From Newsday - January 14, 2003

Get Out of Jail Free

Public Penance

by Beth Whitehouse

It was mid-morning and cold, and Marc Muzio was on the side of a road in Miller Place wearing gloves and heavy work boots, scanning the scruffy grass that grew like an adolescent's beard. He was picking up garbage.
Cigarette butts.
Partially eaten food.
Hubcaps.
Beer bottles.
To pass the time, the lanky 24-year old in jeans with fringed bottoms assigned point values to the items he picked up and tossed in his green plastic trash bag. Any Baggie that used to hold drugs, two points. Any piece of garbage with an adult theme, 10 points.

Muzio could think of a thousand places he would rather be, a thousand things he would rather be doing.

Sitting an upstate prison cell, however, was not one of them.

And so, he was fulfilling an alternate sentence of 840 hours of community service - the equivalent of 21 40-hour workweeks. For months he came to Hauppauge, to the office of Suffolk County's community service program, where he met others who had been sentenced to community service and went out with the road crew.

On any given day throughout Long Island and Queens, hundreds of people are working on the sides of roads, in Salvation Army thrift shops and county parks, in nursing homes and youth centers and YMCAs and hospitals, fulfilling court-ordered community service hours.

It's the sentencing of high-profile offenders that usually makes headlines. Manhattan publicist Lizzie Grubman, for instance, started serving 280 hours of community service last week at the New York City chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society; she will serve some of her hours in Suffolk County as well, with an as-yet-undetermined organization.

Grubman's community service hours are in addition to five and a half weeks of jail time she served this past fall in Suffolk County. She pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and third-degree assault after backing her father's Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle into a crowd outside a Southampton nightclub in July 2001. "It's a part of the penalty that she will learn from and that, in actuality, will make her a better person," said her publicist, Dan Klores, president of Dan Klores Communications. Grubman did not want to comment, Klores said.

Actress Winona Ryder was sentenced Dec. 6 to 480 hours of community service working with the sick, the blind and babies with AIDS; she was convicted of shoplifting more than $5,500 worth of merchandise from a Saks Fifth Avenue store in California. Presidential twin daughters Jenna and Barbara Bush did community service after the two were charged with underage drinking in Austin, Texas, in May 2001. Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood of Huntington, skipper of the ship that gushed 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989, was sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service, which he carried out working in a homeless shelter and soup kitchen over several summers in Alaska, completing the hours in July 2001.

When possible, the community service programs attempt to match the client's skills or the nature of the crime to the community service assigned. If a person is convicted of driving while intoxicated, he might be assigned to Mothers Against Drunk Driving; if she is convicted of shoplifting, she might serve with Shoplifters Anonymous in Jericho. People convicted of graffiti offenses might work with the Suffolk County Anti-Graffiti Task Force.

Most of the offenders are people with general skills whose transgressions range from DWI to property damage to substance abuse to attempted burglary, community service officials said. They can't have a violent history or serious mental illness. In Suffolk and Nassau counties, the offenders are most likely to be working-class people who, if they are agreeing to community service as an alternative to jail time, can keep their jobs, stay with their families and keep paying taxes while they pay back their debts to society.

Community service addresses the fact that when someone commits a crime, there is more than just one victim, said John Carway, director of Nassau County's Probation Department, which administers community service in Nassau. "If somebody breaks into your house, You are not the only victim. There's the fear and discomfort of the entire community," he said. "Community service gets people to publicly acknowledge there is a price to pay."

Sometimes, the work that gets done is actually secondary to the idea that a lesson is learned, he said. "That transgression didn't go unpunished. Maybe it's not being drawn and quartered. It's an opportunity for people to pay back," Carway said. "Does it work with everybody? Obviously not."

While it seems contradictory to be able to force someone into "service," the potential of jail time hanging over their heads keeps people doing satisfactory work, said Ellie Seidman-Smith, director of the Community Service Program of Suffolk County, which is administered by the American Red Cross. "The success rate is very good because the alternative is jail," Smith said. For instance, 82 percent of the people sentenced to community service in Suffolk County finish; the other 18 percent are sent back to the court system, Smith said.

But make no mistake, said Douglas Knight, director of alternative sentencing in Queens County. Community service is not an easy ride. "Community service is punitive," Knight said.

"We want them, to a certain degree, to be embarrassed for their offense to the community. We want them to dislike community service, so they won’t commit the offense again. That's the primary motivation for community service, especially in our jurisdiction."
On one recent Friday, James Koulouris, 23, of Shirley, and James Tillar, 21, of Brentwood, worked in the Goodwill Superstore in Centereach, putting purses and clothing and toys that had just come in to the store onto hangers and shelves.

It was Koulouris' first day working toward the 280 hours he must serve because he got into a fight with someone who called police and accused him of assault. Koulouris, who works in maintenance buffing floors, chose community service over 60 days in jail. "I can't do that, because I have a son," Koulouris said. He didn't want to leave the 18-month-old, he said. Instead, he plans to work off his community service hours every Friday, which is his day off, for at least the next six months.

Tillar was completing hour 44 of his 140-hour sentence for criminal trespassing. He's served some of the hours with the Anti-Graffiti Task Force, painting over vandalism, and some of the time digging a trench to plant flowers in a historic cemetery in Huntington, he said. Tillar, a warehouse supervisor on the night shift, opted for community service over 15 days in jail, he said. "I enjoy my freedom," he said.

Koulouris and Tillar are two of the 433 adults Suffolk's program placed in 2002, said Darlene Gentner, Suffolk community service's number cruncher. Of the 433, 348 were men and 85 women.

Nassau County placed 368 people in 2002 and provided more than 20,000 hours of work, Carway said. Of those people, 280 were men and 88 were women, he said.

In Queens, the numbers are much higher, Knight said. In 2002, about 4,500 defendants were sentenced to community service, and approximately 80 percent were men, he said.
"We sort of depend on community service to help get us through a lot of backlogged things we have here," said Donna Vogt, educational materials coordinator for Shoplifters Anonymous. Those people serving put together kits and mailings that the group sends out across the country; they're indoors in an office doing clerical work. "I've noticed with the older people that we get, they're more reliable. They keep their hours, they're more responsible. They are kind of embarrassed about what they've done; they want to get it over with as soon as possible and put it behind them."

Vogt said she doesn’t even ask people why they've been assigned community service. “I don't give them the feeling that they're here because 'they're' being punished. A lot of times after they've been here for a while, they volunteer the information by themselves. 'You know why I'm here? A silly mistake I made.'''

The ability to use community service workers saves money, said Richard Maiorella, social worker and assistant to the executive director of PLUS Group Homes, a nonprofit agency that provides housing and services to 42 autistic adults in Nassau County. The houses are used 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that causes wear and tear. "When you call a contractor, it's money," said Maiorella, "big money. To get the most for the residents, we use community service when possible."
A maintenance employee supervises the community service workers as they do light maintenance such as painting or cleaning out a shed. "Most of the people are fairly remorseful when they come in," Maiorella said. "If I had to put a number on it percentage wise, I would say probably 75 percent show up and follow through."

One of those working at PLUS is Bryan Snyder, 25, of Hicksville, who is fulfilling the 100 hours of community service he was sentenced to after he got into a fight. So far, he's done 12 hours of work such as stacking and tying discarded cardboard after a PLUS project. "I understand I did something wrong, and I have to be punished somehow," he said.

One 35-year-old Suffolk County white-collar health professional who asked not to be identified did some of his community service in the medical records department of a Suffolk hospital. "I did a combination of things because I wanted to get through my community service as quickly as possible," he said. "Within the first week and a half! thought, 'This is going to be rough.' "

Although he’d escaped any jail time for his driving while intoxicated conviction, fulfilling the community service requirement was still a major inconvenience, he said. He was working his regular job and also trying to fit in 15 to 25 hours a week of community service. His 280-hour sentence took him about four months to complete, he said.

' "Community service had an economic impact, an emotional impact and was a lifestyle adjustment," he said. "You still want to conduct a lifestyle where you are able to pay bills, see friends, play on the baseball team. It's not jail, but it's sort of house jail, because you're still doing time. It's very difficult to juggle. For someone who has a very busy life and gets community service - it's a whopper. It's a whopper."

Muzio was initially one of those who tried to shirk his community service responsibilities, he said. He was sentenced in 1998 and was supposed to start service in 1999. He'd been charged with breaking and entering. Here's what he said happened: He had permission to be in the house, but friends of his who visited while he was there stole things from the home. "I kind of just looked the other way, which was the wrong thing to do. Everybody else got a year in jail."

But Muzio didn't start taking his sentence seriously until early 2002. "I kept slacking on it," he said. "I would come for a day and then not show up for like a month. Honestly, I was lazy at the time. I didn't want to work. I was more interested in working with my father's company. But there's no hiding from your community service. It catches up with you." Muzio said he was eventually told to serve or risk jail time; he has completed the hours and is living in Nassau County.

"It really isn't that bad," Muzio said. "I made a few friends here. I'm not a person who would make it in jail. I like going home at the end of the day. I like seeing my family. I like having a girlfriend."

Of course, there is some stigma attached to community service, said Muzio, who initially didn't tell that girlfriend what he was doing. "At first I told her I was working in the morning. Then I told her I was volunteering. It got to the point where we didn't want to keep any secrets and I told her. She said, 'I wish you would have just told me in the first place. Everybody has skeletons in the closet.' "

As for his parents: "They have never been more proud of me than now, because I'm doing the right thing. I see it, too. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. It feels good to be tired from work, rather than to stay home and be tired from nothing."

One of Muzio's community service buddies, who asked not to be identified, said he actually feels good about cleaning up the roadways. "Yesterday, we were doing road cleanup and a guy was jogging by and he said, 'The road looks beautiful.' " It's made him think twice about littering as well, he said, after having to pick up so much garbage.
"You have to humble yourself to do some of this stuff," Muzio said. "To come out every day and to admit to yourself that you're wrong and to accept it. I got myself into this mess. I don't blame anybody but myself. I guarantee you I will never get in trouble again."

He's grateful that this time around, he had the ability to serve his time someplace besides behind bars.

"It's beautiful outside," Muzio said "It's better than sitting in a 6-by-5 cell. I like my freedom. I never really appreciated it until now."

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