Prison Labour Used As Fire Fighters Saves Money

Demetrius Barr, the central character of Amanda Chicago Lewis’s BuzzFeed article, “The Prisoners Fighting California’s Wildfires,” is an accidental firefighter. He’s an African-American man from Los Angeles serving time in California for selling crack, and he has enlisted in a “fire camp,” a program created to train inmates to fight the state’s growing wildfire problem. The fire crisis is almost certainly a consequence of climate change, and faced with quickly dwindling funds for handling it, the state has turned to prison labor as a cheap way to meet the need. Here’s the math from Lewis’ story:

About half of the people fighting wildland fires on the ground for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) are incarcerated: over 4,400 prisoners, housed at 42 inmate fire camps, including three for women. Together, says Capt. Jorge Santana, the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) liaison who supervises the camps, they save the state over $1 billion a year. This year, California has had over 5,300 wildfires, which is about 700 more than had occurred by this time in 2013, and a thousand more than the five-year average. Now, as the West is coming to the end of one of the driest, hottest years in recorded history, the work of inmate firefighters has become essential to California’s financial and environmental health.

Barr makes less than $2 a day toiling under California’s flames and sun, and an extra $1 when actually working on a forest fire. When he gets out of prison in about a year, he’ll have made a whopping $1,200. The mean annual salary of a firefighter is $48,270, or a little under $22 an hour.

[Barr] grew impatient with any talk of how this program could somehow fundamentally change him, as a person, for the better.
Inmates are often insulted by the state’s claims to be teaching them how to work. Most come from poverty, where holding down two minimum wage jobs and putting in 70-hour weeks will get you nowhere fast. Many, as people of color, face profound socially and politically condoned opposition in ascending the socioeconomic ladder, regardless of how hard they work.
Barr only has a high school education, and says selling crack seemed like the most lucrative option available to him. He regrets dropping out of junior college after less than a semester, and he snorts with laughter when he hears that part of the justification for sending him to fight fires is that he must learn how to work hard in order to abandon his criminal ways.
“Of course I knew how to work hard before,” he said. “I was just working hard at something illegal.”

 read more here

Highlighting a number of the idiocies of capitalism this account reveals the contradictions of a system based on profit when employing one sector of the population puts another sector at the risk of unemployment. Paid employment for some, 'illegal gains' for others, workers tied to lifelong wage slavery - and we're expected to believe that 'There Is No Alternative'? This is unacceptable. We will continue to call for and work for a socialist revolution across the globe.
JS