To the editor: I have lived in California my entire life and was evacuated from my home as the Woolsey Fire raged through my neighborhood in 2018. Fires are a fact of life in California and will only get worse with climate change. California inmates are performing some of our most crucial firefighting duties. Ruben Vives’ article (“California's inmate fire crews are dwindling just as the state begins to burn”) portrays the inmate firefighter system as a fact of life, although nothing about this system is acceptable.
These incarcerated workers are paid a fraction of minimum wage for extremely dangerous work. This system is, by definition, debt bondage, something that should be unconscionable in this day and age. The solution to our firefighter shortage is not mass incarceration. The solution is to get rid of the system that forces us to rely on debt bondage to protect what we hold dear.
Rhys Hedges, Thousand Oaks
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To the editor: As a resident of Southern California, I have noticed that the frequency of wildfires has increased dramatically over my lifetime. I understand that as a result, the demand for firefighters, who risk their lives to extinguish these fires, has also increased. But what I don’t understand is how the state’s declining prison population for nonviolent offenses is portrayed as detrimental to our society because there are fewer people who can participate in California’s inmate firefighting program. Instead, this decline should be seen as a step toward reducing mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex.
We should be focusing on climate change and the correlation between increasing wildfires and climate destruction in a country that is obsessed with the profits of multi-billion dollar corporations rather than sustainability. The situation we find ourselves in exploits the labor of prisoners who earn the financial equivalent of a few coins per day.
This is not sustainable.
Delany Moreno, Pico Rivera
