Construction of a retaining wall at Twin Lakes Park, improvements at a football field in Mount Pleasant and regular grass cutting outside the Westmoreland County Prison all have been carried out by nonviolent offenders from the jail.

Use of inmate labor has benefited Westmoreland County residents and the prisoners themselves for many years, Warden John Walton said.

"Every spring they go out and dig up the flower beds around the courthouse [in downtown Greensburg]," Mr. Walton said. "We have 82 acres around the prison, and all that area is cared for by prisoners."

Allegheny County Council is considering a similar proposal that would require some prisoners to put in eight hours of work daily on county property outside the jail. Like the Westmoreland County inmates, they would be paid a nominal amount for their labor, most likely between 25 cents and 50 cents per hour.

Nonviolent offenders at the State Correctional Institution Greensburg and other state prisons have painted municipal buildings, installed fences and filled sandbags during floods.

"When you're traveling along an interstate, you may see one of our crews working," state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Sue Bensinger said. Carefully screened inmates from most of Pennsylvania's 27 prisons work outside their institutions' walls. Their jobs include picking up trash, raking leaves and painting and patching buildings owned by governments and nonprofit organizations.

Inmate crews perform their jobs under the direction of maintenance supervisors, not armed guards, Mr. Walton and Ms. Bensinger said.

"This is not 'Cool Hand Luke,' " Ms. Bensinger said, referring to a 1967 prison movie that features manacled prisoners and shotgun-toting guards.

Prisoners selected for work "outside the fence" cannot have been convicted of violent crimes, officials said.

Westmoreland County's crews can include as many as eight inmates, Mr. Walton said. "We screen them and we believe that the people we put outside are not a danger."

Prisoners serving time in a county jail ordinarily have been sentenced to terms of less than two years. "They are only here for a short time, and they know that if they try an escape they could face another three to seven years," he said.

Mr. Walton, warden since 2003, said the Westmoreland jail has never had a prisoner walk away while working as part of a crew.

When they return to the county lockup at night, prisoners are strip-searched to make sure they are not bringing in any contraband, including drugs and, more recently, tobacco products.

Westmoreland inmates earn 25 credits per hour, a rate of pay equal to 25 cents that can be cashed in at the prison commissary for snack items and hygiene products.

Relations are good between prisoners and county workers, Mr. Walton said. "County employees have more than enough maintenance work to do," he said. "When the prisoners are shoveling snow in the winter or cutting grass in the summer sun, our maintenance guys are not complaining a bit."

Municipal officials and nonprofit groups across the state vie for state inmate crews, Ms. Bensinger said. "They will send in proposals saying they need a new fence put up, they need this painted, they need landscape work."

The work the prisoner crews do falls into the category of "deferred maintenance," tasks that the local government or charitable organizations could not otherwise afford to have done, she said.

The program also benefits prisoners, she said. "It helps to install a work ethic in them that they will need for their re-entry [into society]," she said. "The more things they know how to do, the easier it will be for them to get a job when they get out of jail."

The pay scale for state inmates is 19 cents to 51 cents per hour. Money for fines, child support and victim compensation is deducted from prisoners' earnings. "They can shop in the commissary or buy magazines," Ms. Bensinger said.

Allegheny County Councilman Vince Gastgeb, R-Bethel Park, and council Vice President Charles Martoni, D-Swissvale, co-sponsored the prisoner employment bill. The measure is scheduled for discussion when council's Public Safety Committee meets at 5 p.m. Wednesday.

Only nonviolent offenders would be admitted into the proposed program. The prison warden would be assigned the task of setting up policies for transporting and overseeing prisoners on work sites.

No more than 10 percent of the county inmates could be assigned to the manual labor program. Only prisoners who pleaded guilty or who were convicted of crimes could be required to work.

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