There’s a decent idea buried in the “Jails to Jobs” plan that Mayor de Blasio unveiled last week — buried about six feet under.

The program, which is to kick off by year’s end, will offer an eight-week minimum-wage job to every convict who leaves a city jail after completing a sentence — no matter his or her record or suitability for employment.

Providing ex-cons with jobs, argues the mayor, can cut the odds they’ll return to crime — and prison. He points to research showing that “short-term transitional employment” can cut recidivism rates by 22 percent by leading to long-term employment.

Successfully steering those caught up in the criminal world toward honest lives of self-sufficiency would be worth the $10 million a year that de Blasio plans to spend.

And not just because it would carve out a better path for ex-cons: The payoff would also include lower crime rates and prison costs. Everyone wins.

If it works. Trouble is, it’s a big “if.” And the chances that equality-obsessed, big-government progressive like de Blasio can pull it off seem slim. To be kind.

Start with the “entitlement” problem: Giving jobs sends all the wrong signals. Enrollees should have to earn them — or at least apply.

More, de Blasio assumes that many won’t be suited for a job. So he’ll offer “reentry services,” such as job training, as a key part of the program both during inmates’ time behind bars and after they’re freed. Some ex-cons will be paid for job training in lieu of work.

That’s where the big trouble starts.

Since 1984, America Works has found jobs from more than a half-million hard-to-place workers, including many ex-cons.

But what President Peter Cove and CEO Lee Bowes note is that a job is a job — not a training program, mentoring service, peer counseling or any of the other near-useless features the mayor intends to include.

Only working at — and holding down — an actual job, with actual workplace demands, regularly ends lives of dependency, poverty and crime.

It’s impossible to imagine a Team de Blasio running a program that holds the new workers — or the social workers overseeing them — to such accountability. Do they lose the job if they don’t show up?

Yes, the mayor has stumbled on a potentially good idea. But to make it work, he’d have to abandon too many of his other ways of thinking.