By Sonja Sherwood Photos by Aaron Levi

Sunshine glints off the steel legs of the tripod. A half-dressed man confronts the camera mustachioed and unsmiling. He stands like a block against a brilliant white backdrop, chest bare beneath a denim jacket, up to his ears in a stiff blue collar.

His photographer was flown in from Italy. Hair by Goody.™ Clothing courtesy of Prison Blues. Shot on location at a medium-security prison in Pendleton, Oregon.

The photographer postures him, makes him fabulous, makes him remove his watch. He points at the model's smooth chest and flings a remark to his assistant. She translates his Italian: "Giovanni wants the tattoo in the picture."

The model spreads the flaps of his jacket open to expose a tattooed heart encircled by a blank ribbon. He watches more pantomimed instructions and obediently puts his hands on his hips, tucking his fingertips into the pockets of his beltless jeans. He's tough, tattooed, bad to the bone. He's sporting an attitude even the paparazzi of fashion can translate: machismo.

The camera clicks. Ciao.

Made on the inside to be worn on the outside.

--Prison Blues slogan

The model is inmate #6972914, alias Russell Bicknell -- courtesy of Eastern Oregon Corrections Institute (EOCI). Bicknell is a convicted criminal sentenced to seven years in EOCI for burgling homes all over Oregon, including one owned by the parents of a prominent judge. The tattoo is the work of a friend who died of a heroin overdose six years ago. And the clothes are the product of a controversial Oregon inmate work program known as Prison Blues. By muscling in on the popular gangster look, EOCI hopes to steal a portion of the profits that make up the $6.5 billion jeans industry and use it to sustain a prison program that supports itself.

Bicknell and more than thirty other inmates have become voluntary poster boys of badness in an industry in which to be anything but chic is criminal. The chilly indigo-toned photos of their chests, biceps and tattoos have put Prison Blues on the same maps that pinpoint Nordstrom, Meier & Frank and the Emporium. The clothing they model is the mandatory prison uniform for all of Oregon's 8,000 inmates. They wear it, they make it and their mugs help sell it.

After an afternoon posing for his public, Bicknell is escorted back inside the hangar-like Prison Blues factory. High ceilings and skylights create the illusion of open space; the factory is bright, modern and immaculate. Bicknell resumes his place at a row of fast-paced work stations where he and more than fifty other prisoners spend their weekdays hunched over sewing machines running strips of cloth through sergers and back-tackers. The hardy paint-chipped machines zip the denim through textile teeth so quickly that some inmates wear bandages to protect their fingers from cloth burns. A radio tucked in the rafters delivers distantly cheery pop tunes to the men below.

Some of these men have gone on talk radio to answer questions about the program. "What are you in for?" is always the first question. "Has the program bettered you?" is typically the second. From there, callers tend to pitch their tents in one of two camps.

The citizens who want inmates put to work see Prison Blues' success as a solution to the high cost of incarceration (more than $19,000 a year per inmate in Oregon). For every dollar an inmate earns, 80 percent of it is returned to the state in the form of taxes, "rent," drug or alcohol treatment, family support and victim restitution.

But others wonder how far the program's government umbrella, Oregon State Corrections (OSC), should go to employ inmates. Does the state have any business mixing incarceration with the free market? At what point does the advertising and publicity cross the line of good taste? And the biggest worry: Is felony becoming fashionable?

The critical camp -- the mothers, the state politicians and the people who've watched the TV show Cops too many times -- don't want reminders of America's prison crisis facing them on the clothing rack. This country's fascination with violence is severe enough, they say, without the state selling it, marketing it and shipping it overseas. They point to ads depicting a rope of jeans knotted together dangling from the window of a prison cell with the caption, "Wear them out," and they wonder, "Is this rehabilitation or is it irresponsibility?"

We've never sold the gangster look, and we've never promoted -- except humorously -- the fact that these goods were made by prisoners.

-- Perrin Damon, communications manager
Oregon State Corrections

Two years ago on Donahue, an audience of housewives and tourists was treated to the sight of three handcuffed, heavily guarded inmates from the Prison Blues factory. The inmates' chaperone was Fred Nichols, then-director of Oregon State Corrections Industries. Between Phil Donahue's hyperactive interrogation of the inmates, Nichols told the audience: "We don't totally disagree that the Prison Blues product could be seen as glorifying prison life, but we asked that question to Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs -- even at trade shows in Italy and Japan -- and everyone associated Prison Blues with rehabilitation.

"There are 10,000 different labels out there, and for us to be successful we have to find a niche -- something that gives us free advertising. We don't have a multimillion dollar ad campaign out there, so we have to promote what makes us unique and real."

Everything we've done has been an attempt to get out that basic fact: Prisoners make these jeans.

-- Rick Dalbey, Dalbey & Denight Advertising,
Prison Blues' advertising agency

Nichols was the man who turned a prison employee's suggestion into a going proposition back in 1989 and let Prison Blues products loose on the public in 1990. He went on Donahue in 1994 and was fired for "political incompatibility" in 1995.

Nichols envisioned -- some would say hallucinated -- that Prison Blues would grow to employ 300 inmates and generate sales of up to $18 million a year. Instead, the program has hit its ceiling at a work force capacity of sixty and less than $2 million in sales. In the words of Bob Pace, the prison employee who gave Nichols the idea for the garment factory, "Nichols promised the world, and then he couldn't deliver."

With nearly 200 inmates on a waiting list to join the factory, there's no satisfying explanation for why Prison Blues isn't employing the number of inmates Nichols predicted.

The program has a hot product line and no shortage of cheap labor. America's staggering crime problem has resulted in the largest captive labor force in the world. Even Oregon's relatively modest inmate population is expected to double in the next decade. Last year, Oregon voters made their wishes clear when they passed the Inmate Work Act, legislation stipulating that OSC increase the number of inmates employed behind bars.

The reasons being touted to explain why Prison Blues remains a mild -- but not a smashing -- commercial success all revolve around money. Although the wages paid to inmates eventually lead back to the government's coffers, some union leaders object to paying inmates minimum wage. They argue it's unfair to employ criminals when so many free citizens are out of work.

Federal commerce laws add to the conundrum. Inmates are paid prevailing industry wages (typically higher than minimum wage) for products shipped across state or national lines. This makes the "cost" of inmate labor comparable to that of private sector labor. These concerns, coupled with the nagging worry that Prison Blues' bad-boy image might alienate a public put off by gangster chic, all complicate the program's mission to teach inmates a work ethic.

But the main reason Prison Blues isn't a bigger success than it is has nothing to do with the product, which is superb; nor with the inmates, who aren't responsible for how it is packaged. Nor does it lie in any of the largely transparent arguments that have been assembled against work programs in general. The reason lies back in Salem, Oregon, at OSC, where officials are quick to admit they're not business people -- they're people people.

One consequence of this became obvious immediately after the Donahue episode aired. In what was essentially an infomercial, Phil Donahue appeared before his audience dressed head to toe in Prison Blues apparel, modeling the product line like a middle-aged Gap clerk. Viewers responded accordingly, and in the weeks following the show, several thousand Donahue fans deluged Prison Blues with requests for jeans.

Here was OSC's door to the public's dollars flung wide open. But the people people in Salem, seemingly oblivious to the concept of supply and demand, struck out.

"Prison Blues didn't have the stock on hand," Bob Pace says. "There were a lot of people wanting jeans, and they never got them." The event caught OSC literally with its pants down, without so much as a catalog to harvest its new customers. In what could be Prison Blues' epitaph, Pace adds, "If you want to play with the big boys, you've got to be ready to step up to the plate."

All that publicity didn't sell jeans; it was just hype.

-- Brent Wakeman, garment division manager
Prison Blues

I think we were using those inmate images to get into the fashion market, but the sales haven't been there to indicate that it worked.

-- Debra Dawes, executive assistant
Oregon State Corrections Industries

Prison Blues' annual sales have shown steady and sizable increases since it went public, beginning at $125,000 in 1991 and growing to nearly $2 million by 1995. Fully two-thirds of those sales were made in the "fashion market."

If Prison Blues' sales now seem spotty, the underlying dermatitis is political -- the kind of hives people people get when faced with business decisions. The latest decision -- whether to continue hiring slick photographers or to get out of the fashion business altogether -- coincides with the end of OSC's 3 ½-year pro bono advertising contract with Dalbey & Denight.

Until recently, Rick Dalbey and Charles Denight have been Prison Blues' contact with the outside world. Their Portland, Oregon, agency has been behind Prison Blues' brilliant award-winning (and free) advertising campaign.

Dalbey and his partner managed to spread the word about the program through word of mouth. They hauled Prison Blues jeans around to trade shows, sparking the fires of charity with the matchsticks of commerce. Their networking eventually paid off. They landed donated ad space in such national magazines as Spy and Jibe and swept national advertising awards in the process.

The "hype" they successfully generated came to an end late in 1995 when OSC ordered Dalbey & Denight Advertising to stop photographing inmates, remove existing photos of prisoners from its Web site and dispose of the (post-Donahue) catalog. OSC, in the words of one official, was "changing its philosophy" toward the work program.

Dalbey estimates that he and his partner annually invested $60,000 of their time promoting the image that OSC now claims didn't work. "Everybody believed in the program except the people in Salem," Dalbey says. "If they would just let us advertise the jeans, their business would triple and they'd be employing lots of inmates. But the tallest nail gets hammered first; they didn't want anybody to notice them."

OSC has been working on ways to employ inmates without getting its nail hammered. Its main objective now is to revamp Prison Blues' image. "We didn't want to look like we were glorifying inmates or inmate life," says Debra Dawes, executive assistant at Oregon State Corrections Industries. "What we want to promote instead is the value of inmates working."

No more sashays, chantés or ciaos. The decision makers in Salem are leaving the fashion industry to Levi's and concentrating on promoting Prison Blues garments as durable work clothes. The jeans that once appeared in a Playboy fashion layout are now being targeted at lumberjacks, hanging alongside saws and suspenders in mom-and-pop stores throughout the state. A lone salesman trucks the products around rural Oregon getting to know the store owners. He tells them about the prison in Pendleton and chats with them about the merits of rehabilitation, selling a handful of pants at a time.

Meanwhile, back at the prison, Prison Blues' future is on trial.

The people at OSC know that Prison Blues products can't compete without some form of marketing, but they've relied on the charity of Dalbey & Denight Advertising long enough. Faced with the chore of weaning its toddler industry, OSC is more likely to commit infanticide than do what it takes to make Prison Blues' revenues more than just a drop in the rehabilitation bucket. "We need a marketing philosophy, a large clothing line and a good ad budget," Brent Wakeman says. "How do you sell an ad budget to the legislature?" OSC hasn't even considered it.

OSC must walk a thin barbed line between utility and consumerism. Forget about photographs and fashion shoots. Forget about sticking the state's political neck out to sell jeans. Why bother with prison-made products when the prisoner himself can be packaged? Instead of parading inmates' biceps before the public, OSC prefers to hire those muscles out to private industry.

OSC officials call it labor leasing. They offer existing manufacturing companies enticements (e.g., Valuable Working Inmates™) to move their operations inside prison walls. The companies provide the product while OSC provides the labor (the muscle) and the security (the even bigger muscle). Prisons are attracted to labor leasing because the businesses that sign labor-lease contracts are responsible for paying the inmates. Thus, the payroll burden is shifted away from the state. Since 1990, thirty states have legalized contracting prison labor to private companies.

Best of all, labor leasing eliminates OSC's old bogey: business. "Our expertise is in managing people, so it makes sense that we leave business to the business people and work in partnerships that are win-wins for everybody," says OSC Communications Manager Perrin Damon.

Prison Blues' place in the "win-win" world of labor leasing is still a matter of some debate. The optimistic overhead radio inside the factory sounds hollow on slow Friday afternoons when orders are light. The weekly visits from camera crews and journalists are petering out. Prison Blues' striking ad campaign has been replaced by apolitical anonymity.

Dalbey & Denight Advertising's new assignments -- paid this time -- are limited to designing catalogs for some of OSC's less-distinguished work programs. Growth is being kept at a standstill until OSC decides just what the hell to do with all those pants. And instead of expanding the line (a survival tip given to Prison Blues by its erstwhile rival Mossimo), OSC plans to begin manufacturing prison towels and sheets inside the factory -- leading to speculation: Hotel EOCI, maybe?

One day, the only way to try on a pair of Prison Blues jeans may be to commit a crime. The heads in Salem are still wearing their thinking caps, but for now, with OSC content to simply "break even" on sales, Prison Blues remains deadlocked by a mixture of philosophy and politics that may sentence the program to permanent probation.

It's a great program; the prisoner wins, the victim wins and society wins. If only the politicians would just stop to realize that this is nothing to disassociate themselves from ...

-- Rick Dalbey, Dalbey & Denight Advertising