Making Crime Pay : A Program That Allows Corporate Criminals to Reimburse Community
“One of the feelings white-collar criminals experience is anger,” Frances Ellen said. “They feel everybody else is doing what they did--they just got caught.
“Or, they feel, they were a victim of circumstances. If they hadn’t offered that bribe, they wouldn’t have had a chance at getting the contract.”
Barry Minkow, Ivan Boesky and a cast of thousands. Their crimes aren’t committed with guns. All they usually need are telephones and pens. The euphemism is white-collar crime.
Served Time in Prison
When Ellen speaks on the subject, it isn’t just something she read about. She is a 47-year-old divorced mother of three who recently completed probation after serving time in prison. She and a partner in a Los Angeles investment firm were convicted of, among other things, tax and securities offenses, including losing $13 million of investors’ money.
Nowadays, three hours nightly once a week, she may be found in the conference room of a downtown building. Seated before her are from eight to 15 people, who show up for eight weeks. No outsiders are allowed.
Many of these people have had their fill of public exposure. They are, mostly, convicted white-collar criminals, part of whose sentence is community service.
“One thing I tell them is that they should be grateful they are sitting here,” Ellen said. “They could be in a prison instead.”
The meetings are the first step in a program sponsored by the private, nonprofit Foundation for People Inc. Working mostly with the federal court system (and increasingly the state system), the foundation seeks the best ways for criminals--many of them doctors, lawyers, computer specialists--to serve the community while fulfilling their sentence requirement.
Elizabeth Nepstad, the foundation’s executive director, gave an example: “One man we were involved with was brilliant with computers. His misdeed was that he had broken into a computer system and was caught trying to get checks out of it. To satisfy his community service, he set up computer training programs for nonprofit agencies.”
Since most of the foundation’s various programs began six years ago, about 1,200 criminals have been involved, Nepstad said.
Those who must do community service, however, begin with the take-it-from-me Frances Ellen course.
“I hadn’t yet done any of my required 1,000 hours of community service when I approached the Foundation for People,” Ellen recalled.
What she had in mind was a support group for people who had been convicted of crimes, especially the white-collar variety. She got the green light.
Not only does Ellen’s workshop deal with the emotional and psychological needs of probationers (“five years, such as in my case, is a long time for an adult to be monitored and managed”), but its goal is to get the participants to admit that they are the only ones to blame for the choices they made.
“Once you do admit it, you now realize you have the choice in the future to say no,” she said. “At the time of the crime, you justify it. You may say, ‘I’ll do it only once.’ ”
Although the sessions are strictly private and participants’ names confidential, Ellen willingly disclosed how she had faltered and had come to accept responsibility for her actions.
“I think that in my case, I was trying to secure my financial future without having to marry someone again,” she said. “I wanted a comfortable life style, power and prestige. When the point of choice came, I weakened and I became vulnerable. I wanted these things badly, and I wanted them now.”
Newcomers to her workshop, she said, are oftentimes hostile, suspicious, negative and arrogant. By the end, they usually have lightened up, their self-esteem has been restored (a family counselor also is present), and they are prepared to repay the community with whatever skills they have.
One graduate is transcribing oral histories for a museum.
Another is clearing mountain trails in U. S. forests.
Still another is providing hospital patients with videos of vintage movies.
For those who might argue against community service as part of a sentence, Nepstad had this reply: “For some crimes incarceration is appropriate. But for many serious but nonviolent crimes, community service is a substantial punishment.
“You have just come through a conviction in the courts, your family may have broken apart as a result, you probably can’t go back to your old job, maybe you are in your 50s, maybe you are in debt,” she said. “Now on top of this, you have got to devote time to community service. This is the punishment.”
In the last five years, in seven Southern California counties, community service has been part of an average of 536 federal sentences.
Another foundation program is community service placement. After eight weeks at the workshop, the offender is ready to make restitution to society.
“They can suggest where and how they want to do community work, but I make the decisions,” said Phyllis Summers, community service placement director. “Everything is confidential, but the agency does know it will be getting, and agrees to be getting, somebody with community service hours to do. The placement has to be with another nonprofit group--hospitals, youth organizations, senior citizen associations. I have a long list.”
“We like it because we get free work from some highly qualified people,” said a spokesman for a local hospital, who asked that the facility not be named. “Of the total hours from volunteers last year, 20% came from community service referrals.”
The spokesman said workers’ backgrounds are kept confidential, although the hospital knows who the referrals are. Indeed, “we screen them beforehand. If drugs had been part of the background, we wouldn’t put them in an area of the hospital that had drugs.”
Allen McLean, deputy chief probation officer with the U.S. Probation Office, added that “obviously if a person had been convicted of bank embezzlement, he wouldn’t be placed in a position involving the handling of money.”
But once placed, the offenders can be a boon, as the hospital spokesman said, noting, “mostly what we get are skills we would otherwise have to pay big salaries for--workers in the finance office, in the computer department.
“For example, if the offender is a tax accountant who has to work off 2,000 hours, and we get all of that, we are receiving for nothing about $50,000 worth of talent.”
More and more, judges are making community service part of a criminal’s punishment.
Judge Manuel L. Real, chief judge, U. S. District Court, central district of California, said he has used the service sentence for about 15 years.
“I probably have imposed more community service hours on more probationers than all the judges of this district combined,” he said. “My approach is to give the person a taste of jail, plus adding a heavy number of community service hours. And I have the person report back to me personally while completing those hours.
“I happen to think that most economic crimes, such as embezzlement, result from a sense of greed,” he said. “By doing community service, the offender gets an appreciation of what it means to help somebody.”
Still another foundation program that uses Ellen’s services (she has completed her required hours and now is a paid consultant) began only two months ago--corporate crime prevention. She speaks before business groups about it.
“One thing I say is that company environment can encourage white-collar crime,” she said. “The attitude might be, ‘Do anything you have to in order to get business.’ If a job depends constantly on a certain level of performance, if a worker is under unceasing pressure, the resulting stress can encourage white-collar crime.”
A worker in a company granting mortgages, for example, might falsify loan applications to qualify applicants. Or, if an applicant needs to show more income to get a loan, he might get illegal encouragement from the worker to falsify his tax return.
“Also,” Ellen tells her audiences, “when a company doesn’t compensate an employee properly for work, that person may steal something as a form of revenge. A bank teller, for instance, may begin stealing money.
“Company ethics play a part. Everything starts at the top. If there is criminal activity at the top, is it prosecuted? I advise businesses to countercheck people who have authority. They can sometimes get careless.”
A fourth foundation program is known as Employment Plus.
“Employment at a livable wage is vital to staying out of crime,” Nepstad said. “Since many of the people working off their community service hours under our guidance are businessmen, we use some of them to help parolees and other probationers find jobs.
“Every working day from 10 a.m. to noon, about 25 of them show up to hear the businessmen advise on how to develop job leads, how to dress for an interview, how to talk during one.
“And, of course, how to deal with the part on the application that asks if you have ever been convicted of a crime. Basically, they are told to be honest and up front regarding what took place--if they stole because they were under pressures, that doesn’t excuse it, but they should explain what happened.
“Some of the businessmen have actually completed their community service, but continue to conduct the sessions as volunteers.”
Finally, the foundation, which operates on an annual budget of only $150,000, runs an on-the-job training program. “This involves business owners--and sometimes a company itself,” Nepstad said. “They help satisfy their sentences by giving training and employment to convicted criminals who have never held jobs or who may need employment while attending school.”
For example, a manufacturing company with a machine shop found itself in Federal Court. In a totally unrelated case, so did a master machinist. The foundation used them together to turn unskilled job-seekers into machinists.
Such companies can refuse if they consider referrals inappropriate. But they must--often at the direction of a court--take some of the felons.
Statistics on recidivism are hard to come by, and those available can amount to comparing apples and oranges. But for whatever it is worth, according to Nepstad only 15% of those who have taken the Foundation for People workshop (known as Cares) have relapsed into their former lives of crime.
This, according to McLean, compares with a federal courts rate nationally of 32% for parolees, and 20% for probationers in 1988. “We not only provide support for former criminals to put their lives together, to resore their own dignity,” Nepstad said, “but hopefully we make them tax-paying citizens again, productive and law-abiding.”
