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Women at the Malibu Conservation Camp #13 in California's prison system. All photos by Tobin Yelland
A short, winding drive from the glorious beaches of Malibu, amidst the private vineyards of the Santa Monica Mountains, a group of several dozen
women stand in line as a supervisor calls them forward one by one.
"Vasquez."
Samantha Vasquez, 26, steps forward. She pauses to stamp her heavy
black work boot in the dirt, which gives her supervisor just enough time to
match her face to the photo ID he holds in his hand.
"Vasquez," she replies. Stamp.
Like the rest of the women in line, Vasquez is an inmate of the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) at Malibu
Conservation Camp #13. Also like the roughly 75 other women at the camp, Vasquez's hair is pulled back and pinned into
place, revealing the tattoo on the left side of her neck memorializing her
daughter's father. Her eyebrows and her makeup are immaculate. She had never
imagined becoming a firefighter before coming to camp, but now she's found her
calling.
"I love it," she declares, adding
that she wants to continue the work after she paroles. "I love the cutting, I
love the chainsaw, I love being on the mountains. It's one of the places where
you feel free. You feel like you're giving back."
The one-by-one identification
and boot-stamping are part of the daily ritual known as "crossing over"—that
is, crossing over from state prison supervision to that of the Los Angeles
County Fire Department (LACFD), which jointly runs the camp with the CDCR. Malibu is one of
three conservation camps—more commonly referred to as "fire camps," since the
majority of the work inmates do is fighting and helping to prevent wildfires—where
female inmates can serve their time in California. Each day an inmate serves in
fire camp
counts as
two days toward the completion of her sentence. In a state with the
third-highest number of
imprisoned women (Texas and Florida have the most) in a nation that
incarcerates more of its citizens than
any other on earth, the firefighting female inmates of Malibu enjoy a genuine departure
from the typically brutal carceral policies of the "golden gulag."
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California's inmate firefighter
program
was established in 1946, and the first women joined in 1983 (at least one other
state,
Nevada,
has its own female fire camps). Today, approximately 225 of the program's 4,000
participants are women, according to CDCR spokesperson Bill Sessa. They are divided
between three camps: Malibu, Puerta La Cruz, and Rainbow.
Getting a spot at fire camp
isn't easy. An inmate must have earned "minimum custody" (low-risk) status, have no
more than seven years left to serve, and have shown good behavior in prison. "We
rely on teamwork on the fire lines, where an inmate's ability to work with
other people on the team can be a life or death situation," says Sessa. Inmates must pass rigorous physical fitness tests
for admission—fighting wildfires takes substantial strength and endurance, and
the ability to go with little or no sleep for up to 24 hours. Fire camp
inmates can range in age from late teens to mid-60s. At Malibu, the oldest current
inmate is 52.
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"Females do a quality job," LACFD Foreman Matt Stiffler tells
me. "At times the production level is less, but the quality is significantly
better with females, generally speaking." Another LACFD employee made the same
observation within earshot of one of the crews, noting that the women are more
meticulous, though they move slower. Later, one of the women approached me to
let me know that she resented that comment—we move fast, she said.
There are certain refrains
that come up again and again around California's prison fire camps. One is that
the program is a "win-win-win," which I hear from both LACFD and CDCR personnel
at the camps. That sentiment comes up in sociologist Philip Goodman's 2012
scholarly
work on
the subject, " 'Another Second Chance': Rethinking Rehabilitation through the
Lens of California's Fire Camps."
The first win is for the
CDCR, which gets
positive PR
from the program and can offer some corrections officers a relatively sweet gig
at camp. Steve Schlund is the most senior officer at Malibu, with 15 years under
his belt. Before that, he worked in conventional prison settings with male
inmates, where he became accustomed to daily violence and struggled to keep the
strain of the prison environment separate from his home life. "You got used to
it," he says. "Like, 'Oh, it's just another stabbing or just another fight.' But
there were days you'd go home very stressed out—anybody who says there weren't,
they'd be lying to you." At Malibu, he tells me, it's more peaceful. The women
are better able to get along across racial lines than the male inmates he
worked with, and the only thing he has to complain about is that his senior
status doesn't offer him scheduling privileges.
The second win is for the
inmates. The food is better than in conventional prison. And the wages, though
abysmal, are higher than any other prison job in California, according to
CDCR's Bill Sessa: Women
earn about
$2 per day at fire camp and an extra $1 an hour when working on the fire line,
and an officer at Malibu told me that CDCR is considering raising that to $3 an
hour.
Several of the women tell me
they are treated with respect at fire camp, particularly by LACFD staff, in
stark contrast to the treatment in the prisons they transferred from (inmates
can only be assigned to fire camp from prison, but not directly sentenced
there). They get to be outside every day, and when there's a fire in another
part of California, they travel. Their families can visit without enduring
hours of wait time, invasive searches, and grim, institutional visiting rooms. And
they get to feel they are "giving something back"—another common fire camp refrain.
And there is no doubt that they are: Fire camp crews are dispatched to every
brush fire that LACFD gets sent out to, says Captain Keith Mora. In 2014, that
number came to 453 fires. Even when there are no fires to contain, the women
perform intense physical labor five days a week on various conservation
projects.
Every woman I speak to, both
those hand-picked by CDCR and the ones I approached myself, expresses
gratitude in the strongest terms for being at fire camp. Indeed, close to half
a dozen women say they plan to continue the work when they parole. (One LACFD official
tells me that this might be more challenging than inmates expect because many fire-fighting
organizations will not hire anyone with a felony conviction. But some inmates
and CDCR staff are still in touch with women who have paroled and gone on to do
firefighting or conservation work anyway.) The women describe a feeling of
being part of something larger than themselves, feeling part of a team, proud
of their own competence and endurance, feeling transformed by the
military-style structure and discipline at camp.
Each woman I speak to
describes having undergone a personal transformation to one degree or another,
often in the context of becoming a better mother and a more positive role model
for their children. "When I first went to prison, I was a wreck," Samantha
Vasquez says. "This program has taught me how to work hard and how to
appreciate what I work for." When she paroles, she says her focus will be on
her daughter. "I have this little person looking at me. She's going to copy
everything I do, not what I say. So if I show her, 'OK, mommy has to go to work
now, this is what you do,' she'll know this is what you do, you go to work so
you can pay your bills."
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Alicia Gilbert
Alicia Gilbert, 35, is a
petite blond mother of three and bursts with friendly energy. She's been at
Malibu for two and a half years, making her one of the camp's longest-term
residents, and is a sawyer (or chainsaw operator), the highest-responsibility
position on a crew. Her family visits twice a month, making the drive from
Santa Barbara County. "My kids think it's pretty cool," she says of the work. "A
few times during their visits here, the fire alarm has gone off so I've had to
jump in the bus. My littlest one is three, and one time she tried to run onto
the bus with us," she laughs. Before admission to fire camp, Gilbert was at the
California Institution for Women in Corona, an environment so grim she would
not allow her children to visit. "They don't know anything else but this place,
which is good."
The third "win" is for the
state, and here is where some prison reform and labor advocates believe that
things get murky, to put it gently. CDCR estimates that the fire program saves
California $80-$100 million yearly by employing inmates to fight fires and do
other conservation work. (California Attorney General Kamala Harris recently
had to do some damage control
after her lawyers argued in
court that a federally-ordered prison
release order for nonviolent criminals would cut too deeply into the cheap labor pool
provided by inmates.)
"It's not just slave labor,
it's very dangerous slave labor," argues Paul Wright, editor of
Prison Legal News and executive director
of the Human Rights Defense Center. For its part, CDCR does not officially
track injury rates among fire camp inmates, and a group of LAFCD personnel tell
me that the worst injury they know of occurred when a male inmate was struck in
the leg with a rolling rock about the size of a bowling ball. They said they
had never seen loss of life nor limb.
"This is a prime example of
how prison slavery undermines salaries and wages for non-prisoners," Wright
argues. "If they weren't having the prisoners do the work for whatever pittance
they pay them, they would be paying non-prisoners 15-20 dollars an hour plus
benefits." LAFCD Fire Captain Mike Velazquez agrees with the estimate, saying
that a typical salary for similar work would be around $40,000 per year.
Asked if he sees any upside
to the fire camp program, Wright retorts, "I'm not sure I've ever met anyone
who saw anything uplifting in the financial exploitation of people. That's like
saying slavery taught African Americans a work ethic."
The women at Malibu are
familiar with Wright's argument, but their day-to-day lives unfold on a
different plane than abstract ideas of justice, no matter how elementary or
irrefutable. Jelena Supica, 26, is tall, remarkably poised, with a military
bearing. "It is controversial," she says. "You could look at it that way, as
being exploited for labor. But you've got to look at it as the glass half full,
because I was a lost little girl before I came here. This program is helping us
to become helpful members of society. It's beautiful. If anything, they should
open more camps like these." Supica wonders why there is no camp for female
juveniles, only
males—she
sees that as a squandered opportunity.
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Jelena Supica
CDCR typically doesn't track
data on recidivism rates by institution or program, because "it's too
simplistic a measure," according to Bill Sessa. Only one
report in
recent years has done so, and it indicates that the recidivism rates of camp
parolees, male and female, are among the lowest of any program—52 percent,
compared to roughly 63 percent among the general inmate population. Goodman,
the sociologist, noted surprise at how "strikingly disinterested" CDCR is in
comparing recidivism rates between fire camp and general inmate population
parolees. Instead of CDCR's usual focus on recidivism as an indicator of
success, Goodman argued, the focus is on something less tangible: "[Inmates,
staff, and administrators] view the camp program as an enabler of change for
those inclined to engage in self-transformation. The primary focus is therefore
on moral, as opposed to actuarial, reform."
This points to the strange
central tension of the fire camp project on the whole. For the individual
inmate, fire camp is understandably sought after: the respect given, the higher
wages earned, the relative autonomy, the better food, the access to visitors.
On an anecdotal level, on an individual level, fire camp can be a life-changer.
But what does it mean to celebrate any part of a regime as troubled as the
California prison system, one that uses the word "rehabilitation" in its name but offers only about 3 percent of
inmates the opportunity to take part in fire camp?
For female inmates in
particular, there's another troubling layer. During my visit, several inmates
and even one LACFD employee at Malibu matter-of-factly refer to women serving
time there who are not guilty of a crime. "We're all here for a reason, even if
we might not have done the crime," as Jelena Supica puts it. She's talking
about women convicted of
conspiracy charges on the basis that they lived with a husband or boyfriend involved in
drug sales, or were otherwise "
caught in the net" of sweeping, draconian drug policy. Whether these women have been
granted an opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start over,
or whether they've become slaves of the state due to a series of unfortunate
choices, depends on whom you ask.
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Pat Tate
Bernard today
Nick
Toby
Carole, Ian, and a Bearded Man from East Ham
Kim and Josie, from
Gloucestershire
Kasya (pictures center), from London, was
defying the police and sitting down in the road, blocking the traffic.
Bashir
Barney, Sam, and Ifti Shah
from the Revolutionary Communist Group
Georgia, from New Cross
Some protesters
This guy! Photo via Frederick Ghahramani
Photo by Chris Bethell
