Pubdate: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 Source: Reuters Copyright: 1999 Reuters Limited. Author: Leslie Gevirtz 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.'' - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake