The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) supplies non-violent inmates for the state’s Conservation Camp program. The program boasts more than 3,700 prison inmates, 2,600 of whom are “fire line-qualified.” These are the people clearing brush before fire season and fighting actual wildfire blazes during the climate change-driven, historic wildfires seen in the Golden State these past couple of summers and falls. They were doing this all for $2 a day, with an added $1 per hour when working on firelines. The rationalization given for this clear exploitation of human resources is that these non-violent offenders are being given real-life work experience and on-the-job training, while chipping away at their time served.
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However, with numbers dwindling and calls for less exploitative wages, California began to offer inmates $5.12 a day. Shockingly, this tremendous amount of money, one of the better wages offered to inmates, has not led to an increase in inmate volunteers. In May, the CDCR blame the shrinking numbers on prison reforms, which include the release of non-violent offenders.
Fire Captain Kyle Ferris explained to KRCR News that "With the lack of inmates, we're typically at our camp, six crew that we staff year round and respond to fires. But with the shortage we had, [we] had to shut down one crew temporarily just so we could keep the staffing up on our other crews." Since 2013, the Conservation Camp Program has seen its numbers drop. Gizmodo says that since 2001 the number of inmates in the Conservation Camps has dropped by 1,000. This is a big problem for California because it relies on the cheap inmate labor to prep for and then fight wildfires. Thousands of people are needed.
Gizmodo reports that they have seen a CDRC information sheet where the CDRC blames 2011’s Assembly Bill 109 and 2014’s Proposition 47 for the decrease in inmates. Both bills were part of prison reforms mandated by the people of California as well as in the courts, where then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office argued that prison overcrowding aside, the need to keep non-violent offenders in jail was important because “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.” At the time, Harris told BuzzFeed News that "I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this morning, and I was shocked, and I'm looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court. I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court."
Gizmodo’s findings show that the real story is how much money California is able to “save” by not paying people who aren’t in jail a real wage to help fight wildfires, which totals more than $100 million a year.
Of course, there is something even more craven about it all, as increasing the inmates’ wages by $1 an hour would only cost California $200,000 a year more, and officials have still chosen a cheaper alternative. In the end, the issue is that there is a lot of money that can be made by real firefighters, with real overtime pay bonuses, who fight big and dangerous fires at legally protected wages.
Cal Fire’s payroll rose to the fifth-highest among state departments, behind the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CalTrans, the Highway Patrol and the Department of State Hospitals, according to the analysis. No other state department had a higher proportion of overtime pay.
So while there are many who believe that work release programs such as Cal Fire are important to the rehabilitation of prisoners, the wage gap between what one can make as an inmate and as someone on the outside is so vast, it is hard to defend.
