Places for Not-Quite Criminals

Nancy K. Clark of Newport Beach has a ready description for her vocation: “I help good people who have done bad things.”

Some of us might not be so generous about how good some of these folks are. But Clark worked in the Orange County public defender’s office for 16 years, so she’s used to searching deep for a bit of silver lining.

Clark now runs her own Alternative Sentencing program. She takes on drunks, drug addicts and even shoplifters and tries to rearrange their lifestyles--at least enough to keep them out of jail.

A few weeks ago, when I was working on a column about holiday shoplifters, several sources mentioned the Nancy Clark therapy program for those caught shoplifting. Not everybody was convinced Clark can turn these folks around. But they readily agreed that, in many cases, programs like hers at least stand a better chance of rehabilitating a shoplifter than a jail sentence will.

“Look, these people are ashamed of what they’ve done, they are humiliated,” Clark said. “They want help.”

The italicized emphasis reflects Clark’s enthusiasm for trying to lend a hand. But she had no idea how involved she’d be when she majored in sociology and criminal justice at Cal State Fullerton in the 1970s.

She interned at the public defender’s office in 1973, then joined the office staff permanently in 1974. She was part of a team that found rehabilitation programs to offer to judges as alternatives to jail time for select, nonviolent criminals.

Particularly troublesome to Clark was the high number of cases involving drug abuse, especially heroin addiction in those early days. She became convinced that therapy programs instead of jail saved the county money in the long run.

In 1990, Clark branched out on her own, persuading a friend to turn over his 19-unit apartment complex in Costa Mesa for a live-in alcohol rehab center. After quite a few bumps with the Costa Mesa City Council, Clark’s Recovery Center was finally approved. She’s filled the place mostly with people referred by the police or the courts. But all clients had to pay their way and attend all classes and programs.

Next was a voluntary live-in arrangement for those who had moved on from the Recovery Center. She calls it Sober Living. Soon, she will open her third Sober Living house in Anaheim.

She also added a private drug treatment facility, and last year opened the shoplifting program.

A common thread in all her programs, Clark said, is convincing people that they need help. And then convincing them they have to be accountable for their actions.

“We had one fellow with 12 drunk driving convictions who did not believe he had an alcohol problem,” Clark said.

Her shoplifters come from all lifestyles, she said--lawyers, nurses, accountants, truck drivers, housewives.

“In most cases, these people have plenty of money for shopping,” she said. “But it’s a disease. We had one woman who had filled three storage units with items that she had shoplifted.”

Clark isn’t getting rich from any of these. She actually makes her living being hired by private criminal defense attorneys to write precedence reports. (Her most notable client: former county Treasurer Robert L. Citron.)

In some criminal cases Clark handles, I say lock ‘em up and let them think about it long and hard while eating jail food three times a day. But it’s hard to argue with judges who say they want to give Nancy Clark’s way a chance first.