Reading through today’s New York Times coverage of the fires in California that have caused half a million people (and counting) to flee, I came across this line which induced a double take:
The state’s corrections department also has more than 2,640 trained inmate firefighters actively battling the southern California wildfires today after being deployed by Mr. Schwarzenegger.
Um… what?
Ten incredulous minutes of googling later, the discovery that lest you thought three-strikes-and-you’re-out was excessively lenient, the state of California does indeed use prison inmates to fight wildfires – in return for which it pays them the princely sum of a dollar an hour. Here’s more from a story on PrisonerLife.com about the 2003 fires in California:
They’re the unsung heroes in fighting Southern California’s wildfires — and they’re convicted felons. “We save million-dollar homes for a dollar an hour,” said Ricky Frank, 33, doing a 10-year stretch for theft. “You get to help people. It’s better doing this than being locked up.” More than half of the state’s 3,800 full-time wildland firefighters are prison inmates earning $1 an hour as they work off sentences for nonviolent crimes such as theft and drug possession.
[snip]
The state began using inmates to do roadwork in 1915, and opened its first temporary inmate fire camps during World War II. The program now has 4,100 inmates in 38 conservation camps: 33 operated by the forestry department, five by Los Angeles County. Three of the camps — two state and one county — are for women. “There’s nothing charitable going on here,” [a forestry department spokesperson] said. “These guys get the same training, equipment and do the same work as a regular crew.” When they’re not fighting fires for $1 an hour, they’re earning as little as $1.40 a day cleaning up parks, rebuilding trails, or making or renovating children’s toys. But every day they work, they get two days off their sentence. “It knocks a year off my time. You can’t beat it. It’s better than sitting around prison,” said Allen Preslar, 53, serving a seven-year drug sentence.
The inmates perform “lousy, backbreaking, very hard work,” said John Peck, who manages the Corrections Department’s conservation camp program. Yet, often for the first time in their lives, they’re forced to work together as a team, to respect and obey authority, and are rewarded with real, measurable accomplishment. “We’re trying to do something to save taxpayer money, we’re trying to do good quality work, we’re trying to get these guys to see how good it feels when you’re not on the street corner selling drugs,” Peck said.
