Infernal Affairs
September 1, 2020 11:11 AM   Subscribe

The Violent Contradiction of California’s Reliance on Incarcerated Firefighters: The state is dependent on workers it deems disposable and essential at the same time.

Where a deep blue state intersects with carceral systems, climate change, and the novel coronavirus:
Even as the escalating severity of each year’s fires has come to feel expected, an obscene kind of normal in the Anthropocene, the pandemic has brought new dangers: Home evacuations and shelter relocations are now riskier; relief funds and service organizations are stretched as mass unemployment has dropped the floor out from families across the state. There is also the matter of the labor force California has long relied on to tend to a landscape set ablaze: incarcerated firefighters.

In May, when prisons in California reported the first Covid-19 infections, the state responded to the crisis by releasing people with preexisting medical conditions and little time left to serve on their sentence. In doing so, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation off-loaded some of its most exploitable workers. (This was precisely what California’s then–Attorney General Kamala Harris predicted when, in 2014, her office argued against a new parole program that expanded eligibility for early release. Incarcerated laborers were simply too essential to California’s economy to deserve freedom.)

As fires tear through the state—often in places where Indigenous peoples were banned from conducting controlled burns on land that was stolen by a nascent California government—the depravity of this sense of dependence has been more fully exposed. “This situation right now really shows the intersection of multiple challenges within the state,” Brandon Smith, who served as a firefighter when he was incarcerated, told me. “There’s an environmental challenge here, there’s a criminal justice challenge here, there’s the current Covid crisis, [and] the need to decarcerate these prisons.” We are dealing with co-created crises: California has made incarcerated people essential to its survival, while it’s the opposite narrative—their supposed unfitness for or debt to society—that justifies locking them in cages. The story of how we got here is the story of that contradiction.
Coronavirus limits California's efforts to fight fires with prison labor:
To critics the prison program is a cheap and exploitative salve, one that should be replaced with proper public investment in firefighting; to others it is an essential part of the state’s response to what has become an annual wildfire crisis. Some have complained that participants were released just when the state needed them most.

“The inmates should have been put on the fire lines, fighting fires,” said Mike Hampton, a former corrections officer who worked for decades at an inmate fire camp. “How do you justify releasing all these inmates in prime fire season with all these fires going on?”
posted by Ouverture (30 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
How do you justify releasing all these inmates in prime fire season with all these fires going on?

They're experienced workers with a valuable skill. You could, you know, pay them a fair wage (much like the one you get, you tool), I'm fairly confident a number of them would take the job.
posted by maxwelton at 11:21 AM on September 1, 2020 [30 favorites]


Wildland Fire type jobs (going up into the mountains and putting out forest fires by doing lots and lots and lots of digging) is one of the toughest jobs imaginable. It's also incredibly low skilled, and is absolutely nothing like what most people think of when they think of "fire fighter". I had friends who did it, and not one of them was able to continue past about 23 years old, since that's when the physical demands were just too much for their "old" bodies.

Also, it paid just terrible. I remember it being just twice over minimum wage, which might sound like a lot, but this was for 12+ hour days where you slept in the dirt, much of the time in the clothes you worked in that day.

Anyway, I wanted to put that out there before all the "I'm fairly confident a number of them would take the job." takes come in, since most people who discuss the job have absolutely no idea what it is, and they think it's the same as the boys and girls down the road with the shiny red truck and the Dalmatian and the pole you can slide down. Prisoners are doing this job because if you just tried to hire people, you won't get enough because it's too fucking hard.
posted by sideshow at 11:29 AM on September 1, 2020 [13 favorites]


There's a good podcast episode from the New York Times on this.
posted by doctornemo at 11:32 AM on September 1, 2020


Prisoners are doing this job because if you just tried to hire people, you won't get enough because it's too fucking hard.

Unless you paid them commensurately. Like offshore oil rig divers.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:45 AM on September 1, 2020 [15 favorites]


Scratch a liberal, find a police-prison-industrial complex supporter.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 11:50 AM on September 1, 2020 [23 favorites]


Prisoners are doing this job because if you just tried to hire people, you won't get enough because it's too fucking hard

Prisoners are doing the job because they're being forced to, because it's cheaper for the state to use that labor than to pay what the going rate should actually be for something as hard and dangerous as wildland fire fighting. This is the problem with unfettered capitalism - if there's a way to shave a cost, it'll be shaved, no matter what.
posted by hanov3r at 11:52 AM on September 1, 2020 [12 favorites]


Heather Knight at the SF Chronicle has an article and an attendant podcast episode reporting on this.

And here's an article from another reporter about the bill that is working its way through Sacramento to make it possible for people who were firefighters while incarcerated to become firefighters when they get out.

The justifications for paying inmates so little are all rage inducing. Some combination of "they are paying a debt to society" and "part of their pay is that they get to live outside of the inhumanity of an actual prison"
posted by macrael at 11:54 AM on September 1, 2020 [13 favorites]


While watching, what, $60B worth of second-growth forest land burn up last month I was thinking it could have been more economic to have enough 747 tanker planes on seasonal standby to do continuous drops anywhere in the W USA.

We don't bat an eye at $10B spent on a carrier air arm we don't need, but heaven forfend we invest in actual wealth conservation.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:01 PM on September 1, 2020 [12 favorites]


I was thinking that Joe Biden should announce a program to establish a national firefighting team that could provide coverage during fire season to supplement and bolster local hotshot groups. Create jobs and make a move to help with infrastructure defense.

Of course, he could also redo policy around how the woods are managed to reduce the number and size of damaging fires.

This is pie in the sky wishing and has no basis in fact or reality. But any gesture toward it by future administrations would show some awareness and concern for doing .... something ?
posted by jazon at 12:13 PM on September 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


Prisoners are doing the job because they're being forced to

About a decade ago, I worked and volunteered for a reentry program and was in San Quentin weekly, helping our clients make post-release plans. The ones in the fire fighting program who I spoke with really loved it and felt they were learning valuable job skills. The biggest issue was upon release their felony record kept them from being hired in that capacity. That said they should definitely have been paid a fair wage and given early release.
posted by JenMarie at 12:13 PM on September 1, 2020 [21 favorites]


Oregon does this too. Women in prison will do these jobs for a pittance and then be unable to do them when they release. It sucks so much.
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 12:13 PM on September 1, 2020 [9 favorites]


The 1A talked about this this morning, too: Sorry if this is in those links already, but a quick mouseover didn't seem to indicate it. https://the1a.org/segments/california-wildfires-latest/

posted by Snowishberlin at 12:26 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Hotshot crews are already national, I think. They have a home area but travel to wherever the fire goes. Most are in federal agencies, either Bureau of Land Management or US Forest Service.

The long term solution isn't "more fire crews to put out fires", though. It's to have more small fires to clear out fuels and prevent them from building up. And that solution involves having less people living in the wildland urban interface that prevents these controlled burns from happening.
posted by meowzilla at 12:36 PM on September 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


I was thinking that Joe Biden should announce a program to establish a national firefighting team that could provide coverage during fire season to supplement and bolster local hotshot groups. Create jobs and make a move to help with infrastructure defense.

You may want to look into the involvement of a certain vice-presidential nominee who was Attorney General in California during the years that they ramped this practice up.
posted by Mayor West at 12:38 PM on September 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


MayorWest - I did say I was spitballing LOL

The piece I left out of my musings was that this group could/would be made up of our current batch of prisoners being exploited now; the practice of prison labor would be eliminated, and any that had served before could transition onto the team after release. And from then the group would become self substantiating. As JenMarie said, right now they can't get hired on because of their record. This group could be an option for employment after incarceration.

I know it's all more complicated than that for sure.
posted by jazon at 12:43 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Prisoners are doing the job because they're being forced to, because it's cheaper for the state to use that labor than to pay what the going rate should actually be for something as hard and dangerous as wildland fire fighting. This is the problem with unfettered capitalism - if there's a way to shave a cost, it'll be shaved, no matter what.

They're also doing it because as back-breaking and nasty as this work is, as badly paid as it, it is much better than being inside a California state prison. That's not to minimise how hard the work is, it's an indictment of how bad the prisons are.
posted by atrazine at 2:06 PM on September 1, 2020 [13 favorites]


The ones in the fire fighting program who I spoke with really loved it and felt they were learning valuable job skills. The biggest issue was upon release their felony record kept them from being hired in that capacity.

And here's a link
When Herrera got out, he said he was turned away when he tried to volunteer at his local fire department.

“I didn’t even want to get paid,” Herrera, now 20, said. “But I couldn’t do it because of my record. It was honestly heartbreaking. … I was obviously entrusted to be on a fire crew when I was in jail. Why can’t I do it when I come home?”

Herrera is among the more than 2,000 inmate firefighters assigned to the state’s wildfires each year who are usually barred from getting firefighting jobs after they’re released due to their record of convictions and state licensing rules.
posted by krisjohn at 2:36 PM on September 1, 2020 [8 favorites]


"Prisoners" are doing this job because if you just tried to hire people, you won't get enough because it's too fucking hard.
posted by infini at 2:40 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Now clearly there are large differences in the way fires are fought in California compared to Australia, but I'm a bit shocked to hear the work is so brutal it can only be done by people in their twenties, and no amount of pay can make up for it.

In Australia the rural fire brigades are made up of volunteers and many of them are older and even retirees. Usually people volunteer for their local brigades so are often fighting to defend their own towns.

Of course this has it's own serious problems, as we are starting to get megafires lasting for months we are expecting volunteers to be deployed to distant regions for weeks not only without pay but also not earning from their actually jobs. The cultural prestige of volunteering (we treat firefighters the way the US treats military veterans, with lots of hero rhetoric) is a big motivator, but not that big.
posted by other barry at 2:53 PM on September 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


They're also doing it because as back-breaking and nasty as this work is, as badly paid as it, it is much better than being inside a California state prison.

Right. Terrible living conditions inside the prisons == inmates willing to volunteer for unpaid, terrible labor. Now, if you're the state, how do you increase the rate at which inmates might volunteer for whatever dangerous work you have? Maybe, I dunno, incarcerating even more people to make the living conditions even worse?
posted by hanov3r at 3:27 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


In local town Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz mountains, there were not enough firefighter resources to prevent much of the town burning, and the impression many have is that it was triaged as firefighters worked to protect other towns.

Matthew Hahn is a formerly-incarcerated activist who has wildland firefighting training and was assisting the residents who ignored the evacuation order and stayed behind to fight fires themselves. I recommend reading back through his feed over the past couple weeks to see some reporting from that experience. Through his feed I also learned of AB1247, which passed the CA senate recently would apparently make it much easier for formerly incarcerated people to find employment.

I was reading about the residents who were threatened with arrest for trying to combat fires in evacuation zones and thinking how kafkaesque it would be for someone to be imprisoned for that and then made to fight wildfires to protect someone else's home.
posted by subocoyne at 5:44 PM on September 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


I'm a bit shocked to hear the work is so brutal it can only be done by people in their twenties, and no amount of pay can make up for it.

A friend of mine's kid used to do volunteer firefighting and was seriously debating whether or not to try to get a firefighter job, but the standards/entry/whatever was so freaking high and the job openings were so low that even despite his experience he didn't think he'd get in, so he gave up and became a jeweler. So in the professional firefighting world in CA, it's at least very high standards to get the job.

I was horrified to hear that trained firefighter inmates can't get a job outside though. What a damn waste.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:10 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


So in the professional firefighting world in CA, it's at least very high standards to get the job.

I was horrified to hear that trained firefighter inmates can't get a job outside though. What a damn waste.


Wow, that is definitely disappointing, and a waste.

Please let me say as well, speaking from Sydney, my heart (and I'm sure all Australian mefites) goes out in solidarity to all those in California (and Canada) who are affected by the nightmare of bushfires and now confronting fire seasons supercharged by climate change. And in the middle of the pandemic too. At least we were fortunate enough to get international help from North American firefighting resources, which we are now frustratingly unable to return.
posted by other barry at 11:54 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


In my experience working with inmates, they are eager for work in the fire camps both for the better environment as well as the increased credit earning rate that will shorten their sentence.
posted by ericales at 4:12 AM on September 2, 2020


The state is dependent on workers it deems disposable and essential at the same time.

Gee, what does this remind me of, I just don't know.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:22 AM on September 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


I sent my partner's mom the first link and she sent me this article, which says the following:
After years of pushing, mostly by Assemblywoman Eloise Gomez Reyes, D-Grand Terrace, the Legislature sent a bill to the governor that would help former prisoners — most of them Black and Latino — earn the emergency medical technician license necessary to become full-time, year-round firefighters with the state and numerous counties and cities.

Under AB 2147, former prisoners who have successfully worked in one of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s fire camps will be able to petition a judge to quickly expunge their records and waive parole time. They then would be able to apply not only for an EMT license, but a host of other licenses required by other professions.
posted by aniola at 8:47 AM on September 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


Lifelong Californian (and prison abolitionist) here! There's lots to say about this extreme example of the way our policies treat poor people, Black and Brown people, and workers here, but one angle I'm focused on is the way this state opts to keep itself running, economically.

Take for example how our mental health system works in Calironia: Mental health services are overwhelming provided by local community non-profits (not directly by the state) that rely on low-paid social work and therapy interns. The entire system would actually collapse if these agencies had to pay a living wage to the behavioral health providers involved. This creates a system where our most vulnerable residents receive care from the least experienced providers, and graduates of behavioral health training programs have to go through absurdly long internship periods where they get wages so low they can barely make it in our ever more expensive state. The system isn't designed to give the best mental health care - nor to provide high quality training to mental health providers. It's designed to do the minimum at the lowest possible cost. Just like running our fire-fighting service with prison workers does.

Note that California has a Democratic supermajority in our state legislature as well as a Democratic governor. We are also probably the wealthiest state in the country, and we went into COVID with a historic budget surplus.

Legislative session closed at midnight Monday without significant new policy on policing reforms, housing policy, or COVID-specific relief. I don't know of any legislation that was even proposed about addressing our fire crisis, one we've had a few years of mega-fires to respond to - such as restricting where people can build, stronger climate change legislation, or financial relief for hardest hit residents. Lack of meaningful policy is surely due to extreme timidity on the part of our electeds, but apparently also some idiotic dick measuring contest between the state house and senate branches (this story misses the content of the vote Wicks decided to risk COVID for - a housing density bill that Rendon delayed until 11:58 PM so he could tank it by a bureaucratic method - probably to undermine at Toni Atkins, head of the state Senate).

Our system of governing has epically failed - even - or maybe especially - in our most 'progressive' state. Decades of neoliberal financial policy, fueled by unexamined and often unconscious racial hatred. I would argue this is a cause - not the result - of Trumpism.
posted by latkes at 9:03 AM on September 2, 2020 [5 favorites]


Our system of governing has epically failed - even - or maybe especially - in our most 'progressive' state. Decades of neoliberal financial policy, fueled by unexamined and often unconscious racial hatred. I would argue this is a cause - not the result - of Trumpism.

Yes, this is not really the place for a drawn out conversation on this topic, but all of the screaming about Trump for the last four years has seemed to me akin to screaming about a particularly intense hurricane that is currently trashing a city while more or less ignoring the fact that it is simply an unusually intense hurricane, not, like, some novel type of weather formation that is COMPLETELY UNPRECEDENTED and also, and more importantly, more or less ignoring the conditions and system (in the metaphor: climate change, industrial capitalism) that allowed a hurricane of this peculiar intensity to arise in the first place.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:11 AM on September 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


That's not to minimise how hard the work is, it's an indictment of how bad the prisons are.

Okay, but the unfavorable conditions are mainly due to lack of rehabilitation, job training, and therapeutic programs (over incarceration is also a huge problem). San Quentin has a lot of these rehabilitation programs, but there are places where these need to be linked to the post release situation, like removing the barrier to hire of those with felony convictions. The answer is not to remove job training programs from prisons. It's to increase these, pay fair wages, and to allow those with felony records to be hired. The inmates I met with who were not allowed access to education were the ones most dejected, and at risk of re-offending just due to lack of other options.
posted by JenMarie at 12:19 PM on September 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


That New York Times article is infuriatingly pro-establishment. (The conservatives who mock the NYT for being so unabashedly liberal should try actually reading it sometime; they'd probably like it a lot these days.)

From the NYT:
The California prisons department estimates that its Conservation Camp Program, which includes the inmate firefighters, saves California taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year. Hiring firefighters to replace them, especially given the difficult work involved, would challenge a state already strapped for cash.

From the New Republic:
Despite a steady decline in the number of people (often and disproportionately Black and brown) shadowed away behind concrete and wire since 2006, state spending on prisons actually increased by 7 percent between 2010 and 2015. This year, it will cost just over $80,000 to lock someone up. By paying incarcerated firefighters poverty wages, many people involved in these systems say that California “saves” money, which could be a confounding misunderstanding of the difference between government and for-profit business or a blatant admission that exploitation is a worthy, profitable business practice.

Blithely painting California as a "cash-strapped" state is bizarre.
posted by desuetude at 10:38 AM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]


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