They fought wildfires as inmates, but California won’t let them become firefighters when free
California certainly owes a debt of gratitude to these prisoners. As the Economist noted last October, around 4,000 low-level felons made up 30 percent of the forest firefighters who beat back the flames by clearing brush and hefting heavy equipment. One female inmate even died in the smoke. Sadly, she wouldn’t have found a career waiting for her on the other side anyway. Until the law changes, Arthur Rizer compares this kind of treatment to “slave labor.”
“The state of California is unabashed by that fact,” the director of Criminal Justice & Civil Liberties Policy at the conservative R Street Institute tells me, “with one state official even touting that the program can reduce California’s firefighting “costs up to $100 million a year
