

But unlike halfway houses and re-entry work furlough programs, parolees at the Ferraro are free to move out anytime, as long as their parole officers know their new addresses. Most of the residents--including a handful of non-parolees--stay anywhere from three weeks to three months, and leave when they secure a job, a steady income or enough money to pay rent elsewhere.

If the program works to reduce the state’s recidivism rate, the idea might be tried in other cities where the high costs of private room and board leave many parolees on the streets, said Jerry Di Maggio, regional director for the Department of Corrections.

Nearly half of all parolees released from prison in California end up back behind bars. Parole officials hope to cut that recidivism rate--and reduce the cost of housing prisoners--by giving parolees a chance to choose a life other than crime, said Frank Marino, field parole administrator. He figures that the Ferraro is saving thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money each year.

Of the 47,000 ex-convicts currently on parole in California, 12,000 live in the Los Angeles region, which includes parts of Orange County, officials say.

Those at the Ferraro have a history of transiency and their job skills are “practically non-existent,” Di Maggio said. Although they are not necessarily the most serious offenders, they are among those with the highest recidivism rate.

Those who live at the hotel and are physically able must make an effort to find jobs or to get job training. Hodge arranges for them to be tested for job skills and taught how to go through an interview.

When Hodge came to the Ferraro, he got rid of the two armed security guards Ali had hired and stopped carrying his gun because he thought the parolees saw the weapon as a symbol of mistrust.

“Just because someone’s been in prison, doesn’t mean there’s no way for them to turn around,” he said. “When they come around wanting to change things and you nurse them along . . . anyone can change if they put their foot forward. Even if somebody tries something and fails, it’s better than not doing anything for them at all.”

Hodge, who once suffered from a learning disability and could not read his own high school diploma, said he is especially interested in turning around illiterate parolees.

Some police officers, however, say rehabilitation is not possible.

Rampart Division police, who patrol MacArthur Park and the area around the Ferraro, say it is “insanity” to put 85 ex-convicts together in such a crime-ridden area.

“They’ve been in a penitentiary and you lock them up with others in the same boat,” Police Sgt. Mike Blackburn said. “They’re losers. They’re dishonest. They’re illiterate. They’re prone to violence.”

Lee Chamberlain, 27, a former resident, said he left the Ferraro after a month because the hotel reminded him too much of his three-year stay at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad for an armed robbery conviction.

“There’s too many hardheads in there. The atmosphere really turns me off,” he said.

Since February, 35 Ferraro parolees have been picked up for violating the conditions of their paroles, and 16 arrests have been made, including two for burglary and one for armed robbery.

Gets Few Complaints

But Hodge said police have not received complaints about crime problems caused by tenants. He routinely visits the Rampart station to ask if they have had any problems with the hotel. Both Hodge and Sgt. Tom Knopp said the answer from police officers at the front desk is almost always “no.”

Most of the Ferraro’s neighbors stop short of blaming crime in the neighborhood on the parolees, but they do complain about the number of people who wander aimlessly in front of the hotel, often asking passers-by for money.

Three doors away is Omar’s Hair Designs and Skin Care Studio. “They don’t cause a lot of trouble,” cosmetologist Manuel Diaz said of the parolees, “but they’re always outside asking for money. That affects business a little. A lot of our customers here who live nearby say they’re afraid to go out at night.”

Still, Diaz said the area has improved since the days when police were called regularly to the hotel in response to stabbings, beatings and murders.