Around Los Angeles, firefighting crews continue to battle the Palisades and Eaton fires and other smaller blazes. Nearly a thousand of the firefighters deployed to help contain the devastating fires are incarcerated. They have been working around the clock while earning as little as between $5.80 to $10.24 a day. For more on how California’s incarcerated firefighting program works, we speak to investigative journalist Keri Blakinger, who is herself formerly incarcerated, and who recently had to evacuate her home in Los Angeles.
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
As Los Angeles braces for more high winds that could bring what’s been described as “explosive fire growth,” firefighting crews continue to battle the Palisades and Eaton fires and other smaller blazes. At least 24 people have been killed. Dozens are still missing.
Nearly a thousand incarcerated firefighters have been deployed to help contain the fires, typically earning as little as between $5.80 to $10.24 a day. Popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker spoke to several incarcerated firefighters working in the area.
INCARCERATED FIREFIGHTER: The cops treat us like — treat us like [bleep]. But here, we get better treatment. Right? They talk to us like humans.
HASAN PIKER: Yeah.
INCARCERATED FIREFIGHTER: They talk to us like humans. We got a job. We’re underpaid, but we got a job.
HASAN PIKER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
INCARCERATED FIREFIGHTER: You feel me? And then the community comes out and shows us all kinds of love. We never received that growing up. We never received that kind of love, that kind of recognition for anything we’ve done. So, now doing this kind of stuff and all this love coming, that’s life-changing for a lot of guys, because that’s all that we needed, is a little bit of recognition.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Los Angeles, where we’re joined by Keri Blakinger, investigative journalist with the L.A. Times, previously reported on the criminal justice system for The Marshall Project. Her new piece for the L.A. Times is headlined “How you can help the incarcerated firefighters battling L.A. wildfires.” She co-wrote a Marshall Project piece headlined “Incarcerated Firefighters Do Risky, Low-Pay Work. Many Say It’s the Best Job Behind Bars.” Her memoir is Corrections in Ink, about her own time in prison.
Keri, we spent time out with the incarcerated firefighters years ago. You recognize them in their orange jumpsuits. They’re making between $5 and $10, not an hour, but a day? Explain what you know about their situation right now.
KERI BLAKINGER: Well, as you mentioned, the pay sounds low, but this is actually one of the better-paying jobs in prison, and that’s why it’s actually a really sort of coveted job. So, even though it’s this grueling manual labor, and they’re out there right now, 888 of them, fighting the fires in Palisades and out in Altadena, despite the risks and the seemingly low pay, this is still a really coveted job in prison. And as that clip that you played showed, it’s something that’s also really rewarding for the people that are doing it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about where they’re fighting the fires right now and where exactly they stay, where they work out of, how they get to this point where they can be fighting these fires.
KERI BLAKINGER: Yeah. So, there are 35 fire camps across the state, which is where they live when they’re not actively fighting fires. When they are actively fighting fires, then they’re located at — you know, at some sort of, like, make-do-type camp situation closer to the actual fire. But the training for the firefighters is about a week of training. It’s similar to what — or, it’s actually the same as what people that are fighting this in the free world would go through to do these same tasks.
Oh, and, sorry, you asked where. We’ve only been told that they are fighting the Palisades and Eaton fires, so, you know, the Malibu area fires and the ones in Altadena, we haven’t gotten any more specifics. The prison system has not been able to give us any more specifics about, like, where specifically or if there are other blazes in the area that they’re working on.
AMY GOODMAN: Historically, incarcerated firefighters has made up as much as 30% of the California wildfire force? Is that right?
KERI BLAKINGER: Yeah, the numbers have dwindled, though, over time. There was a point at which there were over 4,000. I think that was around 2005. They’re down to about 1,800 now. There had been some consideration of — in the budget, it was slated to close five of the fire camps, although that got taken out of the budget, so those stayed open. But they’ve been a significant part of the firefighting force even though their numbers are dwindling.
AMY GOODMAN: You, yourself, Keri, had to evacuate. Can you describe your own situation?
KERI BLAKINGER: Yeah, that was wild. I actually had jury duty that day, because despite being a felon, in California, you can be called for jury duty. So my first jury duty. I was worried all day about what would happen if I had to evacuate while I was at jury duty. And I came back, and within an hour, I was scrolling Twitter and saw a report of a fire very close to me. And I looked out the window, and the flames were right there, and it was less than two blocks away. And I had to take what — I don’t have a car, so I had to take whatever I could carry and flee on foot. And I walked a few blocks south to get away from the gridlock and then had someone pick me up, and then, a couple days later, went a little bit further to try to get a day or two of clean air in Orange County. And it was really wild to see the disparity, because I got off the train in Orange County, and there were rich people frolicking to the sound of somebody playing Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the disparity was really jarring.
AMY GOODMAN: Keri, I wanted to go back to your piece, which is really illuminating. You say, “Legally, one of the reasons that the state can pay incarcerated firefighters [so little] for this dangerous and vital work is that under the U.S. and California constitutions, involuntary servitude is permitted as punishment for a crime.” You say, “California voters had the opportunity in November to remove this exemption from the state constitution. That would have opened the door to new kinds of legal challenges over working conditions for incarcerated people in the state, but the measure failed,” Keri?
KERI BLAKINGER: Yes, it did. And I think that was surprising, in some ways, because there wasn’t any particular opposition to it, and a similar measure in Nevada actually passed. So, when you look at what you would expect from a bluer state versus a redder state voters, I think that was surprising. But yeah, Californians decided to keep that on the books.
AMY GOODMAN: Do incarcerated firefighters get firefighting jobs when they get out?
KERI BLAKINGER: This has been such an issue over the past several years. It started getting more attention, I don’t know, in the past five years maybe, because the fact that they have felony convictions has, in most cases, barred them from being firefighters because they can’t get the EMT license. There was a change in state law that took effect in 2021 that allowed for California firefighters with nonviolent convictions to potentially get those convictions expunged and become firefighters in the free world. And that has happened some. It’s not widespread. But it is an option now, and it didn’t used to be.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Keri Blakinger, we thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to link to both your Marshall Project piece and your piece in the L.A. Times, “How you can help the incarcerated firefighters battling L.A. wildfires,” author of the memoir Corrections in Ink, speaking to us from Los Angeles, where she was just recently evacuated.
That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Hana Elias. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. I’m Amy Goodman. Thank you so much for joining us.
To learn more about incarcerated California firefighters and help end mass incarceration, visit Vera Institute of Justice.
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