They're like everybody else—almost. They go to work each weekday morning, serve communities throughout North Carolina as barbers, mechanics, cooks, secretaries and farmers. Then they go home —to their cells in state prisons. There are 306 of them, and they are convicts taking part in North Carolina's promising work-release program, a rehabilitation plan based on the idea that a prisoner with a steady outside job is of greater benefit both to himself and the state.
Begun tentatively in 1957, North Carolina's system has evolved under State Prison Director George W. Randall into the most liberal outside work plan in the...