While Youths Seek New Lives, Funds Lie Idle

Not every young criminal wants to make crime a career.

People change. Some drug dealing gang members contemplate going straight as the turning point age of 30 beckons. Maybe they’re afraid of risking a third strike and life sentence with another crime. Maybe they’d like to give up the dangerous street life and become family men or women.

We don’t know how many are so inclined. Years of social science research has provided no firm answers. But the experiences of cops, academic researchers, parole officers, teachers and others who deal with young offenders show that each year a certain number turn their lives around.

It’s tough, though, especially for ex-cons whose major work experience has been hustling heroin and crack cocaine on the streets of L.A.

In 1992 and 1996, Los Angeles County voters approved $859 million in bond issues for new parks and other recreational facilities, including about $4 million a year for providing jobs for ex-gang members and others inclined toward the criminal life.

But so far, the $4 million is just sitting there, gathering dust.

The Los Angeles County supervisors are in charge of allocating it to the cities and park districts that will hire private contractors to build the projects. But some people are concerned that the individual cities and contractors won’t like the county telling them to hire delinquents and potential delinquents.

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A group of anti-delinquency-oriented community organizations is now trying to kick-start the stalled parks and recreation jobs program. They have been inspired by an unrelated jobs program operated since 1994 by the Venice Community Housing Corp., which uses federal, state and county funds, along with private grants, to build housing for the low-income.

The jobs effort was conceived by Brad Carson, the Venice Community Housing Corp. board president, who is also a parole officer, and Steve Clare, the group’s executive director.

In 1994, Carson helped arrange a truce in a bloody Venice gang war between the Latino V-13s and the black Shoreline Crips. Some of the gang members said they wanted to go straight, but their prison records and lack of work experience made it all but impossible for them to find work. So Carson and Clare decided to put some of them to work on a corporation construction project after teaching them the basics of the building trades.

I talked to one of the graduates, Gabriel Llamas, 29, married and the father of four. Llamas is now a skilled tile worker and a painter. A tall, thin, soft-spoken man, his arms and clothes were spattered with paint from his current job.

Llamas explained he had served time. “I was a drug addict,” he said, “all kinds of drugs. I didn’t know nothing about work. All I knew was selling drugs.”

Then, he said, “I reached a certain point. I didn’t want to be in jail. I didn’t want to be selling drugs. I didn’t want to be hanging out with gang members. I needed a new life. . . . A lot of my friends, they’ve got the third strike, they’re doing 25 years to life.”

A friend directed Llamas to the Venice Community Housing Corp. He joined the first class. Afterward, he went to work on the apartments for the Golden Bear Construction Co. as a beginner at the $20 to $25 an hour that is the prevailing wage. The housing corporation and Golden Bear each paid half.

“We had our share of problems--kids showing up with baggy pants, taking off at lunch time,” said Chinn Lee, a partner in the firm, “but it worked out well overall. It worked out really good.”

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Excited by the Venice program, the Venice Community Housing Corp. and other organizations are lobbying the supervisors to launch a countywide effort by freeing parks and recreation bond funds from their current political limbo.

But jobs advocates are expecting powerful opposition from forces with clout at the County Hall of Administration.

Private construction contractors, who will build the parks and recreation projects, aren’t expected to accept the county dictating hiring policies. The independent cities in the county, particularly the smaller ones in conservative areas, tend to believe in home rule and are likely to resist efforts by the Board of Supervisors to force them to adopt an anti-delinquency jobs program.

No one really knows how to solve the crime problem or when it makes sense to give somebody another chance. But county supervisors should be bold enough to give this program a try.