the program, keeps a four-inch-thick scrapbook of newspaper and magazine clippings describing the project.

Newspaper photographs show prisoners thinning timber stands, repairing forest drainage ditches, and cleaning up debris after forest fires. Another group, featured in the sports pages, are stocking a lake with fingerlings that would soon be game fish.

To McLagan the basic purpose of the program is punishment, paying society back by performing services useful to others. As an alternative to jail, McLagan suggested, it has a lot of advantages. "Jails," he said, "are expensive. People hurt one another in jail. It breaks up families. So if you have people who don't need that kind of security, why not use another form of punishment?" His question is rhetorical. Not since the corrections staff convinced their natural resources counterparts that they would not put "thugs in the woods" has anyone challenged the program.

Besides its possible rehabilitative effect on the offenders, Sentencing to Serve has achieved significant cost savings—as much as $32,000 in six months for one county—by reducing the need to pay for new prison beds. These measurable benefits satisfy one of the specific STEP criteria.

After Sentencing to Serve was nurtured through a pilot stage with private funds, the Corrections Department put up $700,000 to expand it, and Perpich held a press conference to launch it. Popular with both conservatives and liberals, Sentencing to Serve is now a line item in the budget of the Corrections Department, which last year got $1.5 million for the program.

McLagan reflects on the generous press coverage and the official approval the program now enjoys and wonders whether it would have been started "if I just sat down and wrote up the program concept and said I would like you to try this. I believe in my heart we never would have gotten it going without the status it gained by being chosen as a STEP experiment."