American Notes PRISONS

There was something about the scheme that just did not compute. Under a recent contract between the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. prison system, 45 inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lexington, Ky., were set to work entering data from thousands of applications for FHA insurance into a computer. But Beverly Hirsch, 36, who is serving a 40-year sentence for credit-card and check fraud, was surprised to see that some forms carried not only information on applicants' income and debts, but their bank-account and credit-card numbers as well. "The information they were giving me in here was what I worked pretty hard on the outside to get," says she. Concerned that some inmates might try to cash in on the information, Hirsch alerted reporters and the U.S. Attorney's office. That led Warden Patrick R. Kane to shut down the operation last month and call in the U.S. Secret Service to investigate whether any of the data improperly fell into the hands of prisoners. HUD, says Kane, was "supposed to send in information that was not sensitive. If I've got your credit-card number, that's damn sensitive." So far, no frauds have turned up.