Sentenced to Serve Community

Maneuvering between an old-fashioned stove, a refrigerator and an 80-gallon soup pot on the floor, Genesis Orosco finished sweeping the floor of the Someone Cares soup kitchen in Costa Mesa.

Wearing a flower-print shirt and a pink lipstick, the 40-year-old interior designer said the community service she was doing--part of her sentence for a traffic violation--turned out to be a joyous experience.

“When they sent me here, I didn’t know what people did, but I like it,” Orosco said. “Sometimes, people who come here [to eat] bring me flowers.”

She likes her chores so much she’s thinking of volunteering at the soup kitchen after she has served her sentence.

The Costa Mesa woman 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 by 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.

“It’s a really good learning experience for some people,” said George Neureuther, who runs Someone Cares. “They realize [there’s] a part of the world they may never have seen before.”

At least a third of the soup kitchen’s staff is referred from the courts, providing vital help to serve 200 meals every day for the homeless and the working poor, Neureuther said.

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.

Even supporters cite problems, however. Some say participants fake time sheets to avoid work, or don’t show up at all.

The Santa Ana-based Volunteer Center--coordinator of the greatest number of Orange County court referrals--puts an estimated 15,000 people to work every year. The hours of service for each individual can range from one eight-hour shift to 1,000 hours or more, a center spokeswoman said. But while the center helps coordinate referrals, it is not charged with or equipped to track the community service hours worked.

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 work only 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, Levinson said. “They could have more to offer in terms of community service: They can pick up trash but they also can 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.

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 the Orange County Red Cross, court-referred help frees up nursing staff and provides people to work during the day when many regular volunteers are working at their regular jobs, Volunteer Coordinator Jeffrey Rezende said. Those referred from the courts perform support and clerical duties.

“For each volunteer--any volunteer--it frees up the nursing staff, and we get at least five pints of blood,” he said.

The organization gets more than 400 hours a month of free work from offenders, and many of those people opt to volunteer after they’ve completed their court referral hours, Rezende said.

Caltrans also benefits heavily from court-ordered community service. In Orange County alone, Caltrans officials say work done by offenders saved the agency $3.9 million in 1998.

Juvenile court judges frequently order offenders to do their community hours in the Juvenile Court Program. Teenagers are sent to paint over graffiti along Orange County freeways, help remove brush from roadside embankments, clean debris from flood control channels and maintain hiking trails in wilderness parks.

The county park system, school districts, Caltrans and city governments hire the work crews for specific projects, paying between $375 and $620 a day. The agencies get maintenance projects at a low cost, and the Orange County Probation Department offsets much of the cost of operating the crews, said Probation Department spokesman Rod Speer.

“The work program is an effective alternative to incarceration for teenagers who have broken the law,” said John Robinson, the county’s acting chief probation officer. “It provides immediate consequence for their crimes, while at the same time making a positive impact on the community.”

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.

David Rodriguez 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, the resident of Los Angeles’ City Terrace neighborhood was offered a choice: stay in prison or do 1,800 hours of community service, roughly equal to 45 weeks worth of 40-hour workweeks.

It wasn’t a difficult decision, he said.

Rodriguez, 30, started work at LAPD’s Hollenbeck Division station on Nov. 17. If all goes well, he will serve time there through June, working eight hours a day, five days a week.

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

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

Each weekday, he goes 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,” Rodriguez said. “It gives me discipline. I get up in the morning sober-minded.”