Protect California’s inmate firefighters

By Delany Moreno | LA Times | July 15th, 2024

As a SoCal resident, I have noticed the frequency of wildfires increase dramatically over my lifetime. I understand that as a result, the demand for firefighters, who put their lives on the line to extinguish these fires, has also increased. But what I do not understand is the way the decrease of the state’s inmate population for nonviolent offenses is presented as something detrimental to our society because there are fewer people who can participate in California’s inmate firefighter program. Instead, this decrease should be viewed as a step toward reducing mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex.

We should be focusing on climate change and how the increase in wildfires correlates to climate destruction in a country that fixates on billion-dollar corporations’ profits instead of sustainability. The situation we are in exploits the labor of prisoners who earn the financial equivalent of pocket change per day.

This is not sustainable.