The vast urban fires that destroyed Los Angeles’s Palisades and Altadena areas have been blazing for more than two weeks now.
Coming out of this epic disaster are, of course, stories of tragedy, but also tales of heroism. However awful these days of fire have been, however many lives and homes have been lost and residents rendered homeless, the scale of the catastrophe would have been far worse but for the extraordinary efforts of firefighting crews to contain the zones of devastation.
Thousands of local, Los Angeles-based firefighters are working around the clock on the fire-lines. They have been supported in their efforts by large numbers of fire crews from around the state and country, as well as from Mexico and Canada. They have also been joined by many California state prisoners – upwards of 1,000 according to the most recent CalFire estimates – men and women who have been trained in the state’s prisoner fire-camps, and who work the fire-lines for pennies on the dollar, performing feats every bit as dangerous and as heroic as the free-world firefighters they work alongside.
I know all too well the world of the prisoner fire-camps, having myself been through the Rainbow Camp, one of two camps in California that trains female prisoners to fight fires, while I was serving time at the California Institution for Women (CIW). Those camps, along with the more than 30 that train up male prisoners, have for decades now provided a steady stream of labor, made up of minimum custody inmates with less than eight years of their sentence to complete, to bolster the state’s often-strained firefighting infrastructure.
When I was at Rainbow, my colleagues and I trained to pass the Pulmonary Function Test (PFT), the same physical test that free-world firefighters have to pass. We had to learn how to run a mile in under six minutes, and how to do timed hikes up mountains carrying fire gear. The intent was to condition us to work in hard-to-access fire zones such as the mountains and canyons that went up in flames in LA this past week. It was hard work, but it came with a huge incentive: if I completed the training, I would get time cut off of my sentence – and since I was desperate to get back to my children, this was an opportunity I wasn’t about to turn down.
Even when I hurt my ankle during the training, after a few days of bedrest I returned to the camp, completing a modified training regimen that allowed me to progress to a position not as an active firefighter but as a cleaner. My job was to ensure that the prisoner-firefighters came back to clean showers and toilets and to generally hygienic conditions in the camp.
Those firefighters would go out to tackle the huge blazes that have repeatedly hit California over the past decade. They worked alongside Cal-Fire crews. But they earned a tiny fraction of what their free-world colleagues were earning. My memory is that my fire camp friends earned between one dollar and five dollars per day for their efforts in potentially deadly environments. That’s less than a free-world firefighter would have earned back in 1900.
These days, the pay is somewhat better, but it remains scandalously low: the CDCR pays fire-fighting inmates between $5.80 and $10.24 per day, and adds in an extra one dollar per hour when they are on an active fire-line, such as the ones in Los Angeles this week. For one of these firefighters, a full day of dangerous work will net them about what a fast-food worker in the state earns in an hour.
Moreover, until 2020, none of those prisoner firefighters could work for CalFire upon their release. They had the skills, and they had the on-the-ground experience, but the criminal justice code barred felons from being hired as firefighters. With fire departments under year-round pressure in an era of climate change-related disasters, this exclusion was an absurdity.
In September 2020, legislators in Sacramento finally woke up to this. That month, Assembly Bill 2147 passed and was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, allowing for graduates of the fire-camps to apply to have their records expunged so that they could apply to work for CalFires. It was a game-changer, one that criminal justice reformers in the state had long campaigned for. And it meant that the prisoner-firefighters could now apply their skills out in the free-world. That’s a win-win for everybody.
But there’s a catch: despite the passage of this bill, too few ex-prisoners know about it, and the expungement process remains cumbersome. In consequence, only a few hundred of these men and women have graduated the training program that would allow them to get jobs with fire departments statewide.
Given the magnitude of California’s fire-crisis, the state should be making every possible effort to bring into fire departments the thousands of trained men and women who have gone through the prisoner fire-camps in recent years. They have proven their mettle on the frontlines, and they have shown a desire to give back to the community to make up for the crimes that got them sent to prison in the first place.
Now let’s find a way to use more of them as professional firefighters.
Ingrid Archie is the national organizing director for TimeDone, the nation’s largest network of people living with old conviction records, which works to end post-conviction poverty in America.