Checkpoint: Wildfires Clear The Smoke Around Prison Reform
Douglas Sacha / Marianne Purdie
Wildfires are becoming one of the most visible effects of global warming. As the climate continues to suffer and undergo forced changes, areas like Siberia, Australia, and the Amazon Rainforest are being ravaged by these natural disasters. The results are not only a loss of habitable land for humans and animals, some being pushed ever closer to extinction by the blazes, but also a loss of trees that help to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The United States of America has not escaped this global phenomenon. Right now wildfires are raging across a million acres of land in the state of California alone. This is the result of increased lightning strikes and some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded for the entire planet. Worse still, wildfire season in California does not truly begin in earnest for several weeks.
Amidst this natural disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on a controversial practice among California’s first responders: the use of prison inmates in firefighting crews to control blazes. Reportedly, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has roughly half as many inmate fire crews than it originally had to work during the most dangerous part of wildfire season. More than 12,000 inmates and guards have contracted the virus in the state’s prisons, severely depleting the incarcerated workforce available to combat the spread of the wildfires.
Even those inmates who are capable of performing this job will find themselves earning a pittance for risking their lives, sometimes as little as $2 per day. For many of them, the skills they acquire while protecting the lives and property of their fellow Americans will be next to useless once they have finished their sentences. California law prohibits anyone with two or more felony convictions from obtaining employment as a firefighter. The dangerous and unforgiving labour, combined with the lack of reward and the suppression of free choice inherent in the prison system, has led some to compare the plight of inmate firefighters to a form of modern slavery.
These comparisons are not unfounded. The United States Constitution itself acknowledges the link between slavery and the prison system. Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States and provides that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” When America abolished slavery, it recognized that incarceration was also a form of slavery, but one that it wanted to keep.
Black Lives Matter protests have spread across the nation and have arrived in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Outrage over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29 year old Black man who was shot in the back seven times by white police officers in front of his children, has fueled the protests. These protests are forcing American society to reexamine the ways in which it thinks about and tries to address social issues. Racism, gun control, historical figures and calls to defund or even abolish the police are all being re-scrutinized as chants of “I Can’t Breathe” fill the streets from sea to shining sea. America’s relationship with its prison system has not escaped this national moment of introspection.
The U.S. has the highest per capita incarcerated population globally, at 698 per 100,000 residents. That comes out to 2.3 million people in America behind bars. There is little proof that mass incarceration has actually reduced crime, allegedly one of its primary goals. According to the NYU School of Law, the tenfold increase in the prison population over the last 50 years has had zero effect on rates of crime. Worse still, the prevalence of private prisons means that profit is being made off the backs of locking people up. The Corrections Corporation of America makes billions of dollars in profit each year, while doing nothing to save taxpayer money and engaging in shady practices to increase prisoner sentences.
Racism also plays a critical role in how the American prison system works. Despite only being a combined total of around 32% of the U.S. population, Black and Hispanic Americans make up 56% of the country’s prison population. These minority groups find themselves the targets of racist policing policies, leading to more frequent arrests and charges than their white peers. The poverty in many of these communities also makes getting adequate legal representation, or even just posting bail, next to impossible.
Within this environment, there is a growing movement to abolish prisons altogether, rather than reform them. Reform is a much easier sell for politicians. So easy, in fact, that President Donald Trump, a man building his current campaign on threats of violence, crime and anarchy in the streets should Joe Biden win the election, has even embraced prison reform as a policy platform that both his own voters and moderates from both sides of the political divide can get behind.
However, abolitionist activists say that a system broken to its very core cannot be reformed. Given the profits made by private prisons, and in the case of California the slave labour force available for the state to use as cannon fodder against wildfires, it is not wrong to say that prisons themselves might be part of the problem rather than the solution. As is the case with those calling for the abolishment of the police, activists want a racist justice system torn down and the funding directed into jobs, education, housing, healthcare, and all the vital systems of support that many communities lack.
The question society needs to ask is not “what will we do with the criminals without prisons?”, but instead “what can we do to resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need before the crimes happen?”As long as there is a prison system that profits off of misery and slavery, victimizes minority and working class groups, and leaves young men and women more broken, America will never force itself to look beyond the former question and ask itself the latter question.