30 Percent of California's Forest Firefighters Are Prisoners (xpost from GD)

[KamaAina]

About 4,000 inmates battle blazes in the Golden State's woodlands.

Here's a kind of crazy stat: Between 30 and 40 percent of California's forest firefighters are state prison inmates. The state has become a tinderbox of sorts from a four-year drought, and roughly 4,000 low-level felons are on the front lines of the state's active fires. Here's what's going on:

Why are prisoners fighting fires? For years, California's prison system has operated a number of "conservation camps," in which low-level felons in the state prison system volunteer to do manual labor outside, like clearing brush to prevent forest fires or fighting the fires themselves. A handful of other states have similar programs, but California's program is by far the largest, with roughly 4,000 participants. At its best, the program is a win-win situation: Inmates learn useful skills and spend time outside the normal confines of prison, and the collaboration with Cal Fire saves the state roughly $80 million a year.

Participants make $2 per day in the program and $2 an hour when they're on a fire line. That may sound paltry, though it's not bad by prison standards: Many prison jobs bring in less than $1 per hour. In addition, for each day they work in the program, the inmates receive a two-day reduction from their sentences.

So these are convicted felons? Yes—the prisoners are typically low-level felons, all of whom have volunteered to participate in the program and have demonstrated good behavior in prison. Some convictions exclude prisoners from applying, like arson (surprise, surprise) or sex crimes. One benefit of the program is that it often breaks down racial barriers: "When people are incarcerated they tend to segregate by race," says Hadar Aviram, a law professor and criminologist at the University of California-Hastings. "The fire camps are not like that. People who do not associate with each other inside a prison are willing to be friends when they're at a fire camp."

...

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/40-percent-californias-fires-are-fought-prison-inmates

h/t Cheese Sandwich

[petronius]

1. Interesting, that's higher than I would have guessed

That last paragraph really bothers me, however: maintaining adequate numbers of prisoner-firefighters should have no bearing whatsoever on early-release eligibility...

Prison reform advocates have raised concerns that the state is so reliant on the cheap labor of inmate firefighters that policymakers may be slow to adopt prison reforms as a result. The concern was magnified last fall, when lawyers for state Attorney General Kamala Harris argued that extending an early prison-release program to "all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought." Harris has since said she was "troubled" by the argument, and the state has ruled that minimum custody inmates, including firefighters, are eligible for the program so long as it proves not to deplete the numbers of inmate firefighters.

[daredtowork]

2. I saw the Harris remark or something similar last year

Suddenly mass incarceration as "the new Jim Crow" or possibly backdoor slavery seemed a proven point. Since then I've tried to underscore the point that the lack of functioning welfare system for single people pushes people toward crime, so denying people a means to support themselves and then using prisons as a source of cheap (overwhelmingly black) labor can look a tad White Propertied Privilege self-serving.

Prisoners die fighting fires. Perhaps they should receive regular pay toward their release start-up fund.

[petronius]

3. I thought about commenting on that ridiculous pay scale as well - I would

certainly agree that any prison work that benefits an entity outside the prison (whether it's the state or a private enterprise) should receive at least minimum wage--and fire-line work probably deserves more.

It's a pretty transparent sop to claim that they're "learning valuable skills" when post-incarceration employment is so stacked against them. A solid start-up fund as you suggest would probably help a lot of people successfully transition out of prison...