After 19-year-old Maliki Jabari-Lathum pleaded guilty to felony home invasion charges in March 2023, he served the first part of his sentence at a juvenile detention center, where he could complete high school. He quickly excelled in the program; when he graduated in June 2024, a group of guards and teachers approached him and his family with a suggestion.
Jabari-Lathum, they said, would be a good fit for Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp, where incarcerated teenagers and young adults in California receive formal training in firefighting. For prisoners, the program offers skills that may prove valuable when they’re released. California gets something, too: a supply of practically free labor that is increasingly necessary as climate change makes wildfires more frequent and destructive.
Jabari-Lathum jumped on the offer. He was sent to Pine Grove, which is an hour outside of Sacramento, and has been fighting fires across California for the past several months. Although he travels widely and is, in many respects, an employee of the state, he is very much still a prisoner. Phone calls and visits with family are heavily restricted, as is contact with the outside world.
In early January, Jabari-Lathum told his mother, Leanna, that he might be deployed to the Los Angeles metro area, where fires were rapidly spreading. “I’m not going to be able to call you,” he reminded her. “Hopefully I’m OK.” He would spend most of January fighting the fires, unable to contact his family.
For days, Jabari-Lathum and his fellow incarcerated firefighters battled intense blazes, ultimately playing a pivotal role in containing one of the most destructive fires in California’s history. Their effort highlighted the essential role they play in the state’s approach to fire management. But it also led to renewed focus on the nature of their work itself, which some have compared to slave labor, and California’s long-standing dependence on it. The ethical dilemma that this dependence presents is hardly new. But it was given new urgency in January, after hundreds of prisoners who typically work in remote areas arrived in the state’s largest city and got to work. Their presence, moreover, was striking and uncomfortable, given the recent rightward shift in the state, as voters flocked to politicians promising to crack down on criminals. In November, California lurched rightward as voters demanded harsher penalties for criminals; two months later, criminals working under abysmal conditions helped save its largest city.
Thanks to a state constitution that allows forced labor as a form of criminal punishment, California’s incarcerated workers are regularly deployed to complete dangerous, necessary work, from manufacturing key medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic to ensuring that sanitation systems continue to function. But the state’s century-old incarcerated firefighters program, the largest in the country, stands out in its scope. According to some estimates, it accounts for nearly a third of California’s total firefighting force. In a state where destructive wildfires are common and growing more frequent, they are vital workers. They typically make less than a dollar an hour.
The state’s professional firefighting organization is known as CalFire. “The crazy thing is that we sign employee forms with CalFire. We should at least get half a real fireman’s salary,” said an inmate at the Holton Conservation Camp in north L.A., who works as a sawyer—a dangerous job that involves cutting down trees to stop the spread of fires.
In November, voters in California were given an opportunity to end a practice many critics argue is not only part of the legacy of American slavery, but a form of slavery itself. Backed by groups that champion rehabilitation and a lawmaker with a reparations proposal, Proposition 6 would have amended the state’s constitution to ban forced labor entirely. Over 53 percent of voters rejected the measure, reflecting a larger lurch to the right in the state, as many recoiled from viral videos of thieves ransacking pharmacies and a modest rise in crime. Two months later, incarcerated firefighters saved an untold number of lives and homes while making less than 30 dollars a day.
The harrowing conditions they faced as they worked, often with little sleep and no breaks, jolted Californians, who were now reliant on the very people affected by the rejection of the forced labor proposition. “This moment should be an absolute reckoning,” said Bianca Tylek, executive director of the New York-based Worth Rises, an advocacy group working to end forced labor.
Incarcerated workers, moreover, tend to be given more dangerous assignments. Incarcerated firefighters, a 2018 Time magazine report found, are more than four times as likely to be injured on the job than professionals per capita. As an inferno tore through a hill in Palisades Park, Santa Monica, one firefighter told me, his crew was working to spray retardant and clear vegetation as a line of defense. The fire ultimately grew so intense that they had to retreat. “We would have been burned over because the flames [were] almost all around us,” he wrote in a message. “A lot of people were [saying,] ‘I’m scared,’ but that’s part of the job.”
Many do that job because of the opportunity it offers. Despite its paltry pay, participation in the program not only often leads to reduced sentences but also advertises a strong network of postrelease firefighting jobs. In California, where roughly 40 percent of those released from state prison are convicted of a new crime within three years, according to a recent report, firefighting offers a stable—and, in time, often well-remunerated—profession. Unsurprisingly, state prison officials have found lower rates of recidivism among those who earned work credits and completed rehabilitation programming.
For some, however, firefighting is appealing because it offers the only alternative to the dismal conditions of the state’s prisons. Jabari-Lathum, for instance, was housed in a dimly lit hall with a reputation for conflict and violence and was fed meals teeming with insects. He slept beneath thin blankets on a worn bed frame. Work as a firefighter provided an escape. “Mom, I ate some actual food today. I was so happy,” he said in his first call from fire camp after leaving juvenile detention.
Proposition 6 would have protected prisoners doing dangerous work from guards retaliating against them, and it could have opened the door to wage increases. It would not have improved the conditions Jabari-Lathum was housed in. It was still defeated.
The L.A. fires have provided an opportunity to reframe the long-standing effort to reform Proposition 6. “After the abolition frame failed to advance that cause, and after the Los Angeles fires showed the value of inmate training programs, maybe the better way to view this issue going forward is: ‘How can we make inmate work assignments even more effective at their rehabilitative and anti-recidivism goals?’” David A. Carrillo, executive director of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center, told me in an email.
Even after the Los Angeles fires, the political climate in California does not necessarily favor reform. In November, Donald Trump became only the second Republican presidential candidate to win the nationwide popular vote this century, thanks in large part to substantial gains in California.
For some in the halls of power, the best path to reforming California’s approach to prison labor is via gains made when reform was more palatable to voters. In September 2020, following a summer in which millions participated in nationwide racial justice protests, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law that allowed incarcerated firefighters to petition to have their criminal records expunged after their release. Eloise Reyes, a Democratic state senator representing parts of San Bernardino County, who wrote the bill, told me she is working on legislation that would expand that law, which critics have argued does not go far enough to remove postrelease barriers to employment and expedite expungements. “We need to make sure that once these skills are developed that these individuals are offered an opportunity to continue to serve their community as full time firefighters,” Reyes said in a statement. State Assembly member Isaac Bryan, an L.A. Democrat, is proposing a bill that would pay incarcerated firefighters the equivalent of the “lowest professional state firefighter wage,” but the measure is unlikely to pass.
If presented to voters at the right time, ballot measures like Proposition 6 may be the best path for reform. Yet they also carry risks. Proposition 6, for instance, was supposed to protect programs like firefighting, which the state deems voluntary work. But some reform advocates argue that the language ultimately put to voters would have ended up tearing away at a program that offers inmates a rare chance to reenvision their life. “Proposition 6 would have upended prison labor in unpredictable ways, in most likely scenarios by crippling the work programs that are vital for rehabilitation and recidivism reduction,” Carrillo told me. “That could have abolished programs like inmate firefighter training camps—which were essential to combating the recent Los Angeles fires.”
Activists like Tylek, meanwhile, say the reform efforts on offer are inherently insufficient because they apply to only a small number of the nearly 100,000 prisoners in California and do nothing to improve prison conditions in the state. “We’re not challenging whether or not incarcerated firefighters should get the wages that they’re owed,” Tylek said when asked about Bryan’s legislation. “We’re challenging the fact that [the bill] is so narrow that it completely misses the point.”
“This is the beginning of what will be decades and decades of California burning. This is not the end.”
–prison rights lawyer Charles Carbone
As the state’s incarcerated firefighters helped contain some of the costliest and most destructive fires in California’s history, Newsom was pushing a budget that threatened to put prison reentry programs on the chopping block. For prisoners, the firefighting program will continue to be one of a dwindling number of opportunities to learn skills and leave prison with a better chance of finding reliable work. It doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. “This is the beginning of what will be decades and decades of California burning,” said Charles Carbone, a prison rights lawyer based in San Francisco. “This is not the end.”
And for Jabari-Lathum, things are turning around. On January 10, he and his family were informed that he is set for early release in October. His mother, who spent much of January glued to social media as she followed the fires that her son helped extinguish, is still anxious about the work he will likely continue to do until then. But she’s also proud. “When we go and visit, they don’t even have a camera to take family photos; they were just forgotten about,” she said. “Now everybody’s recognizing them.”
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