Walls of Fire: California Is Fighting Wildfires Thanks to Underpaid Prisoners

Fifteen thousand people are mobilized every summer to fight wildfires in California. Men are exposed to the extreme heat of the burning zones, loaded with 100 pounds of equipment, working in the field for 24-hour shifts without interruption. Among them, 4,000 have an odd status and earn only $2 per day, far from the $34 an hour that the average firefighter in California earns.

On Thursday, July 31, the American website Vox, going back over a KQED report, looked into the case of prisoners “employed” by the state of California in its struggle against wildfires when 900 of them wound up being mobilized over two weeks in the northern part of the state. All of them are part of a program called “Conservation Camps,” through which they fight flames but are also required to build barriers to head off floods or, more generally, to be a part of other community outreach. It’s a program that allows California to save more than $100 million a year, according to KQED.

Questioned by Vox, John Roman, member of the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, a think tank that evaluates American public safety policies, considers the prisoners “so far below poverty that it’s just laughable,” particularly since the argument for such training seems uncertain. “Fighting forest fires is really a job, it’s not really a career,” and it doesn’t improve the level of the general education of the prisoners. According to the government of California, only 3 to 5 percent of prisoners who have taken part in the “Conservation Camps” have since found work in fighting forest fires after their release from prison.

There are no statistics to allow an evaluation of the effect of the program on the rate of recidivism. The authorities are simply under the impression that “they see fewer of these guys back behind bars than those in other programs or straight out of prison.” While he recognizes that the experience is more valuable for the prisoners than a stay in prison, John Roman wonders, “Should people in the care of the state be put in jobs that put their lives at risk?”