Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, November 4, 1995                   TAG: 9511060031
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CORRECTIONS - FOR INMATES AND PARKS

Item: Virginia has about 24,000 adult inmates in state prisons, and many of them are in good shape: They're rested, having plenty of time to sit around watching TV; they're well-fed; they're physically toned up from lifting weights and playing basketball.

Enter Gov. George Allen with an idea: Put to work the second item helping to rehabilitate the first.

It's an excellent idea, worth applauding by tree-huggers and tough-on-crime zealots, by Democrats and Republicans, by all Virginia taxpayers.

This initiative, employing nonviolent inmates in refurbishing facilities and infrastructure and for necessary land-conservation efforts in public parks, should save taxpayers some bucks.

With his plan to expand the program to include fix-up projects in local communities and at state-agency facilities, Virginians who never visit state parks or historic sites also will benefit.

To be sure, Allen has picked a bad name for the endeavor: the Virginia Conservation Corps.

It was fine that the governor and a group of state inmates launched the VCC initiative Thursday in Chesterfield County's Pocahontas state park, created in the 1930s by the federal Civilian Conservations Corps.

But the CCC, which was launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression and which quickly became one of the most successful social programs in American history, was not a corrections program.

Perhaps Allen would just as soon not be reminded of this, but the CCC is more like kissin' kin to President Clinton's AmeriCorps - a national-service program for college-bound young people that congressional Republicans are about to whack with a budget ax.

Leave that aside for now, though. We like both sides of Gov. Allen's initiative:

However modest a proposal, it's more of a commitment than the governor has shown before to protect and, in some cases, to salvage some of the state's most beautiful natural resources - at-risk resources that rank high on Virginia's quality-of-life index.

It's also an intelligent way to deal with nonviolent criminals who now are the guests of the state, but who - Allen's no-parole policies notwithstanding - will in large numbers be leaving the prisons eventually.

When these inmates go back to their communities, some of them may be more welcome and more likely to stay out of trouble if they return with a sense of self-worth, self-discipline and hard-won skills acquired in the Virginia Conservation Corps.

Work can be as redemptive, and sloth as harmful, to prisoners as to anybody else.

While they'll earn a little money, which is good, the work itself - even nitty-gritty jobs like painting fences, repairing picnic tables, picking up trash, shoveling rocks, clearing land of dead wood and girding it from soil and flood erosion- will probably prove more valuable to them than the 50 cents-an-hour wages.

Similarly, the potential value of Allen's initiative for parks and prisoners is likely to be greater than the thousands of dollars a year it might save.