ELOISE - -- For 10 hours a day, they hack at the scrubby brush on the highway embankment, straining to balance on the steep slope.

They wrap masking tape around their prison-blue pants cuffs to keep out the red ants. But they can't do anything about the other biting bugs, the itchy bits of weeds that sift down their sweat-soaked shirts, the dust or the beating sun that so defines their days, their crew boss has a name for it.

"There's Big Red," says correctional officer Robert Cochran, 43, feeling the heat on his neck as the clouds break up. "You don't have to ask where he is."

If the job has anything to recommend it, the inmates say, it's that it makes the days go faster as they near the end of their time at Polk Correctional Institution, about 25 miles southwest of Walt Disney World. Their pay is 10 days off their sentence for every 30 they work, though they can't cut their time by more than 15 percent.

Better yet, the work gets them out from behind bars for a while.

"I get to ride, see different little towns, see how they're fixing up their cars and see beautiful women," says Jermaine Russ, 30, of Tampa. "So I go back and lay down and just think about getting out."

Leon Spruill, 30, of Miami, equates clearing roadsides for the state with legalized slavery, but at least he isn't caged up.

"I won't say you're free, but you're out here in freedom."

These four inmates laboring for Cochran and the Florida Department of Transportation on a bridge just south of Winter Haven are among hundreds of prisoners working on the state's roads.

They've been deemed trustworthy by prison screeners, but they make some passers-by nervous. People will cross to the other side of the street, or lock their car doors, or cradle their purses defensively.

That irks Spruill. "We're not murderers. You don't have to be scared of us."

Spruill has 13 months to go on his sentence for arson and aggravated assault. Russ has 21 months left for violating probation on an aggravated battery conviction.

Aaragone Quiroga -- friends call him "Gone" -- violated probation on a charge of selling heroin. The 27-year-old Palm Bay man is almost lighthearted; he has five weeks left on his two-year sentence. It's the longest time he has had to ponder the drug habit clear-headed. He vows to stay clean.

"It's so sickening," he says.

Counting The Days

John Johnson, 24, faces the second half of a two-year stint, his second time in prison -- "and my last," he insists. In for identity theft, he's counting the days till he can go home to wife Tonya and son Chad, whose names are tattooed in blue script on his neck.

He doesn't have far to go. He grew up in Polk County. Friends sometimes pass by and wave, which doesn't embarrass Johnson. He thinks it's fitting that he serve his time in his home county. "You feel like you're giving back to where you messed up."

Their day begins as Freebird the rooster crows at Polk Correctional, near Polk City. They wake at 4:30, eat breakfast -- eggs or pancakes with watered-down syrup -- and line up at the gate to be patted down. Under the bright yellow lights of the prison, they board a bus for a 20-mile ride through darkness to the DOT yard near Bartow.

They get back to the prison at about 6:15 p.m. and submit to a strip search to show they haven't hidden away any roadside contraband. They eat supper, go to the showers and can relax until the nightly head count between 9:30 and 10:30. Lights go out at 11, but Spruill tries to doze off before then.

"If you don't go to sleep, man, you're just going to be tired the next day. You try to get as many hours as you can, 'cause it's really not even a full eight-hour sleep with the 9-o'clock count."

The work crews labor for four long days, which allows them to rest Friday, Saturday and Sunday. On Fridays, some inmates sign up for crews doing public works projects for city governments. The cities usually offer good lunches.

Food -- But No Nap

On the DOT detail, Cochran's crew members dig into their prison-issue lunch sacks without enthusiasm. They've settled for a half-hour at picnic tables at Lake Shipp Park.

Each gets three sandwiches, usually peanut butter, bologna and turkey, plus chips or fruit and a dessert.

The men hope they don't get "stank meat," as they call it: salami. "You can't give it to nobody," Russ says.

They threw some to an alligator once and the reptile knocked it away, Johnson declares.

"He ate an apple. He didn't want nothing to do with that sandwich. He was scared of that sandwich."

The weariness really sets in after lunch. "You know, you done ate; you're full," Quiroga says. "You want to lay down for that extra half-hour."

They get as many short breaks as they need to get water and cool off, as long as they don't abuse it. That's Cochran's philosophy. He would rather treat them like men, he says: "I'd rather it be like a job."

A corrections officer for 18 years, Cochran wears his hair buzzed to a crew cut. He wears combat boots, fatigue-style pants and a gleaming badge. He carries no weapon.

At one point, Spruill walks along the embankment with a machete in his hand. Cochran, at perfect chopping height below, points out the scrub he wants removed.

The men have invested too much in their sentences to try to escape, but Cochran watches for signs. If he isn't sure about one inmate, he'll leave him back at the prison for the day. He might have gotten a bad phone call.

"Often, it's a girlfriend going with their best buddy, and nothing they can do about it."

While he supervises from the shade of a big oak, a man and woman walk by the crew. The man flashes a power salute and peace sign to the inmates, then greets Cochran.

"How you doing, boss?" the man says, and adds, "I'm staying out."

"I like that," Cochran says.

"I do, too," the woman says, smiling.

As the day wears on, the four men rev and rip and think about other places, other times.

Back To School

Quiroga sees himself on a beach. That's one of the first places he'll go when he gets out, he says.

"I'm going to try to go back to school. They offer some money programs for people coming out of prison."

Russ is eager to see his seven children and return to his lawn care business in Tampa. He may go to trade school to learn how to be a barber.

Johnson, a house framer, says, "I'm going to get a job, go back to doing what I'm supposed to do."

Spruill wants to get his high school equivalency diploma and enroll in junior college.

Someday he wants to open a soul food restaurant.

Right now he just dreams of being able to go where he wants to go without a guard looking over his shoulder. He wants to take a shower by himself, watch television in peace, sleep in his own bed -- "those things that you lose when you come to prison."