Incarcerated firefighters are paid $2 to $5 a day for potentially deadly work.
In less than a week, the wildfires have charred more than 771,000 acres , killed five people and forced tens of thousands of Northern California residents to evacuate. But people who are incarcerated do not have the ability to choose when to escape approaching flames. Two California prisons — Solano State Prison and California Medical Center — are near residential areas that have been evacuated, but prison officials have resisted relocating the people in custody.
“We are actively monitoring the Lightning Fire in Vacaville, but are not being directed to evacuate and the institutions are not in immediate danger,” Aaron Francis, a spokesperson for the state’s corrections department, wrote in an email. “For safety and security reasons, we are not releasing evacuation plans to the public.”
Rasheed Lockheart, who served as an incarcerated firefighter at San Quentin before he was paroled earlier this year, said the only evacuation plans and disaster drills he ever saw at the prison were for staff, not prisoners. Lockheart helped facilitate disaster drills every month from 2017 to January 2020. “Every one of them was for the staff. We never once did any for the incarcerated people. And I’ve never even heard of there being a plan for the incarcerated people,” Lockheart said.
Lockheart remembers doing earthquake safety drills when he was incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility shortly after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. “All these kids were telling me, ‘This is bullshit because when the earthquake happened, all the staff took off and all you could hear was boys in their cells crying and yelling,’” he recalled.
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