Eliminating the Bounce of Bad Checks : * Consumers: Run a red light, go to traffic school. Write a bad check, and you may be sent to a class that tries to break your little habit before it becomes a big problem.

Checks don’t really bounce. They roll along and fall like balls on a pool table.

At bank processing centers, they shoot through check-reading machines, and if there’s not enough money in their accounts, they carom into a slot called the “pocket.” Then the bad-check specialists take over.

Those specialists say that nowadays the “pocket” is getting exactly what it doesn’t need: new blood.

Like the 24-year-old woman spending her Saturday in a community college classroom, compliments of the Orange County district attorney. “I never bounced a check before, I swear,” she says. “This is first time it’s happened.”

Which is exactly why she and hundreds like her have been attending such classes all over California. The goal: Make them see that bouncing a check is morally wrong, before it becomes a habit.

In 1986, the state Legislature authorized district attorneys to set up their own check collection programs. So far, programs are operating in 11 counties, aimed at rookie bad-check writers who might still feel guilty about it. Like traffic offenders, they are sent to school in hopes that will patch up their attitudes.

“I have a lot of compassion for these people,” says Don Mealing, owner of American Corrective Counseling Services, the firm hired to run the Orange County program. “Most of them, when they signed that check they had no intent to defraud. It’s kind of ‘there but for the grace of God . . .’

“We’ve had people attend who looked like street people, and we’ve had doctors and lawyers.”

After seeing about 3,200 people go through his classes since they began in September, 1990, he says a typical student has emerged: A woman of modest means in her late 20s or 30s who has been writing the occasional bum check since she opened her first checking account.

The Los Angeles County program has operated since 1986, administered by the D.A.’s office itself. Larry Mulligan, head of the program, says he’s boiled down to its essence his image of his typical student: “It’s someone who can’t live without the Twinkies and Ding Dongs and always figures they can make it to Friday.”

Notorious as a bad-check center even in good times, Southern California sent $33.8 million worth of checks into the “pocket” every banking day last September. That’s $4.4 million a day more than in the kinder, gentler September, 1988, when total check volume was the same--about $1.8 billion a day.

Cashex-West Inc., reputedly the largest check-collecting agency in Southern California, now is receiving 80,000 bad checks a month, far above its usual 60,000. “I think one of the reasons is that it’s harder to collect on these checks now,” says Cashex general manager Larry Page. “We have more clients and they’re referring more checks to us. It’s taking a lot longer.”

Says Bob Johnston, collection supervisor of Commercial Check Control in Los Angeles: “Lately with the economy, we’re getting more of the first-timers, a lot more, people who have run into problems.”

If past years are any indication, things will soon get worse. Bad-check volume will increase and peak this month, when bills come due for holiday cheer.

Many such bills will be paid with checks backed mainly by hope.

Most people in the Orange County program, Mealing says, don’t fit the criminal personality. That’s one reason he thinks the program will work: “When they signed the check they had no intent to defraud. They just didn’t take care of it.

“About a third of the people are in some short-term financial crisis and write a bad check as a kind of loan. They intend to pay it back. Another third are just procrastinators. Another third are passing bad checks to meet living expenses.

“Underlying all this are their values toward money, relationships, being responsible. They’re very basic issues, but they don’t see the relationship to their check writing. So we try to remove their rationalizations.”

That isn’t always easy.

Take Brad, who wrote a hefty check to buy a car stereo and wound up in one of Mealing’s Saturday classes in Santa Ana.

It wasn’t his fault, Brad explains to his 18 classmates. He’d moved out of San Diego, but all his mail was still going there. So how could he know his checks were bad?

You don’t keep track of your checking balance? Mealing asks.

“I don’t have the time.”

Why didn’t you have your mail forwarded?

“I don’t know.”

Don passed a bad $14 check at a supermarket, then didn’t respond to letters asking payment. “It was just an oversight,” he says. “It’s easy to oversight $14. I focus on the bigger things.”

Debbie reacted to her latest bad check by closing her checking account. She gets in trouble, she says, “because I can’t say ‘no’ to my kids.”

Colleen had promised to take care of her bad check, “but I just forgot about it. When no one’s helping you and you have all these responsibilities,” she says, leaving the rest of the sentence to inference.

The program’s greatest value, Mealing says, may be what the students dislike the most: being forced to attend classes when their “crimes” seem so trivial. One class member was there because a $6 check went sour.

“But if you’re doing something you know is wrong--like writing bad checks--you feel guilt. And if you can’t change that behavior, you eventually lower your values to match the behavior,” Mealing says. “That eases the feelings of guilt, all right, but it’s also the route to becoming a criminal.”

Check-collection programs were born to meet the needs of the grocery industry, which claimed it took a $444-million bad-check bath statewide in 1983.

The stores’ problem was that police departments, fearful of a deluge of bad-check complaints, set minimum amounts for checks they would investigate--typically $100, $200 or more. Most grocery-store checks didn’t qualify.

The 1986 legislation allowed the local district attorney to create a new avenue to prosecution that didn’t involve the police. If bad-check writers didn’t pay up after a reasonable time, the store or individual could send the bad check and a complaint directly to the D.A.’s bad-check program, which would mail its own demand for restitution, this time backed by the threat of criminal prosecution.

Mealing says that about 80% of bad-check writers who receive the letters pay up right away. Many offer to come to the office that very day and pay in cash “if they just don’t have to go to that class.”

But the class is mandatory. The check writer must pay for the class ($50 in Orange County, $40 in L.A. County), pay a $25 fee for each bad check and make restitution. If the check writer floats another bad check after completing the class, Mealing says, “we go straight to prosecution.”

Program details vary by county. In Orange County the bad check must be $500 or less and the class lasts eight hours. In Los Angeles County there is no maximum check amount and the class lasts four hours.

But spokesmen for all programs boast that they cost taxpayers and victims nothing. All expenses are covered by the bad-check writers’ fees, the spokesmen say. The Los Angeles program even makes a surplus, says Mulligan.

According to Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi, his program handled about 45,000 bad checks and collected about $300,000 during the first year.

“I’ve had very positive comments from businesses in the community,” he says. “They think it’s one of the best things since sliced bread, and I think so, too. Everybody comes out ahead.”

Mealing says he knows of only three of his 3,200 graduates who have again written a bad check. He said no statistics exist on repeat offenders and that such statistics are almost impossible to compile. “I’d guess that over the long run, maybe 15% might write bad checks again,” he says.

Al the bartender disagrees. He says his personal checks bounced because his payroll checks bounced. This class, he says, “is a mockery of justice. Who protects the little guy? I’m real angry about being here.” Al adds that the class was a waste of time for him: “I know all this stuff already.”

Mercedes, a gray-haired and jittery woman, says that the class didn’t do her any good either, because her problems taught her to “never write another check.”

Perhaps, Mealing suggests, she could handle an account after she learned how to manage one in class.

“No,” she says, “I’d rather die.”

But Linda, young and quiet, says she feels better after taking the class.

At the start, she had told about writing her bad check because her husband was a day late making a deposit. “We’ve gotten it worked out,” she now tells the class. “For the most part, we pay cash for things. We have a checking account if we need it.”

“Is that arrangement OK by you?” Mealing asks.

“Well, we have other financial problems, and my dad . . .” She breaks down sobbing and leaves the classroom.

After class, she says that she had learned a few things: “If you write a bad check, it’s you who did it.

“I think I could handle things better now. But I still think I’ll leave the checkbook alone until we get back on our feet.”