California’s inmate firefighters deserve better

By Rhys Hedges| LA Times | July 15th, 2024

I have lived in California my entire life and I was evacuated from my home while the Woolsey fire was burning down my neighborhood in 2018. Fires are a fact of life in California, and they will only get worse with climate change. California inmates are performing some of our most crucial firefighting work. Ruben Vives’ article (“California’s inmate firefighter crews are dwindling just as the state starts to burn”) portrays the system of inmate firefighters as a fact of life, even though nothing about this system is acceptable.

These incarcerated workers are paid a fraction of minimum wage for an extremely dangerous job. This system is by definition indentured servitude, something that should be impermissible in the modern day. The solution to our firefighter shortage is not mass incarceration. The solution is to rid ourselves of the system that requires us to rely on indentured servitude to protect what we hold dear.