PENDLETON, Ore. — Rows of men sit before their sewing machines, moving their hands quickly and steadily as they stitch stiff swathes of blue denim.
At the end of the production line, Sergio G. Mora, biceps rippling from daily sessions pumping iron, goes through a bin of jeans carefully checking for defects, snipping off loose threads wherever he finds them.
"Some of this stuff goes overseas to Sweden and Japan," says Mora, who is serving a sentence at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, just outside this old western town, for killing a man in a fight.
This factory, which manufactures blue jeans sold worldwide under the brand Prison Blues, is part of a massive Oregon effort, launched by a 1995 voter initiative, to push for full employment among prison inmates.
"Work can be a part of teaching accountability and a way of rehabilitation," said Kevin Mannix, an Oregon state legislator and author of Measure 17, which amended the state constitution to require prisoners to spend at least 40 hours a week at work or in on-the-job training.
Oregon's ambitious effort is being closely watched around the country, where prison officials are desperately searching for ways to deal with the rising cost--already as much as $23,000 a year per prisoner--of keeping an exploding population of convicts behind bars.
The number of inmates in the nation's state and federal prisons now totals more than 1.1 million, five times the level of just 13 years ago. And with tough new laws calling for even longer sentences for repeat offenders, experts worry that the numbers will rise even more sharply.
Prison work programs, experts say, make it easier to manage inmates, provide convicts with important work skills and produce goods and services that can help offset prison costs.
"In California, you have this warehousing philosophy toward managing inmates," said Philippe Magloire, head of the education program at the Eastern Oregon penitentiary. "In Oregon, we now have a state mandate to offer work or job training."
Inmates like the opportunity to work. "I have to work or I'd go nuts," said Scott Rovig, a bearded 27-year-old who says he's served 133 months for attempted murder and kidnapping and worked his way up from kitchen duty to a production job at Prison Blues.
Brant Wakeman, the garment division manager at Prison Blues, says that in five years of operation, he has only had to call security guards into his factory once.
