Sentenced to Service

Shuffling between black and white squad cars, David Rodriguez swept up leaves and trash in the parking lot of the Hollenbeck police station in Boyle Heights on a recent Friday morning.

Heavily tattooed and wearing the baggy clothes often associated with street gangs, Rodriguez, 30, said he never thought he would work at a police station, let alone be “treated right” by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Every morning I say, ‘Good morning’ or ‘God bless you’ to the police officers, and they tell me the same,” he said.

But Rodriguez isn’t a city employee. He’s “doing time” for drunk driving.

The City Terrace resident is one of thousands of Southern Californians who each year pay for their crimes with community service.

A court-ordered penalty, the unpaid labor is performed in place of jail time or as a condition of probation. Most people’s familiarity with community service involves hearing that celebrity A or athlete B has been sentenced to it for one transgression or another. Few people, however, know how it works.

The penalty is usually imposed in state or federal courts for nonviolent offenses, such as petty theft or white-collar crime, but it can be used for more serious violations too.

Most criminal justice professionals praise the program, saying it is less costly than incarceration, provides workers for government agencies and nonprofit groups, and is more likely to rehabilitate defendants, especially teens.

But even supporters cite problems. Some say participants fake time sheets to avoid work, or don’t show up at all. Judge Stephen Marcus, chairman of the Los Angeles Municipal Courts Alternative Sentencing Program, said community service, although generally effective, needs to be “fine-tuned.”

In a 1995 report, Marcus’ committee advised judges how to spot phony paperwork from offenders. The committee also put new safeguards in place, requiring special seals and signatures to verify documents.

Those measures helped reduce the problem of fakery, Marcus said, but he believes that there is still some fraud in the system, with offenders lying to the courts.

“It doesn’t happen that often, but it violates the integrity of the system,” he said.

Lack of government oversight is a systemic flaw. The Los Angeles County Probation Department is supposed to oversee the nonprofit centers that dispense community service work. But the department has almost no resources or personnel to perform that function, said Florence Fujii, the agency’s sole employee assigned to monitor the job centers.

“We have zero budget to do this work,” she said. “There’s no quality control. We just leave it up to the centers themselves.”

This lack of oversight can make judges hesitant to assign community service, Marcus said.

In one of the most extensive studies of California’s community service programs to date, UC Berkeley law professor Malcolm Feeley concluded that more government resources are needed to keep offenders from abusing the system.

Even so, he said, “Community service is a vast untapped resource for the criminal justice system” that needs to be expanded. Feeley’s study, conducted with UCLA statistician Richard Berk, covered community service supervised by the U.S. District Court of Northern California. But he believes the results are applicable to other jurisdictions.

The study concluded that community service is a bargain for taxpayers compared to prison, and that offenders in “well-run” programs were slightly less likely to break the law again than those incarcerated for similar crimes.

And although common wisdom holds that community service can only work for the most minor offenses and for a short period, Feeley found that it was effective for more serious infractions and longer sentences.

“Before, it could only be a slap on the wrist,” he said. But he added that his work with Berk “showed it could be effective for up to 2,000 hours,” or about one year of work.

Laurie Levinson, an associate dean at Loyola Law School, said community service is a worthwhile alternative to throwing people in jail for minor offenses--a costly process that can do more harm than good.

White-collar criminals are more likely to receive community service--an apparent inequity that on a certain level makes sense, said Levinson. “They could have more to offer in terms of community service: They can pick up trash but they can also do more sophisticated tasks,” she said.

Despite the challenges that community service presents, people on all sides of the county’s vast criminal justice system agree that it offers a variety of benefits to defendants and the community.

Free, Reliable Source of Labor

For government agencies struggling with budget cuts, and private nonprofit agencies that can’t afford to hire workers, the program can be a windfall, providing a free, reliable source of labor.

At Sun Valley Graffiti Busters, a nonprofit civic organization, community service workers begin lining up at 5 a.m. for a spot on the group’s work crew. Demand for jobs is so strong that supervisor Kevin Lukas said he regularly turns people away.

“I feel bad,” he said. “They made the effort.”

Lukas said he has had as many as 20 people trying to earn their community service hours show up for the six spots in the group’s van.

“We’re glad to have them. It’s free labor,” Lukas said.

Five days a week, the Graffiti Busters cruise the streets of Sun Valley. It rarely takes more than a few minutes to spot graffiti, Lukas said. When that happens, the van pulls over, the workers climb out, and they take turns painting and scrubbing.

“It was either this or go to jail,” said a 21-year-old community college student, convicted of riding in a stolen car. The man, who asked not to be identified, said he’d completed 41 days of his 45-day sentence.

The West Los Angeles Division of the LAPD used to have more community-service workers show up than Officer Ralph Strand knew what to do with. But then other city departments, most notably Parks and Recreation, realized they were missing out on free labor and started snapping up the workers.

While some offenders in Southern California are just trying to do hours, others see community service as a time to take stock of their lives.

In Rodriguez’s case, he was arrested on DUI charges and then failed to appear in court. He pleaded no contest, and in October was sentenced to a year in jail.

But after two weeks of sitting in his cell, he was offered a choice: stay in prison or do 1,800 hours of community service, roughly equal to 45 weeks worth of 40-hour work weeks.

It wasn’t a difficult decision, he said.

Rodriguez started work at the police station on Nov. 17. If all goes well, he will serve time there through June, working eight hours a day, five days a week. Every weekday he comes to work at 6 a.m., sweeps up the parking lot, washes squad cars and does other chores. At 2 p.m., he goes home, where he remains under arrest at the house he shares with his girlfriend and their six children.

He wears an electronic ankle monitor and reports every two weeks for drug and alcohol testing to a private firm that tracks convicts on probation.

“To be honest, change comes from within yourself, not something like this. But I like what I’m doing,” said Rodriguez. “It gives me discipline. I get up in the morning sober-minded.”

Community service may deter some offenders but not others from committing additional crimes, said Carey Ricard, a veteran sex crime detective at the Hollenbeck Police Department in Boyle Heights.

He offered an example of when and how to use community services.

Imagine, said Ricard, two young men arrested--on the surface--for the same crime: indecent exposure. One “streaked” through a college campus as a prank, the other exposed himself in front of women and children on their way to school, as was recently the case in the Hollenbeck area.

“You have to remember, sex offenders are the biggest recidivists. Obviously, the intent in these two instances isn’t the same,” said Ricard.

While a community service sentence could deter the first person from further “lewd conduct” that might lead to a felony, said Ricard, it probably wouldn’t impact the second person’s future behavior because even incarceration rarely stops true sex offenders.

Caltrans Is ‘Cadillac of Agencies’

Defendants sentenced to community service can be sent to a particular agency by the judge. For adult offenders, Caltrans is the jurists’ favorite, said Marcus. Court-assigned workers clad in the transit agency’s orange vests are a common sight along area highways and in city parks.

“Caltrans is the Cadillac of agencies,” he said. “If you send someone to Caltrans, you can be sure they’re going to do their hours.”

Marcus said that other work sites popular with judges include police stations, hospitals, the Red Cross and a program that cleans city buses.

In most cases, however, participants must report to their nearest Volunteer Center, part of a network of work clearinghouses. In greater Los Angeles, there are about a half dozen of these centers, run by a private nonprofit organization under contract with the state.

Defendants pay the center a fee from $45 to $60 to find them work. They are then assigned a job with a nonprofit organization, such as Goodwill Industries or the Salvation Army, or to a government agency, such as a city parks department.

Community service works somewhat differently for juveniles, who usually put in their hours closer to home at churches, schools or boys and girls clubs. Parents and the children themselves often help craft the assignments.

Pasadena Juvenile Court Judge Raymond Mireles said he regularly hands out 100-hour work assignments to juveniles for crimes such as vandalism and petty theft.

Some of these juveniles, especially those convicted of vandalism, are assigned to graffiti cleanup crews. Going to work four or five hours every week for six months gives kids a sense of accomplishment and discipline, Mireles said.

“Probably for the bulk of them they’ve never had that imposed on them in their lives,” he said.

Mireles and others say that assigning juvenile offenders to work with social services agencies can provide a more meaningful experience.

Burbank probation officer Paul Vinentz works closely with at-risk teens. He says jobs at homeless shelters and other aid organizations are better for teens than menial work, such as cleaning up graffiti.

“When the kids volunteer and they give of themselves, they see others who are less fortunate and learn about themselves in the process,” Vinentz said. “That’s where I think volunteer work and court-ordered community service is best used.”

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Times staff writer Bobby Cuza and correspondent Jessica Garrison contributed to this story.