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| Californians Owe Homes, Lives to Inmates |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 11/10/2003 |
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They've dug fire lines and cut trees. They've hustled families to safety and wielded garden hoses in hopes of saving homes. They're the unsung heroes in fighting Southern California's wildfires--and they're convicted felons. More than half of the state's 3,800 full-time wildland firefighters are prison inmates earning $1 an hour as they work off sentences for nonviolent crimes such as theft and drug possession. About 2,150 offenders--either minimum security wards of the California Youth Authority or adults sentenced to the California Department of Corrections--have been out battling the flames. The convicts usually are out of sight--as they were last Sunday, laying more than a mile of hose, cutting fire lines and grubbing stubborn pockets of flame with shovels, rakes, pickaxes and hoes. On the day the fire in San Bernadino County flared into a wind-whipped monster, however, residents there caught a rare glimpse of the prisoners in the unusual role of trying to protect houses. The inmate crews are neither trained nor equipped for fighting house fires. But a 28-inmate strike team happened to be one of the first to arrive. They grabbed garden hoses and borrowed chain saws from homeowners. Burglars and thieves risked their lives to rescue prized possessions from doomed homes. The state began using inmates to do roadwork in 1915, and opened its first temporary inmate fire camps during World War II. The program now has 4,100 inmates in 38 conservation camps: 33 operated by the forestry department, five by Los Angeles County. Three of the camps--two state and one county--are for women. When they're not fighting fires for $1 an hour, they're earning as little as $1.40 a day cleaning up parks, rebuilding trails, or making or renovating children's toys. But every day they work, they get two days off their sentence. The inmates perform ``lousy, backbreaking, very hard work,'' said John Peck, who manages the Corrections Department's conservation camp program. Yet, often for the first time in their lives, they're forced to work together as a team, to respect and obey authority, and are rewarded with real, measurable accomplishment. Violent criminals, sex offenders and escape risks aren't eligible. Those selected for the program generally have short sentences remaining, so there's an incentive not to flee or cause trouble, which could earn a longer term or a transfer back behind bars. |
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