As wildfires rage across California each year, often with increasing ferocity, exhausted firefighters call for reinforcements from wherever they can get them — even as far as Australia.
Yet one homegrown resource is rarely used: thousands of experienced firefighters who earned their chops in prison. Two state programs designed to get more formerly incarcerated firefighters hired professionally have barely made a dent, according to an Associated Press review. One of them, a $30 million effort, has netted jobs for just over 100 firefighters, accounting for little more than one-third of those enrolled in the program.
Clad in distinctive orange uniforms, scores of incarcerated crews fan out across the state each summer and fall to protect multimillion-dollar homes by cutting brush and trees with chain saws and scraping the earth to create barriers they hope will stop flames. For that sometimes life-threatening labor, most are paid just a few dollars a day.
Once freed from prison, however, the formerly incarcerated have trouble getting hired professionally because of their criminal records, despite a first-in-the-nation, 18-month-old law designed to ease their way and a four-year-old training program that cost taxpayers at least $180,000 per graduate.
“It’s absolutely an untapped pool of talent,” said Genevieve Rimer, director of supportive services at the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, where she helps formerly incarcerated people try to clear their records. “Thousands of people are coming back from California’s fire camps annually. They have already been trained. They have a desire to go and put their lives on the line in order to ensure public safety.”
California is hardly alone in needing seasoned firefighters, but the nation’s most populous state faces different challenges from other more sparsely settled Western regions. A wildfire that nearly leveled the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Paradise nearly four years ago, for instance, was the nation’s deadliest wildfire in nearly a century, killing 85 people.
The U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department are short about 1,650 firefighters, nearly 650 of them in California, according to Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, in a recent letter to Biden administration officials.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the California legislation in 2020, which allows people who were formerly incarcerated for mostly nonviolent offenses to seek to withdraw guilty pleas or overturn convictions. A judge can then dismiss those charges.
Since the law took effect, the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, started by two formerly incarcerated firefighters, has worked with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles to help other formerly incarcerated people clear their records and get hired.
Yet they have only been able to file 34 petitions, and just 12 had records expunged during what the program warns “can be a long and drawn out process.”
Ashleigh Dennis, one of at least three attorneys filing expungement petitions through the Oakland-based advocacy group Root & Rebound, said she has only been able to file 23 requests, of which just 14 have been granted.
Among other hurdles, applicants must demonstrate to a judge that they have been rehabilitated. Furthermore, the expungement only applies to the specific convictions that led to their firefighting duties while incarcerated. Many people have unrelated convictions that must be separately expunged.
It’s been a learning curve to educate judges about the law and get the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to speed up the court certification process, said Dennis.
Da’Ton Harris Jr. can attest to that. His record was finally cleared in August, about 18 months after starting the process.
“I’m out here, a public servant, risking my life every day to try and better my community,” said Harris. “I don’t think it was a smooth transaction at all.”
Despite his record, Harris obtained firefighting jobs with the U.S. Forest Service, the state’s firefighting agency Cal Fire, and the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program.
But his initial advancement was limited because his criminal record made him ineligible for an emergency medical technician (EMT) certification, an obstacle that disappeared with the expungement. Outside of temporary federal and state firefighting agency jobs, most fire departments require applicants to be licensed EMTs — a certification the state bans certain incarcerated people from obtaining because the job comes with access to narcotics and sharp objects.