Justice and the Courts

Inmate firefighters get home beyond Malibu

In a deal that will be welcome news to Malibu homeowners, the Los Angeles County Fire Department has struck a three-year agreement to house fire teams staffed with state prisoners at a juvenile probation camp in the Angeles National Forest.

The agreement ends the Fire Department’s search for a long-term home for the crews, a quest that sparked protests in mid-January when word leaked that a fire station in the Rambla Pacifico area of Malibu was being eyed as a possible replacement for a fire camp that burned during the Station Fire in August.

Angry neighbors complained that housing the inmates so close to their homes posed a safety risk. The residents also argued that with only one narrow street providing access, traffic from visiting inmate families would be a mess.

Within days of the uproar—some of it based on misinformation—the Fire Department announced it was scrapping the Malibu option.

Under the terms of the new agreement, about 90 state inmates whose fire camp on Mt. Gleason, known as Camp 16, was destroyed last summer will be housed at the Probation Department’s 30-year-old Camp Holton, in the Big Tujunga Canyon, east of Sylmar. The men already had been staying at the facility on a temporary basis since shortly after the fire, which killed two County firefighters.

“This long-term arrangement,” Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman said in a statement, “satisfies the immediate need of the Los Angeles County Fire Department and assures the residents of Los Angeles County that these crews will have an appropriate facility.”

Chief Probation Officer Robert Taylor added: “The overriding issue for both of us was the issue of public safety.”

The fire crews consist of state prison inmates with good behavior records who are serving time for non-violent crimes that include burglary, fraud and DUI offenses. Firefighting inmates have been housed at five locations throughout the county, including a facility for women in Malibu’s Encinal Canyon.

Freeman and Taylor came to terms Tuesday during a meeting at the Probation Department’s Downey offices. How much the Fire Department will pay probation has yet to be negotiated.

In interviews, Freeman and Taylor explained that the arrangement deal to house the inmate crews for a longer stint at the probation camp emerged only recently.

Freeman says his staff conducted preliminary searches at several locations around the county, “but the options were not panning out.” Among those was the Malibu location. Freeman says the department was only scouting potential sites—including the Malibu location—before he was going to approach the state and the community.

The agreement between Freeman and Taylor was reached after it became clear that no other location would work.

Unlikely duo writes new script for inmates

As a Hollywood executive, Scott Budnick produces buddy movies with a twist, like “The Hangover,” this summer’s gross-out comedy about the aftermath of a lunatic Vegas bachelor party, which has been nominated for a Golden Globe.

But he’s also starring, albeit far more quietly, in a real-life buddy production.

The high-energy film executive teamed up with a young prison inmate to create a new state program that gives an educational boost to L.A. County juvenile inmates who, at age 18, are facing time in California’s tough adult prisons. Launched last year, the Youthful Offender Pilot Program so far has placed about 50 juvenile offenders in safer settings with better educational and job training programs.

“I love a challenge,” says Budnick, 32. “This is a population that no one really cares about. These guys are demonized, and some people think they can’t be rehabilitated. It’s not true.”

A good number of these young inmates—eight of them—are at the medium security California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, near Riverside, living in a “college dorm” decorated with murals of Albert Einstein and astronaut Neil Armstrong and featuring quiet study rooms.

There, these young charges of the penal system, along with nearly 100 older inmates, have been allowed to participate in an already existing, federally-funded college program for inmates under the age of 35. They take correspondence courses ranging from art to pre-calculus and watch DVD lectures on four new flat screens.

From Budnick, they’ve learned lessons of another sort.

“He don’t have to do none of this for us,” says Michael Tavarez, 18, from La Puente, who arrived at Norco this spring after a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. “He has his own life, but he’s doing all this just to help us out.”

The idea for the program actually started with an inmate named Prophet Walker, who was sentenced to six years for assault with great bodily harm. He had been one of Budnick’s students in a writing program at Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, where he earned a high school degree.

At 18, Walker was shipped to an adult facility in Blythe, a rough setting for a young guy determined to right his life. Despite the environment, Walker continued to pursue his education and steered clear of the gangs that ruled the roost. After two years of lobbying prison officials, he won a bed in the lower-security Norco and a seat in its coveted educational program.

Given his own experiences, Walker figured there must be some way for other juveniles who’d done well during their incarceration to sidestep the more dangerous adult prisons, which he believed were undermining rehabilitation.

So, in 2008, he turned to Budnick for help. And the executive turned the challenge back on Walker, telling the inmate that, if he came up with a good plan, he’d sell it to prison higher-ups. In fact, Walker came up with a very good plan.

He proposed revamping the scoring system that state correctional officials use to place new inmates in prisons so that it rewarded juveniles who behaved well during their incarceration. Budnick jumped on the idea. A week later he arranged a meeting in Sacramento with Scott Kernan, who oversees inmate classifications for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation as undersecretary for operations.

Kernan was quickly receptive. He shared concerns that younger inmates can get “thrown to the wolves” in tougher, high-security facilities, making rehabilitation even more remote. “We hope this will help avert some of those problems,” Kernan says.

If an inmate and an outsider teaming up for prison reform wasn’t enough of a Hollywood ending, Walker, now 22, earned parole in November after completing an associate’s degree behind Norco’s walls. In January, he’s scheduled to start classes at Loyola Marymount University as an undergraduate engineering student.

“It’s amazing,” Walker says of his accomplishments. “I’m still coming down from the high.”

As for Budnick, he says he’s driven to help the young inmates because most people see them as a “disposable population” best locked up and forgotten.

Budnick, who grew up in a nice Atlanta neighborhood and says he never got in trouble, believes that kids in tougher neighborhoods are afflicted by the same lack of awareness of consequences as teens in more affluent areas. The difference, he says, is that guns are more pervasive in some neighborhoods. “If you grow up like me in the suburbs, the kids get in a fight and it’s not a big deal,” he says. “Here, everyone’s armed, and it takes it to a different level.”

Budnick is president of Green Hat Films, the production company of director Todd Phillips. Besides “The Hangover,” Budnick also has producer credits for “Starsky and Hutch” and “School for Scoundrels.” He’s an executive producer of another upcoming Phillips buddy film, “Due Date” with Robert Downey Jr., which was shooting this fall.

One morning in November, Budnick played hooky from filming at the Ontario Airport to visit his friends at the college classroom at Norco, the sprawling prison that houses 4,680 inmates.

“Molina, you keeping up with your work?” he asks Luis Molina, 20, from Van Nuys. Molina arrived in March, after time at Folsom State Prison for attempted murder and robbery.

“Alfaro!” Budnick greets Anthony Alfaro, 23, from Santa Monica, who entered the program last year and says he is “halfway to an associate’s degree.” Convicted of attempted murder as a teen, he’s now planning on enrolling in college after parole in two years and hopes to get an MBA someday. “I’ve got a lot of ambition,” he says.

Like Walker, Alfaro entered the state prison under the old rules, and was assigned to Centinela State Prison in Imperial County. And, like Walker, he too had known Budnick from the InsideOUT Writers group as a juvenile inmate in L.A. and stayed in touch.

One day, he was on lockdown at Centinela when, out of the blue, officials told him he’d just gotten a new deal.

“They said, ‘I don’t know who you know, but you just got a transfer,” Alfaro recalls.

In the classroom at Norco, Budnick praised the inmates’ progress in a macho style that aimed to encourage without being saccharine.

“Hey Van Pelt!” he calls out to Don Van Pelt, the program’s administrator, within Alfaro’s earshot. “I’m shocked these guys know how to do PowerPoint presentations!”

Across the classroom, the intense Alfaro, whose left forearm is covered in tattoos, smiles.

To remain in the program, the students have to complete assignments as well as stay out of fights and gangs. “So far, we have not had any of Scott’s guys kicked out,” says Van Pelt, referring to Budnick.

The young inmates understand that if they foul up they’ll get sent back to the tougher prisons. “Not a lot of good opportunities come in life,” says Gerardo Vasquez, 19, of La Puente, serving time for armed robbery. “Scott gave us an opportunity, so now we got to take it and get the best out of it.”

Jail phone calls ring up big bills

Responding to complaints about the high cost of telephone service in Los Angeles County jails, the Board of Supervisors has moved to open up bidding on the multi-million dollar jail phone contract in an effort to lower the cost of calls while still providing key funding for jail programs.

The jail phone contract with the Sheriff’s Department governs the rates charged when inmates call family, friends and attorneys from the jails’ nearly 4,100 telephones. The current provider is Global Tel*Link, a privately-held Alabama firm that operates phone services in jails and prison systems nationwide, including many in Southern California.

The contract brings in about $30 million a year. The company keeps 48 percent while paying 52 percent to the Sheriff’s Department, which uses the money to help pay for inmate programs and jail maintenance.

The contract, which runs through December 2010, allows GTL to charge $3.54 for the first minute of a collect local call from the jail, making the average call of 17 minutes a $5.20 expense for the inmate families, according to a 2008 report by the county CEO’s office, prepared for the Board of Supervisors. The county initially cut the deal in 2005 with the then-SBC/AT&T, which later sold its jail business to GTL. Inmates can also buy prepaid phone cards and save 10 percent on calls, but few do.

The rates are among the highest in the region, about 10 to 30 percent above most prices paid in other county jails and many prisons nationally.

GTL says the county negotiated and approved the contract in 2005. The company says comparisons of per-call rates from one jurisdiction to another are unfair. “Variability in rate structures and costs [between counties] is to be expected” because each jail system negotiates prices based on a different menu of services and product features, GTL’s western regional vice president for sales, Michael Palovik, said in an e-mail exchange.

Palovik says GTL prices in L.A. can be as low as $3.35 for the first minute during daytime local collect calls; later minutes can cost as little as $.759 per minute.

The amount of money charged is controversial because studies show that maintaining strong family contact during incarceration through phone calls, correspondence and visits can aid parole success and reduce recidivism.

The supervisors believe it’s possible to get a better deal for both the inmates and the county if several companies vie for the next contract, which begins in January 2011. “The one way you find out about the best deal is you put all the sharks in one tank and let them fight it out,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said during a board meeting last year.

County CEO William T Fujioka agreed. “I’m absolutely convinced, you put this out on the street, we’re going to get a more competitive contract,” he told Supervisors during the 2008 meeting. “The County wants to achieve two goals. One goal is to lower the rates. The second goal is to make sure that this valuable resource for the Sheriff’s Department is maintained.”

Supervisors rejected a GTL offer to pay the county a $3.5 million fee to extend the current contract through 2013. The supervisors’ goal in putting up the contract for bid is to lower per-call costs to families while maintaining steady revenues for the Sheriff’s Department.

The fund nets about $15 million a year for the sheriff’s Inmate Welfare Fund, which helps supplement the costs of inmate education, drug recovery and training program as well as maintenance programs in the overcrowded jails.

The Sheriff Department’s 52 percent cut is “at the high end of the range” compared to figures paid to other correctional facilities, according to a County CEO’s report last year. Most commission rates, as they are called, fell between 40 and 56 percent.

As his office is preparing the terms of the Request for Proposal, the initial step in soliciting new bids, Sheriff Lee Baca is pushing against any plan that would lower revenues to the department. “I oppose any effort by the Board to alter the rates through a bid process,” Baca told Supervisors in a letter dated September 22.

“We can’t look at this from the perspective that the inmates are overcharged, because they are not,” he told Supervisors at a hearing last year.

The first-minute charge exceeds every Southern California county except Orange County, which charges a flat $4 rate whether the call lasts a minute or an hour. The price of the average Los Angeles call, at $5.20, is roughly 10 to 30 percent higher than other jurisdictions, except San Bernardino ($6.40)—including several operated by GTL. A 17-minute call from an LAPD lockup is $4.48, similar to Ventura County’s $4.49. In Riverside County, the call would run $3.73.

“How could it be possible that a company can charge people fees like that?” complains Evelyn Boligan, whose son Nicholas, 21, awaits trial for attempted murder. Boligan, a Department of Motor Vehicles employee from Gardena, paid over $900 in collect phone calls during her son’s first five months of incarceration in 2007 at Men’s Central Jail.

She complained to the company without success about charges for dropped calls or conversations she had to cut short because of static or overwhelming background noise at the jail. But she is unapologetic about the value of staying in touch with her son. “I had to pay those bills,” she says. “When it’s your child, you want to know that he’s okay.”

GTL’s Palovik counters by pointing out the rates are set in the terms of the county contract. The decision as to how often and low long to talk with inmates is at “the discretion of persons who chose to accept those calls,” he says.

Some families say they have had to reduce phone calls from the jail. After Janet Harris’ son Andrew Arthur, 20, was arrested on assault with a deadly weapon charges this summer, she says her phone bill shot up significantly. Even the second month’s additional $68 in jail calls was too high for Harris, a custodian at LA County + USC Hospital. “I had to tell him he could only call me every two weeks,” says Harris. “It was too high.”

Defense lawyers complain that the collect call system interferes with client contact. Glendale criminal attorney Sue Brown says she cut off client calls from jail clients after getting angry over high rates and charges for calls she never received. “It’s really a rip-off,” Brown insists. “Now I go visit my clients at the jail. It really interferes with my representation, but I don’t think I have to sacrifice my principles to represent my client.”

Attorney Christopher McCann notes that whenever he adds another $50 to the debit account that allows the clients to call him collect, GTL takes a $9 cut. “They call it a one time transaction fee,” he complains. “Well, it’s one-time every time I do it.”

Van Nuys courthouse opens child-friendly waiting room

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky strings beads with a youngster at the new Van Nuys Courthouse Waiting Room, which offers a reassuring and child-friendly environment for youngsters whose parents or guardians are involved in various types of court-related business such as attending hearings, filing court papers, or seeking advice from the Self-Help Legal Access Center. The Waiting Room frees up parents to deal with their legal issues, secure in the knowledge that their children are safe, entertained and well supervised. The Waiting Room also spares the children from tedious, complicated and sometimes heated court proceedings. Yaroslavsky’s office contributed roughly 80% of the project’s capital budget costs in partnership with the Valley Community Legal Foundation of the San Fernando Valley Bar Association, which contributed the balance. (11/20/08)