Up to 20 percent of California's wildfire force can be comprised of inmates, who are putting their lives at risk alongside the Los Angeles Fire Department. “How do we get Californians to understand we can have volunteers that do this work and do it with pride, and get [them] paid a decent wage to do so?” former inmate firefighter Amika Mota tells Rolling Stone. “We [deserve a] basic level of dignity and humanity. Forced labor and involuntary servitude is slavery.” Inmate firefighters have been battling blazes in California since 1915, with California prisons and Cal Fire coming together around World War II to create the Conversation Camp Program Camps enlist volunteers to train to become firefighters alongside traditional crews with the promise of a glimpse of freedom, job training, and “good time,” which allows inmates to shave time off their sentences. The state has 35 camps with 1,800 participants on hand to respond to emergencies. Nearly 800 are battling massive fires for $5.80 to $10.24 per day. A 13th Amendment loophole allows inmates people to be forced to work for public and private enterprises for extremely low wages. In November, California voters defeated Proposition 6, which would have abolished prison labor. Inmates continue to fight fires, a job with the highest injury rate among prison jobs.
When these volunteer firefighters get out of prison, they’re largely on their own. With their records and lack of traditional training, they’re often not qualified to get jobs in firehouses. “When I was inside, they put us on the frontlines, wherever the main fire is, we went to it,” says Anthony Pedro, a former inmate firefighter at the California Correctional Center Fire Department. “When I was released, I was homeless for six months, sleeping in my car. I was very fortunate [because] I was the only one [of my buddies] to eventually get hired [as a firefighter]. The rest of them, they all ended up dying — either committing suicide, overdosing, or they hung themselves when they went to their jail cell because they got caught up again.” A 2020 law expunged the records of non-violent inmate volunteers, but job placement is still an uphill battle. Pedro was lucky, securing an internship at his local fire department after his 2018 release and going on to get a job at Cal Fire. He went on to found the Future Fire Academy which provides training, certification, experience, and job placement to former inmates and others who want to pursue a firefighting career. Pedro remembers laboring alongside his comrades under the pitch black sky during the 2018 Camp Fire. “It was life changing,” he says. “I knew that this would be the rest of my life. This would be my career.”
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