One of the purposes of a prison system is to turn around a convict's life and make him or her a productive member of society. The word "penitentiary," after all, has its roots in repentance.

Unfortunately, a program that was giving inmates a fighting chance to go straight on the outside is about to shut down for a lack of funds.

For the past 20 years, Utah State University offered classes for inmates seeking to earn bachelor's and master's degrees. For $100 a semester, inmates could take classes online or through television, and eventually earn a college degree. Most of the degrees were given in business, accounting and psychology.

Snow, Dixie and Salt Lake Community colleges provide classes for inmates working toward two-year associate's degrees.

But in August, the program at Utah State will be shut down. It is running a $600,000 deficit, and the university can no longer afford to pay.

A few stone-hearts may call this development good. To them, allowing inmates to take college classes at bargain-basement prices smacks of mollycoddling criminals, giving them a better life than their victims or other law-abiding people who have to pay far more for their college education.

The same types probably also believe that prisoners should eat nothing but bread and water, and spend their days turning large rocks into pebbles with sledge hammers. For them, prison should be all about punishment.

Such attitudes ignore the fact that most prisoners are going to return to our communities eventually. The question is, do we want them coming back willing to contribute to society in constructive ways, or more angry at the world than when they went behind bars in the first placefi

One way to reform an inmate is to train him in skills that will give him gainful employment so he doesn't have to return to a life of crime to survive on the outside. In the past, prison industry programs sufficiently filled this need, teaching inmates various trades such as furniture making and carpentry.

The world has changed since then. Manual labor is no longer sufficient to support an individual, much less a family. Today, a high-school diploma or GED is insufficient to break into most career fields. A bachelor's degree is considered the absolute minimum for many jobs today.

An inmate who can come out with a bachelor's or master's degree is in a better position to find a job and not return to crime than one who comes out uneducated.

There are some statistics that bear this out. The Utah Department of Corrections tracked 145 graduates of the USU program in their first year out of prison. In the period between 1998 and 2003, only 30 percent of them were back in prison on another crime or parole violation within a year, compared with 40 percent of those who didn't go through the program. That's a nearly 25 percent reduction in recidivism.

An inmate working on a college degree is doing more than gaining knowledge in a particular field of study. He's learning self-discipline, gaining a work ethic and making a concerted effort to change his life for the better. That inmate comes out of prison better than the one who merely kept out of trouble just long enough to convince the parole board to turn him loose.

Education makes economic sense. It costs the state $24,000 a year to keep an inmate behind bars. Anything that can reduce jail time is a direct cost savings. And a gainfully employed inmate bolsters the economy and puts money into the state's coffers instead of just taking out.

Kathleen Robinson, the director of the USU program, said that legislators have not made this a priority. They should.

The Legislature should support this program as an investment in human potential.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A8.