‘No One Treated Us Like Inmates’: Why Prisoners Opt to Fight Fires
Amika Mota was drenched, bone-tired, and shaking after her first-ever pump and roll, a fire-fighting technique where the fire truck creeps toward the blaze as personnel wield the massive hose alongside it. It was just her and five other women — along with the fire chief — against a brutal fire just off of Highway 99 in Madera, California, but they got the job done. “I just can’t even begin to tell you the physical impact of this,” she says now. “We’re just completely surrounded by this wildfire smoke. Our eyes are just burning.”
After extinguishing the blaze, though, Mota wasn’t treated as a hero. She and her compatriots showered and changed, but instead of heading home to a soft bed and a hot meal, they were shuttled back to Central California Women’s Prison, back to the endless yelling and despair. “We did these huge shifts, huge fires, and then we rolled back to the prison and we cleaned the engine,” she says. “If we wanted to call our families and talk about what happened, that’s a collect call on a payphone, right? There’s not much additional support that folks get.” And don’t get her started on therapy — that would get her disqualified from the program. So after fires and fatalities and horrors, Mota and her friends just had to suck it up.
More from Rolling Stone
Mota is out now — working as an advocate for criminal justice reform — but when she sees the Los Angeles fires on the news, she can’t help but think of the incarcerated firefighters working to save the houses, structures, and lives that are currently being destroyed. “When I see what’s happening in L.A., I think a lot about how inadequate our gear was — hand-me-downs and goggles without functional seals,” she says. And she’s worried for those incarcerated men and women — the largely unsung folks who battle fires for paltry wages in dangerous conditions. “I’m getting text after text from people that are talking to folks inside, and it sounds like conditions are really bad,” she says.
As the fires in L.A. rage on, Mota and those like her want Californians to remember that up to 20 percent of the state’s wildfire force can be comprised of inmates — and they’re essentially putting their lives at risk alongside the LAFD. “How do we get Californians to understand we can have volunteers that do this work and do it with pride, and get [them] paid a decent wage to do so?” she says. “We [deserve a] basic level of dignity and humanity. Forced labor and involuntary servitude is slavery. And I really think that we as a state and country have to deeply reflect on on on that.”
Inmate firefighters have been battling blazes in California since 1915, with California prisons and Cal Fire coming together around World War II to officially create the Conversation Camp Program. Those camps enlist volunteers to train to become firefighters alongside traditional crews with the promise of a glimpse of freedom, job training, and, in some cases, “good time,” which allows inmates to shave time off their sentences. Although the Covid-19 pandemic and prison reform recently depleted the number of folks in the program, per the Los Angeles Times, the state currently has 35 conservation camps with roughly 1,800 participants on hand to respond to emergencies. Currently, nearly 800 of those folks are on the ground battling at least five massive fires — all for $5.80 to $10.24 per day.
The scale of the current tragedy throws into relief what many prison reformers see as the injustice of the current program, which is largely made possible due a 13th Amendment loophole that allows incarcerated people to be forced to work for public and private enterprises for extremely low wages. That loophole remained open following the most recent U.S. election, which saw California voters shooting down Proposition 6, which would have abolished prison labor. As such, inmates continue to fight fires, a job that has the highest injury rates among prison jobs (they’re four times as likely to get injured as traditional firefighters) and pays $0.16 to $0.74 an hour.
Perhaps most galling, however, is the fact that when these volunteer firefighters get out, they’re largely on their own — with their records and lack of traditional training, they’re often not qualified to get jobs in firehouses. “When I was inside, they put us on the frontlines, wherever the main fire is, we went to it,” says Anthony Pedro, a former inmate firefighter at the California Correctional Center (CCC) Fire Department. “When I was released, I was homeless for six months, sleeping in my car. I was very fortunate [because] I was the only one [of my buddies] to eventually get hired [as a firefighter]. The rest of them, they all ended up dying — either committing suicide, overdosing, or they hung themselves when they went to their jail cell because they got caught up again.”
Governor Newsom passed a law in 2020 to expunge the records of non-violent inmate volunteers, but job placement is still an uphill battle for many. Pedro was lucky, securing an internship at his local fire department after his 2018 release and going on to secure a job at Cal Fire. As such, he decided to pay it forward, going on to found the Future Fire Academy, which seeks to help out folks like his buddies — providing training, certification, experience, and job placement to former inmates and anyone else who wants to pursue a career in that sphere. It was the culmination of a dream for Pedro, who remembers laboring alongside his comrades under the pitch black sky during the 2018 Camp Fire. “It was life changing,” he says. “I knew that this would be the rest of my life. This would be my career.”
And that’s the rub — the inmate firefighting program is not roundly negative. Take an essay in the Marshall Project written by inmate David Desmond, who called it “the best prison job I ever had.” “We were only paid $1 an hour when actively fighting a fire, but the money didn’t matter to me because we worked as a team,” he wrote. “Sometimes we would stay at a fire for two or three weeks, and when we left, people would hold up thank-you signs. People would bring pastries, sodas or sandwiches to us. No one treated us like inmates; we were firefighters.”
The issue then becomes how to better safeguard inmates against exploitation — and provide them with a future beyond bars. “When I had my eyes on the prize of getting to the fire house or getting to the fire camp, it was such a step-up in conditions,” Mota says. “And people really value this program because it transforms their experience while incarcerated. I would never want these programs to go away and for incarcerated people to not have access to them. But what I definitely understand after all of these years is that we’re a commodity. Incarcerated bodies that produce labor for the state of California.”
As for Pedro, he just wants folks to remember who’s out there right now, working around the clock in the inferno. “It’s a heroic job,” he says. “Fires don’t judge who fights them. Humans do. Fires don’t care. They’re still going to burn regardless. They’re not stopping. They don’t care who’s fighting it.”
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.