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© Robert
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A shocking number of
firefighters battling California’s numerous wildfires are actually prisoners
sometimes working for less than US$2 a day. They’re hoping to earn shorter sentences
– and they’re saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. Somewhere between
30 to 40 percent of the state’s forest firefighters, or nearly 4,000 people,
are low-level felons from state prisoners, Mother Jones reported.
Working in “Conservation Camps” set up by the California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the inmates are trained to clear brush
that can potentially trigger a fire and also battle the flames when a blaze
does occur.
RT US report continues:
In
return, they make somewhere between US$1.45 and US$3.90 per day, according to
the CDCR.
They also have two days knocked off of their sentences for every day they work.
Speaking
with KQED,
inmate Cory Sills said that, despite sometimes having to work 24-hour shifts,
he generally feels like the camps are a good thing, especially since prisoners
are treated better than they are behind bars.
“There’s
an assembly where we have a formation in the mornings and it was like my second
or third day and the lieutenant comes out and he goes, ‘Look, we’ll treat you
like men first, firefighters second, and prisoners if we have to,’” he said
last July. “That right there, that stuck in my head for two years now because
now I have a chance to be treated like a man.”
Another
inmate, Michael Dignan, is now close to being released after four years of
working as a firefighter. He said there are upsides to the job besides not
having to sleep in prisons, which no inmate has to do after being accepted into
the program. Prisoners, instead, sleep in barracks-style lodges that are
guarded by correctional officials and even get better food.
For
California taxpayers, the cheap labor amounts to more than $80 million in
savings per year.
Still,
not everyone thinks the program is ideal, especially since the work can
potentially be very dangerous. When wildfires are fought by inmates, the
prisoners are putting themselves at risk against huge flames.
“When
the inmates volunteer, we don’t try to hide that fact [that it’s dangerous],”
CDCR spokesman Bill Cessa told ThinkProgress.
“When you’re actually in a fire — this is not a small grass fire, these are
fires with flames 100 feet tall.”
Prison
reform advocates have also shared concerns because officials have expressed
reluctance to go ahead with early-release programs for fear that they would
significantly reduce the number of inmates left to volunteer as firefighters.
In
2014, California state attorneys stated that implementing an early-release
program would “severely impact fire camp participation – a dangerous outcome
while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.”
Shortly
afterwards, California Attorney General Kamala Harris relaxed this policy. Now,
minimum-custody inmates can be considered for early release unless it can be
proven that the number of firefighters would be reduced by doing so, Mother
Jones stated.
One
troubling comparison was also made in a 2014 Buzzfeed article,
this time to slavery. Of the 45 inmate firefighters interviewed by Toronto
sociologist Philip Goodman, 10 referred to their time in the camps as
“slavery,” while seven referred to it as “rehabilitation.”
“Pshh,
this might be beyond slavery, whatever this is,” inmate Demetrius Barr told
Buzzfeed. “They don’t have a whip. That’s the difference.”
Still,
others have continued to find value in the program. There are no numbers to
determine whether the firefighting camps reduce the rate at which inmates
re-enter the criminal justice system as repeat offenders, but officials told
KQED that they don’t personally see as many back in prison.
“This is a reward for many
of these individuals,” California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
spokesman Daniel Berlant said to Mother Jones. “They’re outside the walls,
doing good work, learning a skill that they may not get behind bars. They don’t
want to screw up.”
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