When he was 17, Fernando Herrera saw a bleak future for himself. A life of gangs, violence, arrests and confinement trailed behind him.
He wanted something more. While in prison, the Yuba County teen joined a program that would put him on a firefighting inmate crew at the Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp in Amador County. As an inmate, he helped fight the Thomas Fire that destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in Southern California in 2017.
The backbreaking, dangerous work for the public did little to set him on a path of becoming a firefighter when he was released. He had been sentenced as an adult for his crimes, and his record dogged him. When Herrera got out, he said he was turned away when he tried to volunteer at his local fire department.
“I didn’t even want to get paid,” Herrera, now 20, said. “But I couldn’t do it because of my record. It was honestly heartbreaking. … I was obviously entrusted to be on a fire crew when I was in jail. Why can’t I do it when I come home?”
Herrera is among the more than 2,000 inmate firefighters assigned to the state’s wildfires each year who are usually barred from getting firefighting jobs after they’re released because of their record of convictions and state licensing rules.
Social justice activists and others say it’s a troubling incongruity in a state that has otherwise embraced reforming the justice system to encourage rehabilitation. They’re demanding a change in the rules to make it easier for those like Herrera who risk their lives fighting fires in prison to be able to land a well-paying firefighting job after they’ve earned their freedom.
Firefighters at many agencies earn six-figure salaries and have excellent benefits.
The treatment of inmate firefighters is part of a larger national debate over sentencing laws and a criminal justice system that puts far more weight on punishment than rehabilitation and redemption.
“It’s OK to exploit the labor of incarcerated firefighters and incarcerated people at slave wages, but once you are released and you’ve paid your debt to society, as they say, and you have this really high-level skill to a fight a wildland fire … you can’t do that,” said Romarilyn Ralston, of Project Rebound, a California State University program that supports those like her who were once incarcerated
A bill this year, AB 2147 by Assemblywoman Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-San Bernardino, would allow inmate firefighters to have an easier path at having their records expunged. The bill has passed the Assembly and is pending in the State Senate.
But it faces resistance from a coalition of firefighters and police unions and state prosecutors leery of allowing potentially dangerous felons an easier shot at a clean background check. They note there’s already a process in place that allows some former inmates to expunge their convictions.
Herrera, the former youth inmate, said he’s since landed a job at the California Conservation Corps that allows him to put to use the firefighting skills he learned while in prison. But he wishes the choices he made a kid weren’t such a barrier to his former dream of becoming a fireman.
“I was a kid when I made those mistakes,” he said. “I want to help change the world, you know? But I can’t because I’m bound by my past.”
What inmate firefighters do
Inmate crews are among the first on the scene when a wildfire is threatening homes across the state. They’ve played a key role at every major wildfire in recent years — from the devastating wine country fires in 2017 to the massive Carr and Camp fires the following year.
Identified by their orange fire uniforms, inmates are the state’s primary “hand crews” doing the critically important and dangerous job of using chainsaws and hand tools to cut firelines around properties and neighborhoods during wildfires. In the offseason, their duties include clearing brush and fallen trees to reduce fire danger, maintaining parks and filling sandbags for flood protection.
Each crew has 17 inmates. They’re supervised in the field typically by a CAL FIRE captain, but sometimes a correctional officer will go with them on out-of-county assignments, or on local assignments located near residential areas.
Only people with less serious felony offenses and a history of good behavior are allowed to participate in the programs housed at minimum-security prison facilities scattered around the state. They’re paid a small wage — between $2 and $5 a day, plus $1 per hour when they’re on a fire. Inmate fire crew members also can earn time off their sentences while in the program.
The state’s primary wildland fire agency, the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, allows former inmate firefighters to become seasonal firefighters with a shot at getting a full-time job. Some former inmates have moved up to ranks as high as battalion chief, an agency spokeswoman said. The agency didn’t have a tally of how many of its firefighters are former inmates.
But most local government fire agencies bar many former inmate firefighters from employment due to them being unable to gain a national Emergency Medical Technician certification required to get hired.
One former inmate firefighter has sued this year to overturn rules that prohibit people like him who have felony convictions from getting certified. The suit comes after efforts to change the EMT rules in the Legislature stalled in recent years.
The opposition is rooted in the fact that the state for the last decade has enacted reform policies that have reduced the size of the state’s prison population by cutting sentences for low-level offenders and moving the least dangerous inmates to county custody, said Tim Edwards, president of CAL FIRE, Local 2881, the union representing the state agency’s firefighters.
Edwards said that leaves a potentially more dangerous field of applicants for the inmate firefighting positions. Where once drunken driving offenders, fraudsters and burglars were manning fire crews, now more armed robbers and other violent offenders are wearing orange uniforms and working around homes, Edwards said.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has started to sweep through the state’s prisons, has only exacerbated the issue of inmate availability on the crews. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has reduced the overall population of the prison system by almost 10,000 inmates since March. The corrections agency plans to shrink the population further through early releases.
A person’s ability to fight wildfires isn’t the biggest hurdle for getting on with local departments.
Since the bulk of a municipal firefighters’ duties involve going into homes on medical calls, it’s imperative for the public to know that those doing so are trustworthy and have a clean background, Edwards said.
“If I come into your house at 2 in the morning … and your 21-year-old daughter is sitting there with just her underwear and a bra on complaining of abdominal pain and other stuff like that,” Edwards said, “and when I’m trusted to do my patient assessment, you are trusting me as an individual to not do anything inappropriate to her at that point in time.”
Dangerous offenders
The prison system bars those convicted of sexual offenses, arson and any history of violent escape from participating in the fire camp program, but concerns about dangerous inmates making it on the fire lines have dogged the state’s program for years.
A couple of high-profile cases of dangerous inmates escaping the state’s fire camps made headlines before the state made its push to reduce its population.
In 2005, Marlon Ruff, 33, walked away from Eel River Conservation Camp in Humboldt County. Ruff had been convicted of beating and robbing an armored car guard.
He later shot and killed San Francisco police officer Bryan Tuvera, in a South San Francisco garage, before shooting and killing himself as Tuvera’s backup arrived.
Then in July 2010, Jeffory Lynn Shook, 36, walked away from Washington Ridge Conservation Camp in Nevada County. He led law enforcement officers on a chase across four counties before SWAT teams said they captured him holed up with some Aryan Brotherhood gang members he’d met in prison at a trailer park in rural Siskiyou County.
At the time of his arrest for trying to run down a detective, former Placer County Sheriff Ed Bonner called Shook “one of the most violent and dangerous suspects we’ve encountered in a long time.”
Police shot and wounded Shook during that encounter. He’d also been shot during an earlier arrest in Orange County, investigators said.
The Ruff and Shook cases shocked experts who said inmates with a violent history like that should never have been put in a minimum-security facility in the first place.
Proponents of the fire camp system say those examples were merely troubling anomalies that shouldn’t detract from the greater good the camp program does.
Prison officials say their screening process ensures fire camp inmates aren’t dangerous, escapes are rare and inmates learn valuable life skills that help them transition back to society while helping the state during its worsening fire seasons.
Assemblywoman Reyes, who sponsored the bill to help inmate firefighters clear their records, said she’s heard the critics who argue that using inmates on the fire lines amounts to state-sanctioned slave labor, but she’s said the inmates themselves don’t see it that way.
“In my conversations with inmate firefighters, at the bottom of their list is how much they’re paid,” she said. “That’s of less concern to them than the skills they’re going to receive and the opportunities that they wish they could get because of those job skills.”
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