in California, where raging wildfires have killed at least 41 people and scorched more than 200,000 acres—roughly the size of New York City. The fires are now the deadliest in California since record keeping began. At least 100,000 people have been forced to evacuate, with about 75,000 displaced after their homes and businesses were destroyed.
More than 11,000 firefighters are battling the blazes, and a number of them are prisoners, including many women inmates.
Romarilyn Ralston talking:
the women who are on the front line are women who volunteer for the camp training program, or they’re assigned to the program because they have nonviolent offenses or are classified as minimum custody. So these are women who are able to leave the prison and be housed in one of the 43 conservation camps—I’m sorry, one of the three female conservation camps.
the program started many years ago, I think around World War II, where inmates became involved with fighting disasters within California, repairing roads and sandbagging floods and earthquakes, things like that. The first conservation camp for women was opened, I believe, in 1983, which is Camp Rainbow, which was formerly a male conservation camp. So, the firefighting program for female inmates has been around since 1983.
fire pay is typically about a dollar an hour. While you’re in fire camp training, some folks are paid zero for that training or up to $18 a month. And then, once you get to the classroom and you are part of the field training, then that pay escalates to a whopping $48 a month. If you’re a swamper, you may get paid $56 a month.
Women do it for various reasons. Several reasons are to get closer to their kids, for day for day. You know, those types of jobs come with a huge reduction in sentence. So the credit bearing that you receive for fighting fires is worth putting your lives at risk between the time that you serve
They get to see their children a lot sooner, because you get a reduced sentence. You earn a different credit. You earn day for day. You get to see your children in a visiting area at a camp, not in a prison, where there are less restrictions, where the environment is more park-like. Who doesn’t want that?
Jaime Lowe talking:
I talked to people who ranged in like many different sociological backgrounds. I found that their response to the program was anything from, you know, resenting the depth and the hardship of the work, because it’s intense physical labor, to a lot of appreciation for the responsibility of working within the community and doing something that was giving back to it. That said, I think that it was—you know, these women are putting their lives on the line for very little money. They make a dollar an hour when they’re actually fighting fires, two dollars a day in camp per day. And while the camps are a nicer place to experience prison, they’re still prison. They’re still prisoners.
Definitely that there was a real appreciation for the—for participation. I was shocked at how many women were really—one woman I talked to, Marquet, felt, I think, transformed by doing the work, but I think it was also just really hard for her. When she described being in the—like confronted with flames and confronted with the training, it was something she like had never experienced before. And her description of it was so visceral and so intense that it was something that just felt outside of the lines of incarceration in some ways. It’s not what you would expect. It felt more like an Outward Bound experience. It felt more like something—you know, these women are providing a service for the state,
I read a small article about Shawna Lynn Jones, who passed away in February of 2016. And she was on one of the crews in the Malibu camp. There are three female camps. And it struck me that nobody really talked about who she was, how she got there, her background and how she ended up dead.
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Jaime Lowe
author and journalist.
Romarilyn Ralston
member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Los Angeles chapter. She is program coordinator for Project Rebound at Cal State University, Fullerton.
— source democracynow.org 2017-10-19