On the Road Gang : Caltrans Doles Out Duties for Offenders Doing ‘Hard Labor’ Along Southland Freeways

It is penal service hiding behind coy euphemisms.

Work release. Celebrity diversion. Special programs.

They are, in essence, chain gangs without shackles.

“I sentence a lot of people to work with Caltrans,” said a Los Angeles municipal court commissioner. “Because it is hard work that in the heat of summer becomes hard labor.”

Said a Caltrans work crew supervisor of the discipline he helps enforce amid the ice plant and fast-food detritus of our state highway system: “You can classify it as boot camp. Because nobody volunteers for it and it’s the job that our people (regular employees) don’t want to do.”

Said the director of a county center that assigns work to those sentenced to all forms of community service: “On our list of 100 activities, picking weeds for Caltrans is not very popular. When people come in with a Caltrans form, they know that the judge meant business.”

Said the sheriff’s deputy of any reluctant lags on the state Department of Transportation work crews: “If they screw up, we handcuff ‘em and bring ‘em back. It’s slam dunk.”

But not many screw up.

They lift those cans.

They tote those bales of trash.

Because they all got a little drunk (or shoplifted, were joy riding, speeding or slapping cops) and would certainly have landed in jail but for California’s well-established program of using its misdemeanants to keep freeway embankments beautiful.

And these litter-pickers are not only impoverished culprits who could not afford a good lawyer. But also the attorney and the aerospace engineer, the television actor and the mayor’s daughter, the Skid Row hotel owner and the newspaper reporter, and . . .

* Kelsey Grammer, who plays a fun, neurotic psychiatrist on the NBC series “Cheers,” recently was sentenced to 10 days work with a Caltrans cleanup crew. It was one of several sentences handed Grammer, 35, for drunk driving, possession of cocaine and probation violations. When last seen, Grammer, a.k.a. Dr. Frasier Crane, was eastbound on the Ventura Freeway, picking weeds and his way to Pasadena.

* Earlier this year, Phyllis Bradley, 44, daughter of Mayor Tom Bradley, was ordered to a 30-day tour of duty with a Caltrans crew after pleading guilty to drunk driving. She was also fined, placed on probation and told to undergo alcohol counseling.

* In October, actor David Carradine, first of the karate kids and the enigmatic Kwai Chang Caine of television’s “Kung Fu,” pleaded no contest in Van Nuys Municipal Court to driving under the influence of alcohol. He was given three years’ probation--and 30 days on the end of trash tweezers with a Caltrans road gang. It seemed to add meaning to Caine’s quiet and obtuse teaching: “The wise man walks aways with his head bowed, humble, like the dust.”

* Michael Pringle, the Cal State Fullerton running back recently drafted by the Atlanta Falcons, has been tackled several times by the law. Last year he was sentenced to probation and Caltrans litter duty on a petty theft. Pringle, who had pleaded no contest, is a criminal justice major.

* The cop slapper. It was not Zsa Zsa but Rose Demirjian, 38, a news writer for the Armenian Reporter. She was stopped by a Glendale policeman for making an illegal left turn and managed to elevate the incident into a charge of misdemeanor battery on the officer. Demirjian, of Hollywood, was fined early this year, placed on probation and drew 30 days picking up trash and swinging a weed hoe for Caltrans.

“But the intention (of the court sentence) is to do work,” remarked Percy Ross, a superintendent with Caltrans’ Long Beach Maintenance Station. “Just because they are celebrities, they don’t get to ride around with a superintendent all day.

“They’re out bending and sweating alongside everybody else. We don’t treat anyone any different.”

Actually, Caltrans does discriminate a little.

The difference was dictated by law enforcers who know that even nonviolent, minimal-risk offenders will sometimes be tempted to walk away from their conscience and an honor-system work crew.

So the next time you see a freeway clique bagging Cold Cups and Krackel wrappers, examine the head gear.

Regular Caltrans employees wear white hard hats. California Conservation Corps workers chose blue. Transgressors doing time wear orange hard hats.

Miscreant trash patrols, remembers Richard Murphy, a Caltrans consultant and retired chief of maintenance, started in 1983 when his office “was approached by groups handling court referrals . . . agencies interested in finding some place where their people could do some meaningful work beneath supervision.”

Considered alongside the essentials of maintaining safety and traffic movement, he said, litter pickup had never been a biggie among Caltrans priorities.

“So it was agreed that if they (referral agencies) could furnish people . . . we’d supply the work site, the tools and the transportation,” Murphy said.

The beginnings were slow. “We were lucky, in that initial year, if we could put out two crews (of offenders) of 15 men each or enough to fill two vans,” Murphy added.

Program expansion in the seven years since has been enormous. “They (maintenance supervisors) are all telling me they are using every van they have and two buses to handle the people,” said Stan Lisiewicz, Caltrans’ chief of field maintenance. “We’ve had to turn people (court referrals) away, telling them to come back another time.

“We haven’t reached a critical overload, but we’re right at the red line and if there’s any increase I don’t think we can handle it.”

Ironically, the freeway cleanup crews--whether formed from direct court referrals or from jail inmates earning reduction of sentences of 120 days or less--have become vital to running a tight freeway.

“Our principal responsibility is safety,” Lisiewicz said.

So every temporary who shows for cleanup chores, he continued, frees a permanent worker for drain maintenance, slide removal, spill cleanup, light repairs, striping and marking, and other duties.

“We couldn’t give anywhere near the level of (safety) service without them,” Lisiewicz added. “And without these people, we’d be knee deep in trash.”

Examine any group of offenders and there won’t be a Cool Hand Luke in the lot. Caltrans crew leaders--on an average of one to a dozen laborers--aren’t even armed with whistles. There is little failure to communicate, and nobody has to ask the boss for water.

Yet the theory and purpose of convict labor remains--and last year Caltrans’ wrongdoer work force picked up 253,000 cubic feet of litter at zero labor cost to the taxpayer. That was enough to fill a line of dump trucks 250 miles long. A four-year load would fill the Rose Bowl.

The program covers every state highway, byway, byroad and bike path in California. From Pacific Coast Highway east to the Nevada border roads; from where Interstate 5 crosses the Mexican border and heads north to wave goodby and disappear into Oregon.

Yet it is in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties, with more than 1,100 miles of state-maintained highways, where the program is largest and most visible.

In May, court-ordered maintenance work (which includes pruning, transplanting, painting over graffiti as well as litter pickup) resulted in more than 12,000 days donated to three-county beautification. That translates to almost 150,000 days in the past 12 months.

And that, said Lisiewicz, is “the same as having 600 extra workers out there, seven days a week . . . although we accept that they are not as efficient, not as highly motivated (as paid employees) because they don’t really want to be there.”

Or do they?

“I’d rather be doing this,” said Sissy McEwen, 22, of Carson. She was hacking at dandelions and dog fennel along a fence line of the Artesia Freeway. “I know the monotony of jail time when the hours pass like days and the days like years, just sitting among prostitutes, drug dealers and real degenerates.”

McEwen, a cook on a catering truck, has been jailed twice. “Why? I drink and drive too much, that’s why.” She was recently convicted of a third drunk-driving offense and sentenced to 45 days with Caltrans. “So I’ve sold my car, bought a bicycle and got on Antabuse.”

In jail, she said, there was only time to brood and resent an environment of “no rehabilitation . . . just sitting there being treated like a dog.” But with Caltrans “they treat you with respect, they consider you to be human.

“Hey, nobody likes doing this stuff for free. But it makes you think, it makes you put two and two together until you know if you don’t do something about yourself, life isn’t going to get any better.”

McEwen’s day had started at the Long Beach yard, headquarters of Caltrans’ West Beach region, at 6:30 a.m. She reported with 80 other court referrals.

They were real estate assessors, the unemployed, an auto mechanic, an insurance salesman, a gardener able to smile at having to work his trade for nothing, and a student (“no names please . . . this is not something you go around and brag about”) who saw irony in his T-shirt.

He had received it for participating in a Long Beach Police Celebrity Sports tournament. A few weeks after donating his athletic effort and entrance fee, police busted him for joy riding in a 1984 Toyota Corolla.

“But it was Seal Beach police,” he said. He was sentenced to 20 days with Caltrans and had completed eight. “But I’ll take this over jail. This helps the state. Going to jail doesn’t help anyone. This is constructive punishment.”

Another man, a real estate salesman in sweat suit and sneakers, didn’t mind talking about the work (“I couldn’t move out of bed after the first day”) but also declined to give his name because “there are friends and family who don’t know I’m in this situation.

“If I’d gone to jail (for drunk driving) everybody would have known. But here I can work weekends, take some sick days and nobody will know. But I don’t want to have to do this work again.

“This has been a pretty sobering experience. And I’m not really a drinking man.”

Charles George, a crew boss, called for attention in the yard and spoke the orders of the day.

Hard hats and vests would be worn at all times. Always work facing traffic. Be careful walking on slopes. Look out for glass and sharp objects.

“Sexual harassment, be it male or female, is not permitted.” That brought sniggers from both sides. “Watch out for snakes.” There was dead silence at that one. “No spitting in the (hard hat) can . . . no drugs or alcohol are allowed . . . and, need I remind you, no leaving the program.”

Then vans towing portable toilets and carrying tools and toilers moved out across the county.

There, the guilty chewed dust and the fresh smog of crush-hour traffic. They squished and skidded on ice plant while tugging fallen ash saplings toward a mulcher. They endured a BYOSL (Bring Your Own Sack Lunch) alongside the Terminal Island Freeway, inarguably the noisiest, filthiest and most dangerous private picnic ground in America.

It only reminded Thomas (Tom-Tom) Lang, a 24-year-old legal services messenger, of how lucky he was. “Who would want to go to jail?” he asked. “I was once a civilian employee for LAPD and saw the holding cells at the Van Nuys division. That was not something I liked.”

Yet it was something he risked a few months ago when he was involved in a street argument. Lang picked up a crowbar. He says he didn’t swing. But he was arrested anyway and convicted of intent to commit assault with a deadly weapon.

Lang was sentenced to 27 days with Caltrans where, he says, the hours “are not easy to do . . . but the 20 days so far have taught me a lot.

“To think smart. To play cool. To realize I’m still a young man and working my way up. So who needs jail, trouble, or even this (Caltrans) experience again?

“After 27 days, you’ll never see Tom-Tom again.”

Rehabilitation. Recidivism. Lessons learned.

Yet these really aren’t aims of Caltrans sentences because the program does not involve hard-core criminals.

What it does achieve, the jurists and program administrators say, is a small easing of overcrowded jails. Los Angeles County Jail, for example, regularly squeezes more than 21,000 offenders into a facility built for 12,000.

Commented Los Angeles Sheriff’s Lt. James Oneill, who is in charge of the work-release program: “There was a time when someone who had 30 days to do came in and kept on walking right out the back door because we were too crowded. Now we are putting them to work.”

The county’s Inmate Placement Program, he continued, disperses early release workers to more than 100 agencies, including Caltrans. Combined savings are huge.

Maintaining prisoners within four walls, Oneill said, costs “$30 per day per prisoner.” During the 1988-89 fiscal year, outside work programs saved the county “$16 million in prisoner maintenance costs alone.”

Then there is the value of services performed by those prisoners: “It worked out to 2.5 million hours of service last year, which, using the minimum hourly wage, would have meant $12 million in payments.”

Los Angeles Municipal Court Commissioner Rebecca Omens-Rochman sees another small but important bonus: “This way, we know that defendants are going to serve all their time.”

Mitchell Block is the court commissioner who sentenced Carradine to Caltrans. But today, he said, Carradine might well have been detoured to graffiti removal with the city “due to the fullness of Caltrans.”

Either job is heavy duty for the typical minor violator (“usually upstanding, regular, middle-class people of all nationalities . . . not criminals”) and, Block said, punishment fitting the crime.

It might not be breaking rocks, he agreed, but a Caltrans detail “is punishment . . . and much more physically demanding than filing papers as part of some standard community services sentence.”

Yet tough as it is, working a Caltrans road gang is not the lowest rung on the county service ladder.

Oneill saves this job for those who might balk at freeway work.

“Coroner’s cleanup,” he said.