To the editor: I’ve lived in California my complete life and I used to be evacuated from my dwelling whereas the Woolsey fireplace was burning down my neighborhood in 2018. Fires are a reality of life in California, and they’ll solely worsen with local weather change. California inmates are performing a few of our most vital firefighting work. Ruben Vives’ article (“California’s inmate firefighter crews are dwindling simply because the state begins to burn”) portrays the system of inmate firefighters as a reality of life, regardless that nothing about this technique is suitable.
These incarcerated staff are paid a fraction of minimal wage for an especially harmful job. This method is by definition indentured servitude, one thing that ought to be impermissible within the modern-day. The answer to our firefighter scarcity just isn’t mass incarceration. The answer is to rid ourselves of the system that requires us to depend on indentured servitude to guard what we maintain pricey.
Rhys Hedges, Thousand Oaks
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To the editor: As a SoCal resident, I’ve observed the frequency of wildfires improve dramatically over my lifetime. I perceive that consequently, the demand for firefighters, who put their lives on the road to extinguish these fires, has additionally elevated. However what I don’t perceive is the way in which the lower of the state’s inmate inhabitants for nonviolent offenses is offered as one thing detrimental to our society as a result of there are fewer individuals who can take part in California’s inmate firefighter program. As a substitute, this lower ought to be seen as a step towards decreasing mass incarceration and the jail industrial advanced.
We ought to be specializing in local weather change and the way the rise in wildfires correlates to local weather destruction in a rustic that fixates on billion-dollar firms’ income as a substitute of sustainability. The scenario we’re in exploits the labor of prisoners who earn the monetary equal of pocket change per day.
This isn’t sustainable.
Delany Moreno, Pico Rivera
