MASSACHUSETTS MULLS MAKING INMATES PAY FOR PRISON

BOSTON (Reuters) - Some prisoners may be forced literally to pay their debt
to society under legislation being considered in the Massachusetts
legislature.

Lawmakers Tuesday debated various proposals including ones that would offer
inmates to private employers, with salaries they earned used to offset the
costs of being housed in prison.

Other bills under consideration would charge prisoners for part of the
medical care they receive behind bars and allow prisoners to work for
nonprofit organizations.

``We're talking about paying your debt to society,'' Rep. John Locke said
after testifying for his bill, which would charge prisoners $5 a day for
their incarceration.

``It's a fallacy to think that all prisoners are indigent. I know, I'm a
lawyer and my clients were not indigent,'' Locke said. ``The people who
are paying for it now are those who are holding down two and three jobs,
who can't afford health care, who can barely make their rent. They're the
taxpayers.''

Like other states, Massachusetts is wrestling with how to pay for its
growing prison population.

Massachusetts currently houses about 22,000 inmates in state prisons and
county and municipal jails at an estimated cost of $400 million annually,
state corrections officials said.

Some 1.8 million people were incarcerated in U.S. prisons last year, up
76,700 from the previous year, according to a report released last week by
the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The rise in
prison population comes at a time when the FBI reports crime rates are
dropping nationally.

The Massachusetts proposals drew opposition from some labor unions, former
prisoners and penal experts.

The Service Employees International Union said in a statement that the
average wage for prison labor in the United States was between $0.23 and
$1.23 per hour and feared that ''workers will lose jobs as factories
relocate to prisons.''

Kazi Toure, a member of the union and a former convict, said the
legislation would create a system tantamount to slave labor.

``They're trying to take away money from people who have nothing, who are
already marginalized by this society,'' Toure said.

Jerome Miller of the Virginia-based National Center on Institutions and
Alternatives said in a telephone interview that the proposed legislation
``is really a way of getting at minority groups and poor whites who make up
most of the prison population.''

``They will talk about it (in terms of economics), but it's really about
race,'' Miller said, calling the Massachusetts legislators ``the most
militantly uninformed group of dudes I have ever seen.''