Photo by Joe Klein

“Real nasties have one foot in state prison and the other on a banana peel.”

Three-thirty Friday afternoon. Gloria, a twenty-three-year-old drug addict convicted on two counts of grand theft, appears unexpectedly to see deputy probation officer Sherri Necochea at the East County Regional Center in El Cajon.

Police say, “We put the criminals in jail and probation officers let them out again.’

Photo by Joe Klein

One of Necochea’s seventy-three “level one” (maximum supervision) cases, Gloria felt like fixing and needed someone to talk to. Necochea had arrived this morning at 7:00 a.m. to see a client who works from eight to five; though the probation officer is very tired at the end of a long day and still must finish an important pre-sentencing report due at 5:00 p.m., she invites Gloria into her cubicle for a chat. Fifteen minutes later the phone rings. It is Albert, another probationer with a colorful police record most recently picked up for auto theft. Albert told the arresting officer he was stealing the car to go to the airport where he would hijack a plane and blow up the world. ‘ ‘Sherri, I want you to come and take me to El Cajon Valley Hospital so the doctors can put me to sleep,” he says.

Doug Moore: "Dickie’s not a hardcore criminal, just a guy who wasn’t aware of his liabilities and who got in over his head.”

Photo by Joe Klein

Necochea knows that Albert has a history of psychotic behavior. Not long ago he set fire to a box of Bibles in his garage, and he has been to County Mental Health three times in the past months. For several weeks Necochea and Albert’s sister have been trying to get him hospitalized on Medi-Cal or SSI. The insurance was to come through any day and Necochea had hoped Albert might hold out till it did.

Cecil Steppe, Jack Peci. Peci: "The PO gets to know the person, so he has a feel for why he did what he did, what makes him tick."

Photo by Joe Klein

“I want the doctors to put me to sleep,” says Albert in a disturbing monotone. Necochea wants to know where Albert is, who is with him, and whether he is on drugs. She finds he is alone at his house. That’s good, because he can't hurt anybody. While Albert rambles, Necochea tells her supervisor to have the police meet her at Albert’s home immediately.

Gloria waits impatiently, gazing at Necochea over bits and pieces of the unfinished report that are strewn on the desk. “Albert, I'm coming to get you,” says Necochea in her most comforting voice.

“No,” replies Albert. “You don’t have to come. I'm hooked into the world computer. I have the ability to read your thoughts from where I am. You are with me right now.” Necochea rolls back her eyes, takes a deep breath, and exhales long and slowly. Relax, she reminds herself. There is nothing to get upset about. It’s 4:00 p.m. Friday. The judge wants a report. Gloria wants a Fix. Albert wants to die. And Sherri Necochea wants to go home.

Gloria and Albert are people the criminal justice system doesn’t know what to do with. They have both been convicted of felonies, but neither is considered dangerous enough to merit the expense of incarceration. They’ve been shuffled through the criminal justice system like hot potatoes that no one can afford to touch. Their status within the labyrinthine halls of justice is dubious, and they’ve landed in the overburdened arms of the probation department, a branch of the system whose status is equally dubious. Though police departments, judges, district attorneys, jails, prisons, and other sectors of the corrections system have increased or at least maintained their status in recent years, the past decade has been grueling for probation. A glance at the San Diego County Probation Department’s budget over the past ten years shows only slight increases and sometimes decreases in funds during years when the number of probationers rose sharply. In 1975 the department had about 15,000 people on probation, a staff of 1381, and a budget of $24.5 million. In 1984 the same number of probationers receive services from only 892 probation staff, and in spite of inflation the budget is now only $28 million. In 1978 and 1981, two particularly rough years, probation laid off more than one hundred employees. Those who remained were forced to accept demotions, pay cuts, loss of benefits, drastic increases in their caseloads, and other austerity measures. The result was plummeting morale among a group of overworked, underpaid, misunderstood, neglected, and frustrated probation officers.

Due to the doubling of the imprisoned population in the past twelve years (now 438,000, or about one American in 550), the criminal justice system is faced with a severe lack of space in prisons. After World War II the word in corrections was “rehabilitation,” and the taxpayers poured their money into social services instead of prisons. However, the 1970s saw a departure from the movement to rehabilitate criminals in favor of the punitive “lock ’em up” mentality that still exists today. Crime victims grew tired of seeing their assailants walk free, either by slipping through a legal loophole or by being placed on probation where, in the victim’s eyes, criminals were being helped rather than punished. Politicians responded to this shift in attitude by pleading for expanded police forces, more prisons, and legislation to crack down on criminals; for example, in California we now have determinant sentencing laws that make imprisonment mandatory for such relatively minor offenses as burglary and pandering, laws that many in the criminal justice system (even prosecutors) find impractical but that no legislator dares oppose at election time. As everyone who actually works in the criminal justice system knows, it is impossible — most would say undesirable — to lock up every person who commits a felony. But swayed by the emotionalism of the crime issue, neither legislators nor voters have attended to two important facts: first, that in spite of efforts to expand prison capacity, we still don’t have enough facilities to house all those whom we eagerly flush out of society and into the court system; and second, that it costs $75,000 to build a single jail cell, and about $16,000 per year to incarcerate a criminal. In sum, there is an annoying conflict between what every law-abiding citizen wants to do with criminals, and what he or she can afford to pay.

Deputy probation officer Doug Moore sits on a bench outside department nine of the superior court at the county courthouse on Broadway. Dressed in a sport coat and tie, and wearing shiny brown boots, the thirty-nine-year-old Moore is waiting to make an oral presentation at a hearing for one of his clients, a young man named Dickie who has been convicted of dealing drugs. (The names of all of the people on probation have been changed in this article.) Recently Dickie, who has been on Moore’s caseload in adult supervision for nine months, has had several “dirty” urine tests. His “chipping” (light use of drugs) has led to a misdemeanor charge that resulted in a ninety-day jail term. Having committed a new offense while on probation, Dickie is in deep trouble. “Dickie’s a nice guy,” says Moore, running a finger through his thick mustache. “He’s kind of a knucklehead, but I like him, and I want to keep him out of jail. He lost three members of his family in the past year due to accidents and illness. He wasn’t making much money, so he started dealing. He’s not a hardcore criminal, just a guy who wasn’t aware of his liabilities and who got in over his head.”

The hall is filled with people. Attorneys, probation officers, and clerks move intently through crowds of witnesses, jurors, offenders, and others who stand around waiting for cases to be heard. “This place is like a bus station without the fumes,” observes Moore. A man in a three-piece suit enters department nine, the courtroom of Judge Kenneth Johns, and smiles and nods to Moore. “That’s my client’s defense attorney,’’ Moore says. “A good man. Even when he’s got a real puke, he defends him. I’ve got a lot of respect for the guy.’’ He casts a sweeping glance down the bustling hall. “I have less respect for some others. Occasionally I’ll get an inexperienced attorney who’ll get desperate and try to come after me. He knows he’s losing his case so he’ll get me on the stand and say something like, ‘Mr. Moore, you don’t like my client very much, do you?’ ”

Inside the courtroom Johns is seated at the bench and has begun this morning’s series of hearings. A grandfatherly type with a good sense of humor, Johns seems utterly unconcerned that no one laughs at his jokes. He knows that courtroom etiquette forbids outbursts of laughter from the gallery, and that in fact there is nothing very funny about an all-expenses-paid trip to San Quentin. But his banter lightens the atmosphere and identifies his courtroom as his own. On the desk in front of the defense attorneys and the D.A.’s are stacks of files — thick files, the thickest of which are weighty digests containing eclectic testimonies to lives of crime. “When a file gets more than about three inches thick,’’ whispers Moore irreverently, “you want to soak it in lighter fuel, and put the guy on top of it, and set it on fire.’ ’ Dickie arrives late and takes a seat directly behind Moore, but does not greet him. The uncertainty of his fate seems to have robbed him of his tongue. Dickie doesn’t know that nine times in ten Moore gets his way with Johns, and Moore is in no hurry to tell him so. A few days before when Dickie asked him, “Are you sure the judge will do what you want?’’ Moore replied, “The judge will do what he damn well pleases. He may say, ‘I’ve had enough, you had your chance on probation and now you’re takin’ Route 5’ [i.e., heading north to one of California’s state prisons!. Or he may let you stay on probation — if you’re lucky.”

Finally Dickie’s case is called and Moore reads his recommendation, explaining why he thinks that in lieu of jail Dickie should receive a stayed sentence with a mandatory review after six months. As though with great reticence Johns accepts the recommendation, but he takes advantage of this occasion to admonish Dickie that a life of crime doesn’t pay. It’s the same rap he gives every day to dozens of burglars, panderers, hookers, dope dealers, slippery pickpockets, sweet-talking swindlers, acid-tongued extortionists, hair-trigger stick-up artists, and all the other punks, hooligans, and thugs whose fate he seals with a tap of the gavel — but it falls on each new set of ears like virgin snow. ‘‘You either do what you’re told this time, mister, or you go to the joint,” barks Johns. “Do you understand?” Dickie, frozen like a rabbit staring into speeding headlights, awed by the power invested in this graying granddaddy in a black robe, nods affirmatively. Johns then turns to Moore: ‘‘See to it that he does what he’s supposed to. Otherwise tell him to pack his toothbrush.”

Outside the courtroom the defense attorney takes Dickie by the arm. ‘‘Johns likes to make people sweat it out,” he tells him. ‘‘But once he makes a recommendation, he follows through. He’s got to maintain his credibility.” The lawyer shakes his head and gives Dickie a look that says, ‘it’s in your hands, buddy.” Dickie, who hasn’t uttered a word all day, nods perfunctorily and walks away.

‘‘Things went smoothly today,” Moore explains later over coffee at a restaurant on Broadway. ‘‘But sometimes I ’ll go to court three or four times a week and all I'll get is a ration of shit. The judge will tell me I didn’t do my homework and refuse to follow my recommendation. The D.A. will tell me I’m too soft, the defense attorney will say I’m too punitive. The other day I put in a five-page report detailing why one of my clients should be in a drug program, not in state prison. This kid didn’t know shit from Shinola. He’d violated every term of his probation, but I argued that he was a minority, not really a criminal, and not a danger to the community. But the defense attorney advised the kid to say he didn’t have a drug problem, so the judge had no choice but to send him away. I lost, but so did the kid. He belonged in a drug program, not in prison. After the hearing the judge said to me, ‘Why are you bleeding all over the floor for this scumbag?’ He thought I was some wishy-washy social worker type.”

Though department guidelines say Moore is supposed to have only fifty clients, Dickie is one of seventy offenders on his caseload. That means a lot of extra work, but there’s no point in complaining about cutbacks in a department that hasn’t hired a single new probation officer in eight years. Moore, whose five years in adult supervision classify him as a rookie, is no moaner anyway, and in this he insists he is not unique among his colleagues. But he admits that the stress can get to him. 4 in May I went to court twenty-five times,” he says, exhaling the smoke of a Vantage. “Some people handle the stress of this job better than others. If I work too hard one week I’ll tell my supervisor that I need time off the next week. I do that to protect myself.”

Probation, simply put, is an alternative to incarceration — the last one, in fact. Nine days before a convicted offender’s sentencing hearing, an investigating probation officer submits a report to the judge recommending either a prison sentence or probation. About eight times in ten the judge accepts the recommendation, which is based upon an investigation of the offender’s past, the circumstances of his crime, and the extent to which he is “a danger to the community.” If the judge decides on probation, the offender is referred to a supervising probation officer, whose job it is to monitor him. Probation is essentially a contract in which the probationer agrees to certain terms: for example, an alcohol abuser might agree to abstain from drinking and join a treatment program; a child molester might agree to seek counseling and to avoid any situation where he would be alone with children; a thief might agree to find “gainful employment” and to pay restitution to his victims.

Doug Moore and Sherri Necochea both work exclusively with maximum supervision cases. Among their colleagues they have the fewest clients (fifty to seventy-five) because they supervise the “real nasties,” the people Necochea says “have one foot in state prison and the other on a banana peel.” They like to think of themselves as protectors of the community, ordinary, law-abiding citizens who, though not the final arbiters of right and wrong, act as the eyes and ears of the judicial system. They are witnesses, monitors, recorders, enforcers, explicators, and, as often as not, whistle blowers. Though many probation officers don’t recognize it, and some of them refuse to admit it, they all have tremendous power over people’s lives. Ironically, that power at times seems inversely proportional to their own power and prestige within the criminal justice system.

The probation officer is the one person designated by the system to establish a personal contact with the offender. This contact, combined with the results of investigation of the offender’s prior record, determines the investigative probation officer’s recommendation for sentencing. In adult supervision, this personal contact (at least two meetings per month in maximum supervision) is the basis for monitoring the probationer’s behavior and enforcing the terms of probation. “The policeman who arrests a guy like Dickie sees him only as a drug dealer,’’ explains communications coordinator Jack Peci. “The D.A. sees him only as the police officer’s report and the defendant’s statement depicted him. The judge sees him only as he was presented in the reports and on the basis of the accusations. The PO gets to know the person, so he has a feel for why he did what he did, what makes him tick, and what it’s going to take to punish him in a way that serves justice.’’

This human contact can work in favor of the offender when, for example, a probation officer might recognize someone’s sincerity or resolution to rehabilitate himself, but it can work against the offender too, as Moore points out. “Two months ago I got a guy on my caseload convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to probation because he had no prior record, but I looked at the case and at the guy’s behavior and said, ‘This isn’t right.’ So I started digging. I went through computerized records, comparing social security numbers, dates of birth, physical descriptions, and fingerprints. Sure enough, I found prior convictions. The guy had been in prison in Florida, he had felony convictions in northern California, six local misdemeanors, nine different names, and six different social security numbers. He had assaulted a sailor in Balboa Park with a bottle of wine, opening up his skull. He was hitting people over the head with a nunchuks. And this guy was out on the streets because the investigating PO didn’t have time to dig. He was a tremendous danger to the community and had no business being on probation.’’ Moore revealed his findings to the county and the man was arrested and sentenced to state prison. In another instance, Moore discovered that one of his clients, a convicted child molester, was working as a maintenance man in an elementary school. He ordered the man to tell the school district about his record, but he refused, so Moore called the school district himself. His client ended up being fired.

“From the outside many people only see what probation officers do for probationers, and they associate probation with leniency,’’ explains Peci. “It’s the old argument, ‘Is probation sanctuary or sanction?’ In the past we gave far more direct services [psychotherapy, vocational counseling, drug rehabilitation, for example], and everybody saw probation as a sanctuary for criminals. That has changed. People don’t realize the restrictions a person has on his liberties when he’s on probation, and that if a person fails to comply with his terms, we’ll send him to prison. Probation is a sanction, too.

“Nor do people understand that prison is not always the best alternative. It’s very expensive, for one thing, whereas probation is much cheaper. [One study has shown that the cost of a year in maximum supervision costs about $2000.] Besides, can you tell me that putting some guy in a cage for ten years is going to make him a better person? I’m not saying there aren’t people who belong in jail. Some obviously do. But we have to realize that every person we put in jail is coming home someday.’’

Probation officers consider themselves servants of the public, and most lament the fact that those they serve understand so poorly both the PO’s job (some actually prefer not to reveal their line of work in social situations) and the system they work in. “All the public sees is what’s up front,’’ says deputy probation officer Marilyn Cornell. “They know who the D.A.’s are — they're the prosecutors out there fighting crime and putting people in prison. They know who the defense attorneys are — they come in with their grandstand shows and they’re glamorous, and they get interviewed on the news. But what happens when a (criminal| doesn’t go to prison? He doesn’t just disappear. He has to go somewhere. Where he goes is into my file cabinet!”

Consider what has happened in San Diego County during the past ten years of cuts in the probation department’s budget. The population of the county has risen dramatically. Responding to the anticrime sentiment of the public, legislators have seen to it that there are more police officers on the streets making more arrests, and that the expanded district attorney’s office is making more convictions. Which means, of course, that the system is handling more people. Which means that a bottleneck has formed at the doors of the probation department.

“Think of the criminal justice system as a great swamp,” says Jack Peci. “Its not very attractive when viewed from the outside — we have ugly jails and prisons and we deal with nasty people who do dastardly deeds to one another — but the system works when everything is properly in place. What happens when you clean all the algae off the surface of a swamp? It looks better, but all the little critters that feed off the algae die off, and in turn something else that feeds off the critters dies off, and so on, until the system breaks down. The same thing happens in criminal justice when you beef up one segment and neglect the others. If you beef up the police department that looks good to the public, but when you do that, arrest rates increase, bookings increase, court dockets increase, and referrals to probation increase. The fact is that in San Diego County our ecosystem has been severely thrown out of whack in the past few years.” Chief probation officer Cecil Steppe admits that in the Sixties and early Seventies the probation department became complacent. “The cutbacks we received were on one hand a travesty, but they were an eye-opener on the other,” he explains, ‘in the past we came to expect yearly increases in budgets and we weren’t self-critical enough.” In effect, they set themselves up to be victims of the times, and when in the mid-Seventies the great social pendulum swung from the rehabilitative to the punitive ethos, probation got clobbered. Proposition 13 was the coup de grace. Before that landmark initiative, the county budget was “appropriations driven,” which means that administrators performed needs assessments of all its agencies and were then appropriated necessary funds. Today, the budget is “revenue driven ’ that is, a limited pot of money ($887 million this year) is designated in advance to fund all county functions. Overnight, the question county administrators faced went from “What services can we offer?” to “What services can we do without?” “Probation is not a function within the criminal justice system that is mandated by law to operate at a given service level,” explains Chief Administrative Officer Clifford Graves. “Probation is a ‘discretionary’ function; that is, the board of supervisors can decide what level of funding they will receive. When the county was faced with cutbacks as a result of Proposition 13, it had no choice but to allocate money to mandated functions and to cut back on discretionary functions such as probation.”

But a source in the probation administration who prefers to remain unidentified pointed out that “there is nothing in the law mandating the number of deputy sheriffs or deputy district attorneys either. They too are ‘discretionary,’ but their budgets have been increased significantly. I think the real reason for the cuts is that county administration doesn’t really understand what probation does, and they are not convinced of its merits.” Those merits are very hard to quantify, particularly with regard to adult supervision. To date the department has not done the complex longitudinal studies needed by legislators and budget analysts who have to justify every penny they dish out. “The probation function lies somewhere in the middle of the system,” explains Graves. “They don’t actually go out and arrest people, and they don’t lock up criminals, so it’s difficult to determine the return on investment in probation. When you can produce hard data to prove effectiveness, it’s easier to make a clear-cut decision to allocate funds. But who can prove that probation officers are more effective if they have thirty-five cases instead of seventy?” The problem lies in the very nature of the work supervising probation officers do. Though most of them will tell you that busting someone for breaking his terms of probation is a “success” (i.e., they’ve rolled up a criminal and protected the community), they know that in such cases the probation “alternative to prison” has actually failed. A true success for a probation officer occurs when a person inconspicuously leaves probation and fits seamlessly back into society. “A success for us is when someone disappears,” says Cecil Steppe. “That isn’t the kind of thing that sells newspapers. If I were to hold a press conference to report our successes, no one would show up. But if a man on probation goes out and kills someone, that’s big news. We are a high-risk profession. Our failures are very dramatic, our successes invisible.”

The probation department has responded to the financial crisis the only way it could — by requiring that investigating probation officers do more — and necessarily more superficial — investigations, and by giving supervising probation officers bigger caseloads. Ten years ago most misdemeanants were required to report periodically to their probation officers and were able to receive social services, such as psychotherapy, if they needed them. Today, almost all misdemeanants are placed in “banked caseloads” of up to 700 people, where they receive no supervision or services whatsoever. Which may seem sensible until you consider that offenders who commit serious crimes are sometimes able to plea bargain down to misdemeanors. “I know of one case where a man caught by police in a woman’s bedroom with his hands around her neck was convicted of trespassing!” says Necochea. The alleged “Clairemont arsonist” was already on probation for a misdemeanor when he was arrested in connection with a series of mysterious fires set in Clairemont. But he was in a banked caseload of several hundred and had no personal contact with his probation officer.

Just about everyone brings up the infamous Kevin Cooper case as an example of how diminished resources and time constraints can endanger the public. Cooper was convicted in Los Angeles of auto theft, sentenced, and placed in a medium-security prison in Chino. He escaped and murdered several people in the nearby community. The brunt of criticism against the criminal justice system fell upon the probation department, which was rightly accused of performing a sloppy investigation of Cooper’s past. Had the investigating probation officer obtained Cooper’s police record in other states, she would have revealed in her pre-sentencing report that Cooper was an extremely dangerous criminal, and the judge would have sentenced him to a maximum security prison. But she didn’t have time to check Cooper’s background thoroughly. Significantly, L.A. County was hit harder by budget cuts in the past decade than any major county in the state.

Administrators both in the probation department and at the county suggest that things are changing, however, this time in favor of probation. Funds were recently allocated to hire three new deputy probation officers, and a commission has been created consisting of the heads of each sector of the county’s criminal justice system to correct the ecological imbalance Jack Peci alluded to. Six years after Proposition 13 jolted that system, it appears the convulsions it created are subsiding. “The Board of Supervisors has gone as far as it could with cuts to probation,” says Graves, “and now they’re starting to see the need to consider the whole system, to see that all the parts are related.”

Probation officers perform two mutually exclusive tasks — to help rehabilitate the offender (to be a social worker of sorts) and to enforce the terms of probation (to play cop) — which constitute their baggy raison d’etre, “to protect the community.” The tension between these two goals leaves them wide open to attack from both ends of the system. Sherri Necochea echoes the frustrations of many. “The defense attorneys are against us because we want to lock their clients up. The D.A.’s are against us because we’re not punitive enough. Colleagues of my husband, who is a police officer, say, “We put the criminals in jail and probation officers let them out again.’ We can’t win.” One probation officer who, like all her peers, often hears that she is easy on criminals, was once turned down for jury duty by an attorney who ironically said that as a probation officer she was probably “too punitive-minded.’’

A good probation officer is both a rehabilitator and an enforcer. To many of his clients, Doug Moore probably seems more like the latter. He's a big man, tall, thin, and bony but solid. At first contact he seems as starched and humorless as the Marlboro Man, with a stiff walk and shoulders as square as his file cabinets. Not the kind of guy likely to get bamboozled by some young bruiser on his caseload. His background is in juvenile institutions (“I did eleven years’ time,’’ he jokes), where it was not uncommon for him to have more than one hundred tempestuous juvenile delinquents under his supervision. “You learn how to handle yourself in situations like that,’’ Moore says. For all his savvy, Moore still managed to have his nose broken five times, and, in one scuffle, cracked four ribs. During five years in adult supervision, Moore has never had a fight, but he has had a few death threats (idle ones, he insists). “I’d say about a third of my clients just need to be paddled and sent home for a shower. Another third are so burned out by the system that they'll do whatever I say just to stay out of jail. Another third are bad-ass characters — bikers, prison gang members, the kind of guys who can’t go out of the house without a six-pack of beer and a couple of pills.’’ It is not uncommon for one of the latter to get “froggy” during an interview. “I’ve had guys who looked like they might be ready to jump me,” Moore says coolly.

“As a supervising probation officer I’ll do just about anything I can to get my people to comply,” he continues from his ten-by-twelve cubicle at the South Bay Regional Center in Chula Vista. “I had a long-haired biker who was in all kinds of trouble, a guy who couldn't get pulled over by the cops without starting a fight. I found somebody who’d give him work, who’d pay him six bucks an hour on the condition that he cut his hair. At first he refused, but finally he gave in. It’s been a year and a half now and his police contacts have gone down to zero. One day he comes in and says to me, ‘Hey, have you been talking to the police, telling them to lay off me or what?’ I told him, ‘Look at the changes you’ve made; you're earning money, you've moved to a new place, you're dating, you got rid of the bike — you made the changes!” Now this guy may not like me, but I think he respects me. I get satisfaction from knowing that he’s not taking up space in Duffy's Hotel and he’s not busting up cops anymore. If I stay on him, he may be making ten or twenty bucks an hour in a couple years, and he may, quote, buy into the system.

“I’m real frank with my people. I just tell them that if they screw up, they’re going to state prison. 1 told this one kid, ‘Look, you don’t have the toughness or the sophistication to make it in prison. And besides, you’re too damn pretty. You go to mainline and you'll be somebody’s wife inside of two weeks. You’ll do your time on your tummy.’ My hope was that he would say ‘Shine those buddies. I'm gonna get straight.’ It seems to be working. He’s in a job program, he’s showing up every day, and he's complying with his terms of probation.” To Moore, working to keep probationers in line is a game, a very serious one rich in nuances for which there are no rules. He stresses the need for experience, and insists upon the value of a broad liberal arts background combined with a fair quantity of street smarts, the latter of which is usually acquired in juvenile or adult institutions. The appropriate action to be taken with a particular client is as unpredictable as the client’s responses. Moore must contend with complicated human behavior within a system that at times seems equally complex, and he, like all probation officers, is impatient with anyone who attempts to simplify or quantify the elements of his art. “I can’t guarantee that I’d get better results if I had thirty people on my caseload instead of seventy,” says the normally unflappable Moore with a hint of anger in his voice. “We’re dealing with people on this job! We can’t give statistics to prove we’re effective. The supervisors in this county are a bunch of small businessmen, and they want figures. But you just can’t do it. We're not putting out new Chevrolets here!”

The feeling of holding lethal fire in his hand made him feel big, important, and dangerous. JJ still likes guns, but he knows that if he gets anywhere near one in the next two years he could soon be speeding northward in a four-wheeled cage with a silver-badged chauffeur. After seven years in the merchant marine, JJ settled in San Diego and became involved in the local drug world, not as a hard-core user but as a bodyguard for dealers. “I was involved in, ah, ‘private police work,’ I guess you’d call it,” says JJ with a knowing smile.

He was arrested outside a bar one night when two plainclothes policemen saw him sitting in a van fondling a gun. In the back of the van they found several more weapons. “He was an armed camp unto himself,” says Moore, JJ’s probation officer for the past nine months. “He had been in the bar earlier packing two weapons; not

just Saturday night specials, but ace weapons! Some guys just love guns. JJ got into what he was doing because of the excitement. He got out of the merchant marine and saw a chance to play John Wayne. He’s got a John Wayne complex.”

JJ arrives for his appointment on July 19 at 8:30 a.m. and seats himself in the chair next to Moore’s desk. He tells Moore he wants to go to Mexico for a day. Moore agrees to sign a travel voucher, but cautions him, “Remember that any violation at the border is a federal offense, and that at customs they know who you are. Keep all your tools in tool boxes, because tools can be considered weapons. And when you get back over the border, don’t be tempted to put a couple aliens in your trunk for fifty dollars each. Don’t get sucked into easy money.” JJ assures Moore that in the year he’s been on probation he hasn’t caught any “beefs” and that he has no intention of catching any beefs. He’s just turned thirty and he’s not into being a jerk anymore. In fact, he and his wife are thinking of starting a family.

Moore’s caseload has grown in the past few weeks; he’s picked up three more “real nasties” that no one else could accommodate, and since JJ is doing so well, he’s decided to transfer him to medium supervision with - another probation officer. JJ shows concern at this news. He is comfortable with Moore and doesn’t like the idea of adjusting to a new probation officer. Even when Moore tells him he’ll recommend early termination of probation if all goes well, JJ is still upset. In the regional center’s cafeteria after the appointment, he explains why: “The investigating probation officer who took my case after I was convicted was completely nuts. I had pled to just one charge of carrying a sawed-off shotgun and my lawyer figured I’d get probation for sure, but this PO starts huffin’ and blowin’ and givin’ me this hard-line case. I mean, I was already starting to rehabilitate myself — I’d started a wholesale business in Pacific Beach and everything was just hunky-dunky — but this guy was trying to intimidate me. He wanted me to go up. So I skipped town after that interview. The thought of doin’ time scared the shit outta me. That PO wanted to railroad me, even though I had no prior record. PO’s really don’t like the kind of shit I was pullin’, takin’ the law into my own hands.”

The fugitive probationer was caught in Florida and extradited to California, where he served five months in Chino State Prison as a condition of probation before being assigned to Moore’s caseload. ”1 was intimidated by Doug at first,” admits JJ, “but now I see him as a real sincere, regular guy, a good family man who’s very concerned about his people. He really motivated me. I think if an offender goes in there and sees that someone is genuinely concerned, they’ll respond to that.’ ’ JJ looks at his watch and gives a start. “Hey man, I don’t mean to hype you,” he says as he stands to leave, “but I’ve gotta get to work.” “I don’t see JJ getting back into crimin’ again,’’ says Moore, sipping black coffee from a cup that has the message “No more Mr. Nice Guy’’ lettered on its side. “But I do see him getting tempted. I simply explain to him what his liabilities and responsibilities are. In some respects he’s intimidated by me, but I think in some respects he’s shinin’ me on. A given in this job is that people lie to you; not all of them, not all of the time. But often I’ll have a guy miss a couple appointments, come in here and say, ‘Here’s the story, I was with such and such and I’ll say, ‘Bullshit.’So he’ll say, ‘No, here’s the story . . . .’ and I’ll say that I checked some things out and know what he said wasn’t true. Then he’ll come back with, ‘Okay, you got me fair and square, here’s the story. . . .’

“There’s a lot to this job,’’ Moore continues. “You tell me that JJ looks like a decent character, that he doesn’t look dangerous. Did you hear what happened at the McDonald’s down in San Ysidro? That fellow had no prior record. A guy like JJ may not look dangerous, but it’s just not that simple.” □