Put Inmates to Work, Make Prison Produce : Crime Cost: Society pays double for evildoers--as victim, then as provider. Use of convict labor could cut expenses and civilize criminals.

When executions were scheduled in the public squares, crowds turned out in droves to watch a criminal be hanged--or drawn and quartered like a chicken. Souvenirs were sold, along with picnic lunches. Some witnesses found the executions edifying; others came for the gore.

Now executions happen behind closed doors. Instead of watching death throes, the public sees video images of protesters or advocates of the death penalty. But the focus is where it always has been--on the criminal as center of attention. Meanwhile, everyday evil goes on unabated. And the level of violence has risen--notoriety does not come as easily these days.

Even as California is once again preoccupied by death row and the now-postponed execution of Robert Alton Harris, most inmates awaiting execution stay alive. The institutions housing them are dead. Instead of places for rehabilitation, for building new lives, prisons have become basic training camps for the most vicious forms of urban warfare. Inmates are clothed, sheltered and fed, living off the welfare of their victims. Prisoners expect the system to look after them.

The current “corrections” system is full of retribution without reform: Either snuff out life or maintain it in cages. Most inmates live passively, like domestic pets, until released for the next opportunity to prey on society. The retributive system is purely retrospective--a view of evil past with little sense of evil to come.

Yet looking ahead--paying attention to prison life and life in prison--would be far more rewarding. Prisoners could become working people, not animals in cages.

Americans have a topsy-turvy view of criminal life and death: Capital punishment is said to be humane while a sentence at hard labor is considered cruel and unusual.

California Gov. George Deukmejian and a few key legislators would like prisoners to pay their way, instead of having society pay it for them. Why, they ask, can’t prisons make a profit for the state?

Labor unions detest the idea. The AFL-CIO main man in Sacramento, John Henning, says labor will not tolerate the taking of jobs from hard-working, law-abiding citizens.

If that means prisoners must continue to be idle, ignorant, living off a welfare state behind bars--all the while plotting the next crime--then so be it. That’s not a union problem, the unions say.

Yet it is a problem--and peril--for all of us.

Deukmejian’s idea begins at home: Many jobs have left California for overseas--South Korea and Japan, for instance. Why can’t the state lease out its prison work force to do those jobs here, building stereos and VCRs, microchips and auto parts? That would not take jobs away from working Californians, it would be taking jobs from foreign competition. Major corporations can make their wares more cheaply using prison labor than they could abroad.

If prisons had a profit-making purpose, more prisons could more easily be built, as personnel pools for nearby industries. California has an abundant supply of able-bodied crooks; state prisons might even become welcome in East Los Angeles or Orange County.

The unions respond with complaints of unfair competition. Since they cannot fight lower wages paid abroad, they try to keep wages up at home--until the factories close. Legislators who warm to Deukmejian’s proposal are threatened with union opposition in elections. What politician wants to be presented as an enemy of honest working people?

So the governor’s notion keeps losing in the Legislature. Henning works his spell year after year. So the prisons fester as breeding grounds for crime, moribund places where inmates can always come home, for a roof over their heads and three free meals a day.

A large prison population, like a standing army, makes the rest of the work force smaller than it would otherwise have been. This, in turn, keeps the demand for unskilled labor higher and pushes wages up. Yet the costs of incarceration rise, not to mention the waste of time and potential. U.S. taxpayers, including union members, must pay twice for the ignorant and unemployed who prey on the public--once as victims of a crime and once again to house their victimizers.

Labor, in opposition to prison laborers, seems to be overlooking the dignity of work. Self-respect is a byproduct of honest labor; criminals at least deserve the chance to experience it. That same respect for the dignity of labor once led the unions, in their glory days, to defend children and pieceworkers against corporate abusers. But the philosophy seems to have changed, from human interest to self-interest.

Proponents of prison labor are not interested in “make-work”; they propose real manufacturing, real jobs that teach real skills. They do not advocate chain gangs or “slave labor”; prisoners would be paid. But their wages would be applied to the costs of housing them. Criminals, at last, would earn their keep.

Incentives are applicable; inmates who become good workers can be rewarded, in terms of better quarters, creature comforts or visiting privileges.

Inmate earnings beyond the cost of room and board can benefit the prisoner and the state. Funds may put in savings, for the prison worker, payable upon release. Profits from the leasing of labor would go to the state.

Education and skilled labor go together. Education civilizes. Labor produces. In the course of training prisoners for productive work, more inmates would learn to read and write and think. They would have skills and disciplines to bring back to the outside world. Good workers know about responsibility and the interpersonal regimens for getting on in life.

Prisons, right now, are storage bins, with few windows or connections to the world outside. Providing connections could give prisoners a better chance of one day contributing to that outside world.

Retribution and revenge are extremely expensive. Convict labor can compensate. It may even rehabilitate.