Another Day, Another $8

Into Turin's busy streets last week strode 50 pimps, pickpockets, smugglers and assorted minor menaces, happy advance guard of some 1,000 jailbirds who will be turned loose this month thanks to a new law that faces up to an economic fact of Italian life: a day's work--even in jail--is worth more than it used to be.

In Mussolini's prewar heyday, when 20 lire equaled one U.S. dollar, a small-time lo'ser unwilling or unable to pay his fine could work it off in jail at about $2.50 a day. Postwar laws boosted fines in proportion to the lira's value of 620 to the dollar, but set the price of a day's work in the pokey at a measly 64-c-. The latest revision of the jail scale retroactively boosts the value of a day at hard labor to $8. Wardens all over Italy spent most of a week working over their bookkeeping, figuring out which cons had already paid off their debts to society. Top time savers turned out to be the rank and filers of the booming cigarette-smuggling trade, whose king-size fines had been calculated according to the value of their contraband. Unexpectedly, scores have already paid for their freedom and will soon be free to rush back to their launches and false-bottomed trucks.

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