ACHARY, La. — For generations, convicts have made license plates or gone out, sometimes in chains, to clean roads and clear ditches. But in recent years struggling rural communities like this one have relied more and more on inmates to do jobs that public employees once did: tending cemeteries, cleaning courthouse restrooms, moving furniture, renovating municipal buildings and even running errands for the police.

In flat and timeworn Louisiana towns near the Mississippi around Zachary, crews from the Dixon Correctional Institute in nearby Jackson set up tables and tents for fairs and charity events, groom the grounds of Lions Clubs, make repairs at museums and string up Christmas lights on Main Street. In nearby Slaughter, they have replaced the metal roof on the municipal building and stripped and waxed floors at the First Baptist Church. At the elementary school, they dug a goldfish pond and planted azaleas.

Here in Zachary, a swampy town of 11,275 people, a group of inmates come into town with an unarmed guard about 20 days a month. They mow the baseball field and cemetery, and they have restored two historic Victorian homes. Now, a dozen inmates, called Crew 12, are laying a sidewalk for a museum that was once the town hall.

In the last few years, the use of prisoners for manual labor has increased around the country, particularly in the South and Southwest where it not only fills the desperate demand for inexpensive laborers, but also helps prisons relieve overcrowding and supplement their budgets.

A Justice Department survey showed that 124,000 inmates in state prisons, or 10.4 percent of the total state prison population, and 45,000 local inmates, or about 7 percent of those in jails nationally, were working off the premises in 2000, the most recent year for which figures were available.

"There's more and more of it," said Carl Wicklund, executive director of the American Probation and Parole Association in Lexington, Ky. "The offender needs to be doing something to prepare himself for release and be seen repairing something broken in the community."

Officials in California, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia, for example, say they are putting more inmates to work outside prison walls. Georgia, said Mike Light, spokesman for the State Department of Corrections, plans to double the number of prisoners doing community work.

In Minnesota last year, 17,073 inmates in state prisons, almost twice the number of six years ago, were enrolled in "sentencing to service" programs in which they live in county jails and do local jobs.

Oklahoma has more than 1,000 inmates assigned to local work centers around the state, mostly in western towns with waning populations. The Legislature is considering raising the 100-bed limit on the centers and letting drug offenders join the program.

Not everyone agrees that the rise in inmate workers is an entirely positive trend.

"It's a way to get nasty work done for free," said Malcolm C. Young, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research group in Washington.

But as a form of restorative justice, Mr. Young said, "it's doing something constructive and it gives something back to the community."

In some state capitals, including Baton Rouge, La., prisoners maintain governors' mansions and do most of the cleaning and heavy lifting chores in state offices and museums. But it is in hundreds of small towns where they stand out most.

In Louisiana, the economic downturn's effect on state and local budgets has been the driving force behind the use of prison labor. By employing inmates that the state pays 4 cents to 20 cents an hour, towns like Zachary can deliver many public services they would otherwise do without.

In this part of the state, most workers come from Dixon, a medium security prison with 1,470 inmates.

"I love it out here," said Timothy Holland, 27, a member of Crew 12 who was working on the sidewalk project.

Mr. Holland said he was sent to prison at age 20 for selling cocaine, was sentenced to 15 years and should be eligible for parole in two.

"It's hard work," he said, "but you get a better peace of mind. You get adjusted back to society."

The men have become a familiar part of Zachary, working from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. about five days a week.

Fears are few, largely because townspeople know that the inmates chosen for the assignments are nearing the ends of their sentences and are unlikely to do anything to jeopardize their release. The workers are carefully screened. Sex offenders are automatically ruled out. Instead of the meager wages, many take payment in "good time" reductions in their sentences.

People gain satisfaction seeing inmates clean up their towns.

"Politically, people want to see inmates work," said John A. Womack, the mayor of Zachary.

Corrections officials also argue that the programs help prepare inmates for life and work after they serve their time. "I think we have to accept the fact that people are going to be released," said James M. LeBlanc, the warden of Dixon.

Nationwide, inmate labor sometimes arouses resentment from unions and local contractors. Towns around Dixon pay only for Crew 12's guard and for its transportation, which works out to $2.50 an hour for each man, or less than half the minimum wage, which is $5.15 an hour. In Slaughter, population 1,011, Mayor Barbara Bourgeois pays the state $2,500 a year for weekly visits from Crew 12.

Mayor Womack of Zachary said that competent workers willing to do menial labor were hard to find. His most likely alternative to Crew 12, he said, would be Mexican migrants.

Last year in Clinton, La., Sheriff Talmadge Bunch began a work-release program for state prisoners with six months to two years left in their jail time. Sheriff Bunch finds them jobs in private businesses that pay them $6 to $10 an hour. Participants live at the jail, but they wear whatever they want and pay taxes. Though they are driven to and from their jobs, they are left to work on their own, without a guard.

Each inmate pays the sheriff half his wages up to $120 a week for room, board and transportation, and the state pays the sheriff $18.25 a day to keep him.

"It generates $600,000 a year for us," said Paul Perkins, the deputy sheriff — more than twice what the East Feliciana Parish budget provides the Sheriff's Department.

Officials of these towns cannot cite many cases of inmates' causing trouble, Mayor Womack said. The only unsettling episode occurred a year or two ago when a newly released work crew member asked a city employee for a ride home. The employee refused, so the former inmate found a solution in a city parking lot. Later, someone in New Orleans called the mayor's office.

"They wanted to know if we were missing a city truck," Mr. Womack said.