One bill being written for the Department of Corrections would allow products produced by inmates working for 30 to 60 cents an hour - items ranging from office furniture to mattresses - to be sold to government employees and nonprofit groups. Current law limits sales to state and local governments and to schools, to limit competition with the private sector.

A separate bill would allow private businesses to move light manufacturing or assembly operations to prison grounds, getting inmate labor at the federal minimum wage. The majority of prisoners' wages would go not to the inmates, but to the Department of Corrections or to restitution funds.

The DOC likely would finance the construction of buildings on prison property to attract manufacturers, authorities said.

Richard Allen, Alabama's prisons commissioner, said more inmates would gain valuable skills that would help them find jobs when they're released, and that an expanded prison work program could produce a profit, lessening the burden on taxpayers.

"We've got a labor pool here of 20,000," he said.

An analysis by DOC staff indicates that if prison industry sales are doubled, increasing from $15 million to $30 million a year, they would turn a $2 million to $3 million profit, he said.

Alabama would not be the first state to locate private industry on prison grounds, if the second bill becomes law. Prison officials in Kansas, a pioneer of the practice in recent years, said more than 20 private companies have facilities at or near seven Kansas prisons, employing 647 inmates and generating nearly $2 million a year in revenue.

Kansas prisoners working for private employers make minimum wage, minus 25 percent, which is paid to the state as partial reimbursement for room and board, a Kansas Department of Corrections spokeswoman said.

Business concerns:

Allen said that concerns are overblown that an expanded Alabama market for inmate-made products would hurt private businesses, which must pay market wages.

Even if sales of prison-made goods reached $30 million a year, he said, that's a tiny piece of a state economy valued at $100 billion.

"I don't think we'll be crowding anybody out," he said.

Still, proprietors of businesses that make the same products as the prison industries said they likely will lose some business if the program is expanded.

Steve Davis, who owns Birmingham-based Alabama Business Furnishings, said his company regularly sells furniture to nonprofit organizations, which would be able to buy prisoner-produced furniture under the provisions of one of the bills. Private industry will provide better quality and service, he said. But the low costs associated with prison labor may be enough to make a difference to his bottom line, he said.

George Clark, director of the Alabama Industry and Manufacturers Association, said larger companies such as those represented by his organization would be unlikely to lose business to prison industries. But they would benefit from any program that results in inmates leaving prison with skills that are increasingly difficult to find, such as welding, he said.

The trade group has talked with the DOC and state education officials about trying to match properly trained former prisoners with jobs, he said.

Alabama's prison industries have an ignominious history. Shortly after the turn of the century prisoners regularly were leased to private businesses including foundries and coal mines. Many died on the job.

In the book "Alabama in the Twentieth Century," historian Wayne Flynt said that prison labor once generated as much as 20 percent of the state government's income.

Teaching taxpaying:

Today, Alabama's prisons still face national criticism for their age and conditions caused by crowding. But prison industries, which fell out of favor nationally when public sentiment favored punishment over rehabilitation, are nothing like they once were.

A Monday visit to Draper Correctional Facility in Elmore County found dozens of inmates working in woodworking and auto shops managed by J.F. Ingram State Technical College.

In one building inmates assembled the walls of a Habitat for Humanity house that will be built next month in Baldwin County.

The Habitat job is part of the technical college program, not prison industries. But it is exactly the sort of work that the prisoners may soon be doing for pay if the expansion legislation is approved, said DOC spokesman Brian Corbett.

Prison and technical college officials also said that studies show a lower recidivism rate for prisoners who learn the skills necessary to work in prison industries jobs.

Bill Griswald, assistant dean for instruction at the technical school, nodded toward inmates who were hammering particle board to 2-by-4 wall studs, building the inside walls to the 924-square-foot house.

"Sooner or later they all will go back to the streets," he said. "We're trying to teach them to be taxpayers, not tax takers."