As California continues burning through another historic period of wildfires the news cycle can become jammed with evacuations, environmental fears and involuntary power shutoffs. All this because intense Santa Ana Winds have collided with extremely dry land and power lines which have set many of the fires.
As part of the state’s ongoing effort to combat fires, it’s no secret that prisoners have been working on the front lines of the fight, often as hand units, for several decades. California’s firefighting force includes prisoners from the fire training program.
California’s Conservation Camp is a rehabilitation and re-entry program in California under the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It began in 1946 and operates in 27 counties in California. It’s billed as a career pipeline that gets prisoners ready for jobs.
“An inmate must volunteer for the fire camp program; no one is involuntarily assigned to work in a fire camp,” Alexandra Powell the Public Information Officer for CA Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. Participants are required to have “minimum custody” status, the lowest classification of crimes.
CAL FIRE is the organization that trains and deploys the prisoners. Powell says prisoner firefighters receive the same training, education and equipment as regular firefighters.
Sean McLean with CAL FIRE communications said the prisoner populations are essential.
“Being able to deal with the prevention side which is extremely important, where the inmates come into play as well. They just don’t fight fire. We have project work that we’re all involved in as far as prevention out there in the wild land area,” McLean said.
While the camps provide training and education for prisoners, there are concerns about whether the opportunity for employment after leaving the program are realistic. Neither CAL FIRE or the fire conservation camp had any records to keep track of future employment of prisoners.
“It may sound like that’s exactly what we would want, a pipeline for these former inmates to know that there is a future for them as a firefighter, but the pipeline, there is nothing in the end,” laments California Assemblymember Eloise Reyes.
Reyes has been an advocate for changing this code. She’s tried, and failed, to pass legislation to amend the rules restricting inmates from receiving an EMT license.
As the state regulations stand today, inmates have to wait 10 years after their release before being eligible to receive their EMT license.
“We still have firefighters who fought in the conservation camp and still were not able to get a job as a firefighter,” Reyes said, “They’re all felons, they’ve all been convicted of felonies and [with] that alone, you cannot get an EMT license with a felony conviction.”
In her opinion, there are too many loopholes and not enough support to provide these inmates with stable career opportunities. Her biggest opposition has been from California’s Professional Firefighters Union.
“There may be an issue about trust,” Reyes says. “I think that when we recognize that nearly 8 million Californians have a criminal conviction. When we look at the fact that if 80% of jobs in California require some sort of a license or certificate for clearance and we’re shutting out an entire group of potential workers.”
When TRMS asked CAL FIRE and Conservation Camp for their data points of success and employment for released inmates, they both admitted there was no method for tracking them.
Carroll Wills, Communications Director for California Professional Firefighters (CPF), says previous attempts at legislation have been unrealistic.
“Our concern about Assemblywoman Reyes’s legislation as it was envisioned, was that it sought to create a more direct path for former inmates directly into local public safety departments,” Wills said.
The CPF is working on rolling out a training program of their own.
The training that prisoners receive at the conservation camps does not cover all the training needed to be a firefighter. According to Wills, tasks like structure entries, direct fire attacks and calls regarding hazardous materials are missing from the program’s curriculum. Furthermore, there has been a deficit of available firefighting jobs in the state for some time.
“There’s not a job. There’s not a firefighting job waiting at the end of this,” Wills said. From his perspective, even if that law were to change, these inmates would still be entering an over-saturated job market where “there’s literally hundreds of applicants for every open firefighting job in California.”
CPF has been wary of speeding up the professional training process, and wanted more oversight in maintaining high standards for new firefighters. Additionally, the union has not taken a formal stance on whether these fire camps should exist at all.
“Rather than putting those standards at risk, we felt it was a better approach to get to provide individuals who are doing, as I said, hard and necessary work, a real second chance,” Wills said.
Wills suggest a change in focus of prisoners’ post-program employment.
“We have a need for forest management, fuel mitigation, resource protection, all things that are key to fire prevention,” he said.
As the push to change current legislation grows, Reyes says the justice system should work for the inmates, not against them.
“If we believe in the concept of redemption, if we believe in the concept of having a finite sentence and paying your debt to society, we should also find a way to make sure that there is a path for former inmates to move forward in most any job.”
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November 20, 2019 at 06:50AM
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CA's fire crisis not a guarantee of jobs for prisoner-firefighters - MSNBC
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