Letters to the Editor: California’s inmate firefighters deserve better
To the editor: I have lived in California my entire life and I was evacuated from my home while the Woolsey fire was burning down my neighborhood in 2018. Fires are a fact of life in California, and they will only get worse with climate change. California inmates are performing some of our most crucial firefighting work. Ruben Vives’ article (“California’s inmate firefighter crews are dwindling just as the state starts to burn”) portrays the system of inmate firefighters as a fact of life, even though nothing about this system is acceptable.
These incarcerated workers are paid a fraction of minimum wage for an extremely dangerous job. This system is by definition indentured servitude, something that should be impermissible in the modern day. The solution to our firefighter shortage is not mass incarceration. The solution is to rid ourselves of the system that requires us to rely on indentured servitude to protect what we hold dear.
Rhys Hedges, Thousand Oaks
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To the editor: As a SoCal resident, I have noticed the frequency of wildfires increase dramatically over my lifetime. I understand that as a result, the demand for firefighters, who put their lives on the line to extinguish these fires, has also increased. But what I do not understand is the way the decrease of the state’s inmate population for nonviolent offenses is presented as something detrimental to our society because there are fewer people who can participate in California’s inmate firefighter program. Instead, this decrease should be viewed as a step toward reducing mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex.
We should be focusing on climate change and how the increase in wildfires correlates to climate destruction in a country that fixates on billion-dollar corporations’ profits instead of sustainability. The situation we are in exploits the labor of prisoners who earn the financial equivalent of pocket change per day.
This is not sustainable.
Delany Moreno, Pico Rivera
