Tag along: crime does pay--poorly--for the women in that venerable prison industry of making license plates.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Picture This

They wake up, clean up, eat breakfast. Then at 7:30 a.m. each weekday, they cross the caged walkway they call The Bridge. Behind lies the brooding brick dormitory with its necklace of razor wire. Ahead waits the nearly new factory that covers almost three-quarters of an acre. It's filled with tool and die machines, curing ovens and numbers. Lots of numbers.

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This is North Carolina's license-plate plant at the Correctional Institution for Women, the maximum-security prison in southeast Raleigh. The freedom of the open road may be only a memory to the 61 inmates who work here, but they make 2.5 million to 4 million license plates each year for the 7.2 million motor vehicles registered to Tar Heel residents and businesses.

"Personalized tags in particular are a growing business for us," says Chuck Congleton, director of sign and tag manufacturing for Correction Enterprises, staterun prison industries that range from growing and canning food to making the paint that divides roads. License tags, the butt of prison jokes--"Where I come from, a personalized tag means your old man made it"--occupy a hallowed spot.

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The prison system inherited their manufacture from the highway department in 1929. Until 2001, license plates were made at Central Prison, the maximum-security men's pen. But the operation outgrew its plant, and this one--28,000 square feet--opened in 2001. Workers are selected at random from the more than 1,100 inmates in the women's prison.

License plates start as foot-wide strips of coiled aluminum. The metal is unrolled onto a conveyor belt that snakes along while a machine applies a white laminate imprinted with the Wright flyer, sea oats and First in Flight legend. Another piece of equipment chops it into 6-inch-high plates with rounded corners and punches four holes for...