HIRE POWER : When a Decent Job Means a Second Chance, a Layoff Can Be a Double Whammy

Get in the car. We’re going to talk about redemption. You drive. East on the 91 Freeway to Compton. Ring the buzzer on the wrought-iron security gate. We’re going to talk to Baxter Sinclair.

Baxter Sinclair owns a company that lays utility pipelines. Resignation is etched across his face these days because business is lousy. He can’t do what he loves to do, which is hire young men whom most of us regard as untouchable. His specialties are gang members and former inmates. In better days, you could find a dozen or two working for him. Now there are almost none. Soon he’ll move the business to Las Vegas.

It kills me to see this. I first ran into Sinclair four years ago, when his redemption business was good. I loved the simple truth he was telling: that most unemployed young men would rather work at decent jobs than gangbang or sell drugs. It clashed with the stereotype that we in the news media were peddling.

Remember 1988? Los Angeles “discovered” gang violence after a woman was killed by gang cross-fire in Westwood Village. The cops, TV and newspapers had an easy explanation: Gang violence was a direct outgrowth of the crack industry. It was convenient: If we could convince ourselves that inner-city criminals were killing each other over drug money, we could ignore the fact that what causes much of the violence is a social psychosis in which kids identify with the 83rd Street Hoover Crips or Lime Street Bloods because there is nothing else to identify with. We could tell ourselves that it was their own fault. No messy gray areas.

I can’t remember anyone that year trying to correlate the rise in gang crime to the erosion of Los Angeles’ industrial employment. Baxter Sinclair did. He put his money where his mouth was. He hired the guys nobody else would hire, and, for a brief moment, he was a hero, a black Republican who took the I’ve-got-mine edge off free enterprise. His willingness to employ gang members brought him plaques from county supervisors and entreaties from urban experts in Washington. He was named to state panels studying private employment of prison inmates and the status of African-American males.

But the praise was nothing more than talk. Government was too fearful of taxpayer wrath to respond to Sinclair’s plea for more job-training programs, for something more than incarceration. Most of the young men he hired trickled away. Many returned to crime. “When you weigh it out,” Sinclair said last year, “it seems like it was a waste of time. . . . The message didn’t get across.”

A few weeks ago, I was back in his office. A young man who’d like to be known as Dewayne because he doesn’t want his grandfather to know about the dark part of his life walked past Sinclair’s door. Get in here, Sinclair ordered.

Look at him, Sinclair said. I took him coming out of county jail and put him to work. Didn’t need to use threats. He came out disciplined, ready to work.

Dewayne had done nine months in jail for an armed robbery conviction he is appealing. Sinclair hired him because Dewayne had spent four months of his jail time in a 2-year-old Sheriff’s Department “boot camp,” the Regimented Inmate Diversion program in Saugus, which combines military-style discipline with academic classes. But when Sinclair Corp.’s business fell, Dewayne was laid off.

He’s still looking for a job. A graduate of a South Los Angeles parochial high school, he said boot camp toughened him, stripped away his moral laxness, restored his faith in the value of hard work.

“If they want to go around saying black people are a burden on society,” he said, “then instead of building prisons, why don’t they build some rehabilitation centers, develop government apprenticeship programs like they do in Europe?” Good question.

By the way, taxpayers won’t have to worry about the Regimented Inmate Diversion program anymore. The Sheriff’s Department, desperate to balance its budget, has eliminated the program, saving $4 million a year. The last “platoon” graduates tomorrow.

We’ll pay later.