Class Helps Put Ex-Cons on the Right Road

A unique state-backed truck driving school catering to ex-convicts doesn’t just teach driving skills; it coaches them in how to act as they pursue a legitimate career, often for the first time.

State oversight of truck drivers is getting new attention after former prison inmate Mike Bowers crashed his 80,000-pound big-rig into the Capitol after just 10 days on the job.

Bowers was not a graduate of the California Transportation Training Program, which is jointly operated by the California Department of Corrections, the California Youth Authority and the Sacramento school district.

Still, his action has forced a rethinking of the balance between an ex-convict’s right to start anew and an employer’s right to background information.

“Our people already have a strike and a half against them,” said Ward Allen, who coordinates the trucker training program for the Corrections Department’s Parole and Community Services Division. “We want them to get a good, objective interview based on their skills.”

The transportation training program has graduated more than 400 drivers since it began in 1998. Allen said the state is considering starting a second school in Southern California.

Only about 7% of the parolees were without jobs a year after graduating, but that was because many of them had wound up back in prison.

“They went back not because of something they did with a truck, but because they did something else; they unfortunately beat up their wife, they got in an altercation down at the 7-Eleven,” Allen said.

The truck training program is based at the Charles A. Jones Skills and Business Education Center, which is run by the Sacramento City Unified School District. Principal Mike Brunelle says the truck program deals with a rough crowd.

“You’re looking at a job that doesn’t have a lot of stigma to it for a tough guy,” Brunelle said. Yet, he said, “they walk out of here and cry like a baby because someone gave them a chance.”

The program lasts 18 weeks, three times as long as most commercial truck-driving classes.

Lynda Lee Elk, 35, of Sacramento said the program changed her life.

“For the most part, I just did drugs and sold them,” she said, until she went to prison in 1997 on methamphetamine and firearms charges. “I’ve always in my mind dreamed of being a truck driver, since I was a little girl, but because of my addiction I never did anything about it.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge is teaching the ex-cons not to act like ex-cons, Allen said.

“People cut you off, people drive you off the road, they get a real rude supervisor,” he said. “So they have to control their temper, they have to learn to get along with people.”

Warren Hoemann, vice president of the California Trucking Association, said many trucking firms will hire ex-felons, but they want to know about the employee’s record. He said current laws and federal regulations restrict the questions employers can ask, to protect privacy.

That would change under a bill pending in the Legislature. Assemblyman Dean Florez (D-Shafter) wants to require the state to reveal parolees’ criminal and medical records to potential employers as part of legislation to tighten background checks since the Jan. 16 crash.