San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Firefighting: Inmates can help save state
Inmates leave prison with skills, desire to battle state’s wildfires
It’s a terrible feeling to sit at home and do nothing while your state is burning. Over the past six months, we’ve developed a deeper reverence for our nurses and medical professionals risking their lives to fight a deadly virus. Now our firefighters are the heroes of the moment, including the more than 2,000 of them who are currently incarcerated.
Every year California needs more people on the frontlines of our deadly fires, and Californians aren’t rushing to volunteer. The segment of the population that consistently seeks out this perilous, though rewarding, work are the formerly incarcerated. Many of them get a taste for the job while participating in fire camps, and want to continue when they’re released, yet until recently most have been barred from doing so.
On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB2147, which will allow formerly incarcerated individuals who participated in a state or county fire camp to apply to have their criminal records expunged sooner. Until now, formerly incarcerated firefighters had to wait seven years, but with the new bill, they will be allowed to start the process of getting their records cleaned as soon as they’re off parole, thereby becoming eligible to apply to be a firefighter.
“Inmates who have stood on the frontlines, battling historic fires should not be denied the right to later become a professional firefighter,” Newsom tweeted after signing AB2147.
Steven Rose, 33, is currently fighting the third largest fire in California history, LNU Lightning Complex. Rose spent five years in prison after being caught in the middle of a residential burglary. He now has a fulltime position at Cal Fire, running a warehouse that serves six counties.
Rose says when he was younger, he was attracted to crime for the thrill, and to support his drug habit. Now he finds excitement in a very different way.
“I like driving up and seeing a plume of smoke,” Rose says. “Your hair stands up, you start sweating ... You’re going to give up on your body long before it gives up on you; you’re going to give up on yourself long before your mind is actually broken. The body is a crazy thing. Right? It heals itself.”
Rose attributes his experiences in fire camp during prison for his success on the outside. At that point in his life, Rose had never written a resume, and the trainers at the camp helped him learn how to do that.
“Let’s just say I don’t mind looking in the mirror anymore,” Rose says. “Before I was selfish. I was angry. I did not care. And now I wake up daily ... I like to get to work and do something meaningful. No matter what, if I do one task a day at work that’s what keeps me going. I get home and I’m proud.”
Rose qualified for fire camp because he was young and ablebodied, but also because he was a minimumcustody prisoner, serving a sentence for a nonviolent felony offense.
Brandon Bailey, 33, a philosophy student at UC Berkeley, has seen what can happen when exinmates with firefighting experience never get a chance to use their skills after release.
His father, Alex Schmies, spent 19 years in prison for a controversial case that is now studied in law schools. While chasing Schmies, a police car crashed into another vehicle, killing its driver. Schmies was charged and convicted in the death. While incarcerated, Schmies was allowed to study firefighting at a community college, and worked on fire crews in the summers for nine years.
Bailey says his father was sent to the most toxic and dangerous spots, where helicopters were dropping fire retardant. The work was brutal, and paid pennies, but his father said he would have done it for free. He grew to love it.
Schmies was released from High Desert State Prison in Shasta County in 2013. For seven months he lived in his car in Redding. Even though he was in a lot of pain, he stayed sober until he was brutally beaten to death by a group of strangers.
“My father would have jumped on the chance to keep firefighting,” Bailey says, “but he was always told he didn’t qualify.”
For many in our society today, prisoners are an abstraction, a statistic that’s much easier not to give a face or a name to. Incarcerated firefighters have won widespread respect for their willingness to do a dangerous job for the greater good, shifting them in the minds of many from the category of human of “dangerous other” to “heroic human.”
This dramatic shift, though in some ways hopeful, is also dangerous. After all, firefighting is not for everyone. Many people come out of prison resilient, skilled, with keen senses tested by extreme hardship, but many more come out traumatized, hurt and defeated. Shouldn’t all formerly incarcerated people get the opportunity to pursue their dreams and give back to society, not just the extremely brave and ablebodied ones?
A person shouldn’t have to risk their lives to get a second chance. It’s essential to recognize that our mechanisms of justice are critically flawed, unequal and discriminatory. The vast majority of people who go through our criminal justice system emerge having have been done an injustice to, by society, through harsh sentencing disproportionate to their crime, racial discrimination and unnecessary cruelty.
We need to create more incentives and an easier path for everyone coming out of our prisons to provide for themselves and contribute in a constructive way. We need a lot more carrots and far fewer sticks.
The expungement of a criminal record is a form of restorative justice. You may have hurt society, you may have hurt yourself, but we need you, we still care about you and we want you back in the fold. Many people in our prisons have caused significant harm, but we as a society continue this harm by failing to give our incarcerated population a meaningful path to make amends and move forward.
For many years, Rose was very harsh with himself for the choices he made and the harm they caused others. He now sees himself being of service to his unit, something bigger than his own failures and accomplishments.
“I just feel who I was is not who I am today,” Rose says. “That shouldn’t have a bearing on what I can do. It’s who I am today that matters.”
When a police car drives by during our conversation Rose laughs, remembering how different his reaction would have been during his years of crime.
“If given the opportunities,” Rose adds, “I assure you ... a lot of (incarcerated) people will take this to the next level and run with it and just be just amazing firefighters, amazing workers, amazing people, you know? Given the right circumstances and a push in the right direction.”
Helping restore dignity to our formerly incarcerated restores our dignity
too. It gives us the potential to expand our humanity to include those we fear, dismiss and objectify as “other.” It is both the ethical thing to do and in our collective best interest.
We should welcome and reward the willingness of some prisoners to fight fires, help with COVID19 and respond to the climate crisis — just as we should make an encouraging path for those who want to get an education, care for their children and protect aging parents.
When it comes to these essential life lessons, we as a society have a lot to learn from the formerly incarcerated among us.