California Wildfires

By Joanne Hwang

In the midst of the devastating California wildfires, hundreds of incarcerated firefighters wield hoses and dig fire lines in the place of paid professionals. In general, incarcerated people comprise 30 percent of all firefighting crews in California. They use chainsaws, axes, and rakes to defend against the fuel of fire. These incarcerated firefighters are part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's Conservation Camp Program, and their efforts are crucial, playing a large role in a wildfire that destroyed 18,000 homes.

The work, however, is dangerous, and incarcerated firefighters are four times more likely to sustain physical injuries often due to lack of training.  While professional firefighters in California are required to go through at least three years of training, incarcerated firefighters are dispatched in under three weeks of joining these programs. Incarcerated firefighters aren’t only undertrained, but they’re also underfed and underpaid. Despite risking their lives by putting themselves in the line of fire, inmates are paid as little as two to five dollars a day. On the other hand, a civilian firefighter earns tens of thousands of dollars per year. This difference is substantial—scarcely enough to allow inmates to readjust to society after release.

Not only are the wages insufficient, but inmate firefighters still struggle to get employed by fire departments upon release, citing criminal records and lack of professional experience. The same holds for the other two job options for inmates: daily prison labor and prison industrial work. These jobs are tedious.

For the state and officials who operate these prisons, however, the issues related to mistreatment, safety, or compensations are insignificant when compared to the fact that California’s incarcerated firefighters save the state millions of dollars in battling wildfires. Inmate-firefighters make up 20 percent of the state’s wildfire force and save the state up to 100 million annually. The for-profit system at the expense of welfare reflects a long standing trend of the prison industrial complex.

Prison labor has always been valuable to states; two thirds of the 1.2 million incarcerated people are forced into work with little pay. While the jobs within prisons are similar to the common employment outside, unlike the outside world, prison inmates are under complete control of their employers and are stripped of rights that are meant to protect against labor exploitation. Southern states like Alabama are especially dependent on exploitative prison labor to produce goods for the public market. As the state economies flourish, inmates are exploited, making prison feel more punitive than rehabilitative.

For most states, the minimum wages for incarcerated workers is less than a quarter, if not zero cents. As a result, almost 70 percent of surveyed incarcerated workers are not able to afford basic necessities with their prison wages. This means that family members of inmates—many of which come from already low-income families—have to chip in to support a loved one. And even if working for mere pennies seems pointless, inmates who refuse to take jobs face solitary confinement, loss of familial visitations, and denials of sentence reductions.

The prison industrial complex has a vicious history of exploiting inmates to subsidize the costs of upholding the growing prison system. Some companies are particularly interested in working with prisons due to the readily available and cheap supply of labor.