Within the relentless pace of any factory, a handful of jobs away from the main production line offer an aura of independence.

That is how Jeffrey Hill feels about his work. He is the last guy to touch what may be the most familiar symbol of everyday life in New York state. Hill works for Corcraft Inc., where he spends about eight hours every day preparing thousands of battered license plates for recycling.

Hill’s station is on the second floor of the plant. He runs each plate through a shredding machine, then carts the shards of metal to an open gate and dumps them into an outdoor receptacle. On a recent summer morning, that gate offered a magnificent view of the summer sky.

The vision lasted only while you were looking up. Once you lowered your eyes, you saw the stone wall and barbed wire of the state prison at Auburn, where Hill, 49, has been an inmate for almost 30 years.

The working force of Corcraft is made up entirely of prisoners. Since the 1920s, every official New York license plate has been made behind prison walls in Auburn. The ongoing change in style for the plates — from a white plate with images of New York City and Niagara Falls to a throwback look of blue letters on a field of gold — has touched off passionate debate throughout the state, since license plates are the rare government symbol whose decorative presence touches every level of society.

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About 10.7 million cars, trucks, motorcycles and other vehicles require plates in New York, according to state officials. The change in style involves a $25 charge at registration for car owners who want the latest version, with an extra $20 charge for those who want to keep the same numbers and letters on their plates. That is expected to generate $20 million in revenues in the 2010-2011 fiscal year for the cash-strapped state. Officials in the administration of Gov. David Paterson have described the switch as a logical way of raising money, since the state had not revised its plates since 2001.

Critics label the move as a desperate gimmick from officials unable to cope with a runaway budget. As for the look itself, it is similar to a style used throughout much of the 20th century, when New York was the most populated and prosperous state in the nation. The tradition is laid out in a display case at the prison, where a rack of historic plates spanning roughly 90 years offers a reminder of how New York plates were traditionally either blue on blue or black on various shades of gold, yellow or orange, or vice versa.

In a world where the daily routine routine rarely varies, the inmates take each change in stride. Public demand for the new plates peaked a few months ago, when the prisoners were producing 15,000 to 20,000 plates a day. By late December, the total for the year will be in the millions. But it was not a full “reissue,” which occurs when every motorist is required to get new plates. Instead, many drivers are hanging onto the plates they have, a choice that makes sense to Ricardo Callender, another prisoner at Auburn.

“I liked the old ones better, with the color scheme and the mosaic of Niagara Falls and New York City,” said Callender, 36, whose job is quality control. He sifts through hundreds of thousands of finished plates a year. If he finds any that are dented or scratched, he sends them back to go through the line again.

Every now and then, he said, he comes across a vanity plate ordered by a friend or relative.

“The one thing I’ll say about the inmates is that they’re concerned about producing a quality product,” said Gary Ryder. He is one of the state-employed civilians from outside the prison grounds who work as supervisors at Corcraft, which might be the only recession-proof industry in Auburn. “They’re very concerned about quality, (to the point) where it continues to surprise me every day.”

About 150 of the 1,700 inmates at Auburn are involved in making plates, said Greg Thurston, a civilian who serves as a general foreman at the plant. He began working at Auburn 30 years ago, when New York’s plates were still blue-on-gold, and he laughs about sticking around long enough to hear the new plates described as “retro.” Like Ryder, he expresses pride in the final product, a feeling that he said also extends to office furniture manufactured by the inmates.

Most of the prisoners who agreed to be interviewed are doing time on murder convictions. Yet Thurston and his fellow civilian supervisors say the inmates typically work hard at their jobs. Being at Corcraft, prison officials say, is a reward for good behavior in the prison, and there is a waiting list for the jobs. While workers earn just 42 cents an hour — a salary rate allowed by state law — several inmates said any source of income is important, since it allows for purchases of food, clothing items, magazines and other goods from the Auburn commissary.

Earlier this month, when some journalists toured the plant, one prisoner called out that working on the line is “slave labor.” But several inmates who agreed to be interviewed said the hours in the plant are a welcome diversion. Bill Hauser, 58, a prisoner who serves as a clerk, said time on the line is far preferable to being idle.

“It’s a good way (for them) to kill eight hours of a long day,” said Thurston, the long-time foreman, “and the yard can get old and sitting in the blocks can get old.”

The inmates at Corcraft eat breakfast with the “general population,” managers said. They punch in after 8 a.m. and punch out around 3:30 p.m. They have earned enough trust that they are allowed to use wrenches, drills and other tools on the factory floor, under a strictly monitored system in which inmates must check those tools out and return them by the end of the day.

In the presence of managers and guards, the prisoners handle a process that begins when sheets of aluminum — the state switched from stainless steel in the late 1980s — are cut into the 6-by-12.5-inch shapes that make up each license plate.

Those plates are then covered by a background, or “field,” of reflective tape. Specialty plates for motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles — as well as the car and truck plates known as “vanities” — are handled in a graphics shop at the front of the plant. After the vanity plates go through quality control, inmates stuff them into envelopes and get them ready to be mailed for mailing to individual homes.

The core of the plant — the spot where plates are made for a typical New Yorker — is the area used for embossing, which is essentially stamping. Each station involves a three-man team of prisoners. One feeds the plate into the machine. In rhythm with that mechanical heartbeat, a veteran worker at each station furiously rotates pieces of metal that alternate numbers and letters. A third worker then stacks the newly embossed plates onto a skid that can hold 1,000 pairs.

“If you can count to 10, you’ve got it licked,” one prisoner said, although it hardly looks so easy to use the "embossers," some of which date to the 1940s.

The plates are taken to the second level of the plant, to be run through machines known as “inkers” — rollers that put dark blue ink on the raised letters and numbers. While two inmates stopped a journalist to ask why workers at those stations aren’t required to wear masks, Thurston said masks are always available. Most prisoners, he said, choose not to wear them.

After being inspected for any potential defects, the plates are readied for transport to motor vehicle offices throughout the state. Pairs of new plates end up bolted to millions of cars and trucks. Some New Yorkers welcome the new field of gold, while others pine for the Upstate-Downstate image of the skyline and the falls.

Only one thing is certain: Sooner or later, tattered and scarred, most of those plates will be returned to the state. In the end, they will get shipped back to Jeffrey Hill’s little corner of the prison, to be shredded and dropped into the bin under the wall.