Probation Officer’s Job Is ‘Patchwork’

Bill Robinson, a bespectacled man with a graying beard and an unusually soft voice, describes his job as patchwork.

“You do as much as you can,” he said.

That can mean getting a pregnant teen-ager, who is also a runaway and a shoplifter, into a special program for unwed mothers rather than see dropout added to her record.

It can mean convincing a teen-age youth with no skills that the Job Corps is his only alternative to unemployment, or it can mean cruising around a city park at midday looking for a familiar face that was absent from school that morning.

Robinson is a juvenile probation officer assigned to a special program at Centennial High School in Compton. He tries to patch together productive futures for young criminal offenders, most of whom come from homes where nurturing is the exception and poverty, abuse or neglect are the norms.

“His mother is someplace in L.A.,” Robinson said of his youngest client, a 14-year-old burglar living with his aunt. “(The mother) has no regular contact with him. She’s a drinker. Father’s whereabouts are unknown.”

Robinson is the first to concede that the success rate in juvenile probation is not very high. The overwhelming majority of juvenile offenders end up as high school dropouts, he said. Few have the kind of family support that gives them the motivation to stay on track.

This year, however, Robinson is celebrating a higher than usual success rate. He has four young males among his cases who have graduated from Centennial. Last year, only one of his clients graduated. The year before, the number was the same--one.

“You’re not going to be nothing if you don’t graduate,” said Michael, one of the four Robinson helped to graduate. A strapping 18-year-old with a gold chain around his neck, Michael is on probation for burglary.

“You’re going to have to have a job,” said another of the four, Donyea, who was arrested for theft and sports a minor arm wound received in a drive-by shooting. “You got to support your family,” said Donyea, who revealed that he also stayed in school because, “I like to do stuff that messes with my mind.”

“Catcher in the Rye,” he said, was the best book he read in school.

Robinson and the youngsters he supervises are part of a little-known program called the School Crime Suppression Unit run by the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Under the program, juvenile officers are stationed at 19 of the toughest high schools in the county, including campuses in Pomona, South-Central Los Angeles, Pasadena, Inglewood and Compton.

Compton has two probation officers, Robinson at Centennial and Benoise Franklin at Compton High School. Because they are on campus, the probation officers can provide close monitoring and intensive supervision for the approximately 50 youngsters on each of their caseloads, said Sandra Moss-Manson, director of the unit.

The typical juvenile probation officer, she said, has a caseload of well over 100 youngsters. “The caseload is very small for School Crime Suppression,” she said. “It has to be for that kind of intensive program.”

When a juvenile fails to show up for school, the probation officer gets in his car and goes looking for the youth, Moss-Manson said. In addition, the officers act as counselors for youngsters who get in trouble at school but are not yet in the Juvenile Court system. And, on troubled school campuses, where gangs are a fact of life, the probation officer is often called on to cool down volatile situations, she said.

As part of their training, Moss-Manson pointed out, juvenile probation officers are required to do a stint in juvenile detention centers, where they learn to defuse tense confrontations and also how to calm emotionally distraught youngsters.

Next year, however, it is unlikely that both Robinson and his counterpart at Compton High will still be on campus. Severe budget problems in school districts and at the county level have imperiled the School Crime Suppression Unit.

The Probation Department began the program at one inner-city Los Angeles high school about 10 years ago, but as gang activity and juvenile problems intensified, more and more schools have joined.

In some cases the county paid the full cost, and sometimes the school district paid half the cost of putting a probation officer on campus. Now, the county is caught in a budget squeeze and is insisting that all the school districts in the program pay half the cost of the probation officers. Compton has put enough money--$35,000--in its budget to pay half the cost of one officer but not two.

School Trustee Kelvin D. Filer said that although the probation program has proved to be successful, the district is struggling financially just to keep all its teachers on the payroll. The Los Angeles Unified School District, Moss-Manson said, stands to lose all 12 of its probation officers.

Robinson, the son of a minister and a 21-year-veteran of juvenile probation, said he hopes the program will survive in Compton. He has spent most of his career there, working with its young people.

“I do feel I’ve made a difference,” he said. “I’ve seen some success. Youngsters have gone off to college. I’ll run into youngsters now when I’m in the market who are in their 30s and they have made a life for themselves.”

Sometimes, youngsters whose probation he supervised years ago will call him and ask for advice, Robinson said. He tells his young offenders that despite their records, their poor academic skills, their less-than-adequate family backgrounds, they can make a life for themselves away from crime.

“I tell them that it’s not easy but it is possible.”