Melissa V Harris-Perry: We turn now to California, where every fallen recent years, the local news reports have sounded like this.

Speaker 1: Overnight, bone-tired firefighters locked in another desperate struggle to gain ground against hundreds of hungry wildfires turning through California.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: According to estimates from Cal Fire, more than 4 million acres in the state burned in 2020, and another 3 million have been lost to blazes in 2021. The fires have destroyed thousands of homes and claimed dozens of lives, and the reality is global climate change suggest that this destruction is likely to be a new normal for the state. When your state is literally on fire, there is no hero, more worthy of respect and adoration than a firefighter, which is why many of the other local news reports in recent years has sounded like this one from ABC 10 in Sacramento.

Speaker 2: Thank them for everything that they're doing.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: The more than 4,000 firefighters working to protect their communities from the Caldor fire are top of mind.

Speaker 3: I want to thank them for doing the best job that they can.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Many of the heroic firefighters battling blazes in the golden state are probably not who you might think. Nearly 30% of California firefighters are incarcerated, and a recent report from Teen Vogue highlights the juvenile justice facility contributing young men to the front lines of California's fire battles. Pine Grove, it's the last fire camp for incarcerated youth in the state. The juvenile justice facility is where incarcerated boys and young men between the ages of 17 and 24 are trained to fight fires. 95% of these young men are Black, Latinx, or Filipino.

For risking their lives fighting fires, they earn between $2.20 and $4 an hour. Now, California firefighters who are not incarcerated, typically earn more than $40 an hour. Sarah Tardiff is a freelance reporter for Teen Vogue, and she looked into the Pine Grove facility for a recent piece.

Sarah Tardiff: Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp is a law security juvenile detention facility here in California, and where teenage boys and young men ages 17 to 24 are incarcerated. Once they turn 18, they're formally trained to contain and prevent wildfires. They earn between $2.20 and $4 an hour plus an additional $1 an hour when they're actively fighting fires. The work that they do is incredibly dangerous, and they receive the same level of training as seasonal firefighters here in California. Even despite the low wage being on a fire campaign crew is still the best-paid job in the California prison system.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Okay. Let's back up for a second, so these are young people, so they were incarcerated based on crimes committed when they were juveniles. Is that right?

Sarah Tardiff: Yes, exactly.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Some of them go into adulthood, so in other words, they pass 18, while still in this Youth Conservation Camp?

Sarah Tardiff: Yes. The youngest age that you can be when you arrive is 17, and so then a few weeks before your 18th birthday, you then begin training to work on a fire hand crew. Then going forward, you work right alongside Cal Fire, Wildfire employees.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Presumably, in the whole state of California, there's lots of different places where young people might end up being detained after being convicted of a crime. How do young people end up in Pine Grove?

Sarah Tardiff: Sure. Everyone who is incarcerated at Pine Grove volunteered to be transferred there. To qualify, you have to have a minimum custody status. Meaning, you haven't committed any violent crimes like murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, or you have to have proof of ongoing good behavior. They are transferred to Pine Grove. It's usually a relatively small facility around 80 to a hundred people at any given time.

Like I mentioned before, it's low security, so there are no guard towers, there's no fences, and they're trusted to protect the community, and be out in the community doing hard dangerous labor, and doing things like wielding axes, and learning how to use chainsaws to do that difficult forestry work.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Now, is this a new practice for those who are incarcerated to be fighting fires?

Sarah Tardiff: No, this is actually part of a long-standing West Coast tradition. During World War II, a lot of forestry jobs were left unfilled when people went to serve overseas, and so the government turned to this mass exploitation of inmates essentially, formalizing the practice by creating what we now know as fire camps. Pine Grove was opened in 1945, and it was the first youth fire camp in the state. At its peak, there were six fire camps just for teenage boys and young men in California. All of which have since closed except for Pine Grove, and it's the oldest continuously operating fire camp in the country.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Surely, given the long tradition of thinking of juvenile incarceration as rehabilitative, even more so than we thought about this for adult incarceration, thought if young people are incarcerated by the state, then they should be in a system that will rehabilitate. Surely, given the training that they have, once they're released, they become firefighters?

Sarah Tardiff: The pathway to employment after being released from a fire camp like Pine Grove is not an easy one. There really aren't any formal pathways that exist. It was about a year ago now that Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2147, which allows previously incarcerated firefighters who have not been convicted of violent crimes to appeal to have their record expunge. In theory, is helpful because it makes them eligible for EMT training, which is a crucial requirement for many, not all firefighting jobs, but a good portion of them, but even accessing that training, it still isn't a guarantee or even a clear path to employment.

We have nonprofit organizations and programs like the forestry and fire recruitment program that run things like expungement clinics for this exact reason to help people have a better shot at finding full-time work as firefighters, but it's only marginally helpful. We are currently experiencing "firefighter shortage" but a lot of the people who I have spoken to who were held at Pine Grove in the last decade or so have had an incredibly difficult time even finding part-time work as firefighters.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Help me to understand a bit, is this something we should be celebrating because here are young people who are incarcerated, but are earning more than other incarcerated young people, or is this something we should be appalled about because we are putting very young people in harms way, and paying them obviously a bizarrely subminimum wage at $2 an hour?

Sarah Tardiff: If the specialized training at Pine Grove doesn't ultimately lead to work as a firefighter upon release, then who is the youth fire camp ultimately serving? What about it is rehabilitative? A lot of fire departments in California require their hirees to be at least 21 years of age and to have a high school diploma or a GED, and those requirements, those standards are not the same for incarcerated teenage boys and young men at Pine Grove.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: I'm wondering about what the alternatives are here, so is this about ensuring that there's a pathway for these young people, or is this about saying, "Hey, we just simply shouldn't be using prison labor to do dangerous work on behalf of the state"?

Sarah Tardiff: I think there's definitely a bit of tension between the community and then local activists. The division of juvenile justice will be closing in June 2023, and so many of its facilities have already been shut down or will be shut down. Those that remain open will become the responsibility of local jurisdictions. Pine Grove is one of those facilities that will remain open through a state-local partnership. There was a bit of time there where it was uncertain, whether or not the camp would close.

The community really rallied around the camp and was really enthusiastic about the brave work that these young people are doing to protect the community. It's an unavoidable part of the conversation that these are effectively young people, 95% of them are Black, Latin, and Filipino, and they are working for dollars an hour compared to free firefighters are making $41 an hour. Doing work in communities that they haven't even really had a chance to be a part of in their adulthood.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: When we look at a connection like this one that is, are you pointed out here, problematic, and maybe not even completely obvious what the right or just outcome is. I'm wondering if it creates a kind of green, black, or green-brown divide, this idea that it's okay to use racially marginalized populations of young people who are incarcerated to address an ecological or environmental problem.

Sarah Tardiff: Yes, as a symptom of the climate crisis, wildfire season is now almost a year-round concern. Here in California, in 2021 alone, we've seen 3 million acres burn. Incarcerated firefighters have long been a critical part of the state's plan to survive wildfire season. In 2018 and 2019, about 27% of the state's firefighters were incarcerated that includes young people. During the Caldor fire, I saw some local news coverage on incarcerated firefighters who were freely fighting this fire and saw that some of them were incarcerated at Pine Grove and that they were 18 or 19 years old.

That's what led me to research more about the camp itself and California's history of incarcerating young people to fight fires.

Melissa V Harris-Perry: Sarah Tardiff, freelance reporter for Teen Vogue, thank you for your reporting and thank you for joining us today.

Sarah Tardiff: Thank you so much.

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