But Keith Graves, busy at a print shop at the Petersburg, Va., federal penitentiary on a chilly, overcast day, said the job helps his prison stint go smoothly. Plus, he can send money to his 8-year-old girl, LaKeisha.

"It's helped me support my daughter," said Graves, 37, who is in prison on federal drug charges and won't be released until 2011. "I can send her extra stuff for Christmas."

Along with the outcry over U.S. jobs being "outsourced" or moved overseas, some lawmakers also complain that prison industries are a threat to American workers.

Supporters say the prison industries program — a government corporation that uses the trade name Unicor — teaches inmates job skills and keeps them active so they do not fight with corrections officers and other inmates. Despite these benefits, Congress this year could pass a bill that would put many prisoners like Graves out of work.

Most federal agencies by law must buy the office furniture, car parts, textiles and other products that prisoners make. Prison industries also have another leg up over private firms because they pay inmates, at most, about a dollar an hour, well below the $5.15 per hour minimum wage, critics said.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra introduced legislation that would break Unicor's federal monopoly by making it compete with private companies to win government contracts.

The Michigan Republican's bill is on a roll. It quickly got 165 Republican and Democratic sponsors. Labor unions and corporations usually on opposite ends of the political spectrum have joined forces to support it.

Hoekstra's bill passed the House 350-65 in November, and it could come up for a Senate vote this year.

Congress created the federal prison industry in 1935 to keep prisoners busy and give them job training they can use after release. But Unicor does more than rehabilitate. Some of the money prisoners earn pays court fines, compensates crime victims, and covers child support.

In the past two decades, lawmakers who believe cheap prison labor threatens private jobs have attacked Unicor. Two years ago, Congress passed a law that exempted the Pentagon from automatically buying prison products.

As a result, more than 2,000 prisoners lost jobs, said Philip Glover, president of the American Federation of Government Employees' National Council of Prison locals.

Idle prisoners are a security threat because they are prone to boredom, frustration and battling each other or prison staff, he said. And prison staff are having a harder time keeping inmates busy because the federal prison population has mushroomed in the past 20 years, thanks partly to tougher, mandatory drug sentences.

The 104 federal prisons across the country now house 175,000 inmates, up from 44 prisons with 24,000 prisoners in 1980, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. About 20,000 inmates worked in prison industries last year.

Unicor sold $667 million in products to the federal government in 2003, down from $679 million in 2002. The program gets no federal money and revenues are used to cover program costs.

The top prison product line is office furniture, with more than $200 million in sales in 2002. Office-furniture manufacturers and textile companies claim they have lost thousands of jobs because Unicor has a lock on the lucrative government contract market.

Even if a government agency finds less expensive office furniture from a private company, it must buy what the federal prison industry offers, said Brad Miller, manager of government affairs for the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturer's Association.

Prison-made desks, chairs and other furniture can also cost 20 percent more than nonprison products, despite Unicor's lower labor expenses, said Thomas Walker, government programs manager for Haworth office furniture company in Holland, Mich.

For example, Unicor prices may be higher in some cases because prisons can give a government agency a cost range for a particular chair instead of one set low price, Miller said.

"An antiquated congressional law permits this agency of the government to, in essence, force their products and their prices on the government customer without any government oversight," Walker said.

American Apparel and Footwear Association members also gripe about Unicor, saying they should be able to bid on lucrative military uniform contracts that Unicor now holds. These contracts are worth almost $160 million, association president Kevin Burke said.

Meanwhile, some congressional aides said Glover's union of corrections officers is really looking out for its members and not prisoners in its desire to keep Unicor thriving. Corrections officers who work for Unicor prisons often pull higher wages than officers assigned to guard inmates, they contend.

But the complaints about Unicor are unfair, Glover said.

The program was designed so products made by prisoners do not directly compete with companies outside the prison walls, he said.

Unicor products account for less than 1 percent of the goods and services the federal government buys each year, so prison products are not a serious competitor for private companies such as Haworth, Glover said.

And if Unicor loses government contracts, many private companies would suffer, Glover said. Dozens of private companies supply raw goods to prison industries and even provide training and staff to supervise inmates.

The program's therapeutic effect on prisoners is priceless, Glover said.

Many inmate workers were career criminals who never held an honest job before, he said. Inmates are so eager to do something worthwhile in prison that many Unicor jobs have waiting lists in the hundreds.