LAWMAKERS GET INNOVATIVE INVITATION TO TOUR PRISONS

SALEM, Ore. (AP) -- "Escape from the usual tour!" exhorts an envelope
adorned with a guard tower and a denim-clad prisoner shimmying down an
attached string.

Pull the string, and the envelope opens to reveal 10 tickets to tour Oregon
prisons, from the Willamette Valley to Ontario.

State corrections officials wanted their invitations to rise above the
customary junk mail received by legislators, candidates and editors.

By most accounts, they succeeded.

One Oregon legislator calls it the most innovative bureaucratic
correspondence he's seen in 17 years in politics.

Another decries it as an overpriced outrage.

Corrections officials hope the mailing will educate politicians and
persuade them to tour the prisons before the hectic legislative session
begins.

Jim Lockwood, the Corrections Department's public affairs director, said he
hit on the idea last fall, a few months after renting a state motor pool
van nine times to take 70 lawmakers and their aides on prison tours at a
time when no one really had any time -- in the heat of the 1997 session.

Lockwood teamed with Perrin Damon, the agency's communications director, to
devise the mailings. They wanted to take a risk, to dispel stereotypes
about prisons through humor.

"We knew we were going out on a limb," Damon said. "Government does not
have to be boring."

State-employed graphic artists did the illustrations, and women prison
inmates assembled the packages. The 285 mailers cost about $5.41 each and
70 cents to mail, for a total of $1,741.35.

Rep. Peter Courtney, D-Salem, called it the most successful effort to
describe an agency's functions and facilities that he's ever seen.

It satisfies what he calls the "double-e" approach: education and
entertainment.

"Snappy, innovative, colorful, entertaining, educational," he said. "I
don't think you can do it any better than they did. It's a winner, by gosh,
it's a winner."

The mailing caught the attention of Rep. Jo Ann Bowman, D-Portland, but she
wasn't impressed.

She called it a "glossy, overpriced publication" that played to every
stereotype imaginable.

"I don't need to be entertained by the Department of Corrections," she
said. "I was outraged. I was really offended. It was just a waste of money."

Corrections Director Dave Cook said legislators are inundated with
paperwork, and that will only worsen when the legislative session starts.

"Some people may see it as offensive," he said of the mailing. "They may
not like it, but they're not going to forget they got that invitation."

Copyright 1997 Associated Press.

Checked-by: Richard Lake