In the realm of presidential politics, the Massachusetts prison furlough program is a "hot button"--an emotionally stirring but largely irrelevant pseudo-issue that serves only to define a candidate's values.

Corrections policy is hardly the stuff of presidential leadership. But that hasn't stopped Vice President George Bush from making his opposition to prison furloughs a major campaign theme.

In his efforts to portray Gov. Michael S. Dukakis as soft on crime, Bush has relentlessly reiterated the story of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who raped a Maryland woman while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

The Bush campaign has paid the victim's expenses as she shuttles around the country telling her story and bashing Dukakis. A Bush television commercial shows convicts walking out of prison through a turnstile, presumably to rape and pillage with the Governor's blessing.

In the litany of unusually specific proposals in the Republican platform is a plank explicitly opposing prison furloughs for murderers. And in a testament to the Bush campaign's utterly shameless exploitation of the issue, media advisor Roger Ailes joked that he only had to decide whether to portray Horton in television commercials "with or without a knife in his hand."

Dukakis's inability to respond to these attacks may well cost him the election. Polls show that voters overwhelmingly believe Bush will be tougher on crime, despite Dukakis' impressive record of reducing crime in the bay state. And the states that Dukakis must win--New York, California and Texas--are domimated by crime-sensitive city dwellers and law-and-order voters.

In defense of Dukakis, sympathetic pundits point out that the Massachusetts furlough program was instituted under Dukakis' predecessor, Republican Ed King, and that California had an almost identical program under then-Governor Ronald Reagan. They remind voters that as Vice President, Bush never objected to the furlough program for federal prisoners, even when a convicted murderer raped a woman in Arizona while on a weekend furlough.

A>LL of these defenses, however, contain one implicit assumption: Dukakis shouldn't defend the Massachusetts program on its own merits, because prison furloughs are a bad thing. Even the liberal Perspective chastised Dukakis' stand, saying "It doesn't take an MBA from Harvard to know that giving furloughs to first-degree murderers is a dumb idea...[T]he governor's lack of political acumen on the furlough issue is troubling."

Although Bush has been able to raise crowds to a frenzy by suggesting that Dukakis coddled criminals, most corrections experts approve of furloughs. In fact, 16 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have furlough programs.

Weekend furloughs remind inmates of what life is like "on the outside," providing a powerful incentive for good behavior behind bars. Furloughs give inmates a taste of freedom and make them anxious for release. Thus, they behave well in hope of parole, or at least another furlough. More importantly, furloughs prepare inmates to re-enter society upon their release, thus reducing prison recidivism.

Weekend furloughs are a useful tool even for inmates serving life sentences. When a prisoner has no hope of release, he has nothing to lose. He becomes more likely to escape, act violently, and riot.

Given the predominance of emotion over intellect among the American electorate, such a cerebral defense of the Massachusetts furlough program would probably be a political loss for Dukakis. Indeed, his best response to Bush's below-the-belt attacks is to sling the mud back and ask why Bush "allowed" the furloughed federal prisoner to roam about and terrorize Arizona.

While it's tragic that Willie Horton committed his heinous crime, it's just as unfortunate that George Bush is exploiting the incident for partisan purposes. And it will be unforgivable if Bush keeps his pledge to abolish furloughs and allows this valuable correctional tool to become a casualty of his campaign demogoguery.