by Morgan Reynolds

About the author: Morgan Reynolds is director of the Criminal Justice Center of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a nonprofit public policy think tank. He is also a professor of economics at Texas A&M University.

The unemployment rate stands at 4.9 percent, the lowest since the Vietnam War. Employers looking for workers are finding that the supply of labor, even unskilled labor, is tight. As a result, Federal Reserve Board chief Alan Greenspan is worried about rising wages reigniting inflation.

However, more than a million Americans who could work—in fact, desperately need the skills that come only from real work—remain unproductive. These are our nation’s prisoners. When idle prisoners are given the opportunity to engage in productive labor that pays a wage, they line up for it. Such work saves...