They’re Sold on Soft Cell Approach

At the end of each workday since May, Willis has driven from his job as a wheel manufacturing supervisor and checked into one of the most exclusive rooms in Southern California.

The cost is only $55 a night, but if he fails to check in by 8 p.m. he will lose his spot and be forced to live in a far less comfortable place: Los Angeles County Jail.

Willis is one of hundreds of convicted criminals so frightened by the idea of serving their sentences in county jail that they pay the equivalent of hotel rates to be incarcerated in smaller suburban jails.

The largest and probably most coveted “pay-to-stay” jail program is Pasadena’s, where Willis and hundreds of other inmates spend time each year. Most are on work programs and return to custody each evening after their normal jobs. There is also the option of serving straight time, but that costs $78 a night.

As the county jail population exploded in the 1980s, small suburban police departments capitalized on the county system’s growing reputation as crowded and violent. While county jails routinely house four prisoners in a cell, many suburban jails give inmates a cell all their own.

“What we’ve tried to do is create a humane program for people to serve their time and not lose their jobs,” said Sgt. Walter Brush, Pasadena’s jail supervisor.

And make a few bucks for the Police Department too.

When Pasadena police built a 70-prisoner jail six years ago (with shatterproof glass instead of bars), it set aside space for 20 “inmate workers.” As a result, the Police Department makes about $130,000 a year off the inmates, surpassing similar programs in communities such as Culver City, Hawthorne and Montebello. Most suburban jails have room for only four or five inmate workers.

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Critics have questioned the fairness of the program, since its cost is prohibitive for all but middle- or upper-class convicts.

Like most inmate worker programs in Southern California, Pasadena’s is designed for people convicted of nonviolent, non-drug-related offenses--drunk driving or white-collar crime, for example--making its jail a much safer environment.

Safety has its price, however.

In addition to steep nightly rates, inmate workers will probably serve longer sentences than prisoners in the county system, where overcrowding means convicts sometimes do only a small fraction of their sentences.

Willis--who spoke on the condition that neither his real name nor his crime be published--was sentenced to one year for a felony. Because of time served while awaiting sentencing and time off for good behavior, he will probably serve about six months in Pasadena. By contrast, he said, his lawyer told him he might have spent only three months in county jail--”if I survived.”

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A soft-spoken man with a buzz cut and a boyish smile, Willis spends most nights on a bunk behind four panels of glass and half a dozen deadbolt locks. Every weekday between 6 and 8 a.m., he checks out of the Pasadena City Jail to go to work at his wheel plant in the San Fernando Valley, where he supervises 10 employees. He spends weekends at home, also in the Valley. The number of nights spent at the jail per week may vary according to each inmate worker’s arrangement with the court.

Thousands of Los Angeles County convicts are sentenced to conventional government “work release” programs, in lieu of jail time, spending their nights at home and their days on Caltrans road crews or cleaning parks. Willis would not have qualified for that program because of the nature of his crime; nor would he have wanted to--he needed to find a way to keep his job.

To be jailed in Pasadena, Willis says, is a new lease on life. By the time Pasadena accepted him, he was desperate. Six other suburban jails had turned him down--in part, he believes, because the crime he had committed often attracts violence in jail. Faced with the prospect of entering a county jail, he began to fear for his personal safety.

“My charge is not a good one to go to county with,” he said.

While staying in Pasadena, Willis said, he has met inmate workers who are lawyers, business executives and doctors--people who characterize themselves as everyday citizens who made some poor choices.

Pasadena police market their program to civic groups and business associations with that kind of empathy.

“Our slogan is: ‘Bad things happen to good people,’ ” said Janet Hinton, the assistant police chief. “Ultimately, we will all know somebody in our family that will have to go to jail at some point in their lives.”

Pasadena started its pay-to-stay program shortly after the completion of its new jail, a bright, modern, $3-million structure with white walls. The jail is arranged in six pods, each with four to 16 camera-monitored cells. Two of the pods are devoted to “inmate workers,” 12 men and eight women.

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More than 1,000 people have used the pay-to-stay program, which is often filled to capacity and sometimes has a waiting list.

Perhaps Pasadena’s most famous inmate worker was Dr. Dre, the rap producer and musician who filmed a video in the Mojave Desert with the late rapper Tupac Shakur last year while living at the city’s jail.

Dr. Dre, whose real name is Andre Young, applied to Pasadena to serve a five-month probation violation sentence that grew out of an earlier conviction for breaking another rap producer’s jaw.

The ability to pay is one of the criteria Pasadena police use in deciding who participates in the program. The $55 or $78 nightly charge “puts us in the Hilton or Doubletree range,” joked Police Cmdr. Mary Schander.

Still, Schander and Brush insist that inmate workers span the class spectrum from blue collar to white collar.

“The worker inmate program was never designed to be a rich man’s program,” Brush said. Prisoners who have a good reference from a court official--about 5%--are not required to pay.

County Public Defender Michael Judge said the safety and well-being of prisoners should not depend on their income.

“Our clients would not have $55 a day to live at a city jail” like Pasadena’s, Judge said. “Our clients are indigent. They don’t have the money.”

Julie, another Pasadena inmate worker serving time for grand theft, makes no apologies for having the money.

If she has to be confined, she says, she deserves to stay in a jail like Pasadena’s.

“I’m not like most people in jail. Those women in county don’t care where they go or what happens to them,” Julie, 24, said disdainfully.

Before she became an inmate worker two months ago, Julie was working part time and preparing for her junior year as an English major at a Los Angeles-area college. Fired because of her job-related crime, she found similar work in Santa Ana and withdrew from school so she could afford her stay at the Pasadena jail.

As with Willis, who supervises 10 employees at his job, Julie’s co-workers have no knowledge of her unusual living arrangements.