California Is on Fire: Firefighters, Prisoners, and the Rescue

Each fire season, a substantial share of California’s hand-crew wildland firefighting is carried out by people who cannot quit the job. They are incarcerated, trained through a network of state conservation camps, and deployed to dig line, clear brush, and hold the edge of fires that threaten homes and lives. The work is dangerous, the pay is a fraction of a free firefighter’s wage, and the labor is performed under a legal regime that, until recently, paid a few dollars a day for the privilege of doing it. The arrangement raises a question the law has never cleanly answered: what does consent mean when the alternative to “volunteering” is a less desirable prison assignment, and the constitutional text that governs the work still carves out an exception for those “duly convicted of a crime”?

That question gained renewed force in 2024, when California voters declined to remove involuntary-servitude language from the state constitution, and again in 2025, when the Legislature raised active-fire wages to the federal floor for the first time. The reforms move the debate without resolving it. What follows surveys the program’s structure, the statutory pay framework, the Thirteenth Amendment problem at its center, the recent ballot and wage developments, and the licensing barriers that have shadowed crew members long after release.

How the conservation camp program works

The Conservation (Fire) Camp Program is run jointly by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), and the Los Angeles County Fire Department. CDCR currently operates 35 conservation camps located across roughly 25 counties, housing crews that respond not only to wildfires but to floods, search-and-rescue operations, and other emergencies. On the order of 1,600 to 2,000 incarcerated people staff the program at any given time, and CDCR has reported that during 2024 its fire crews logged more than 1.8 million emergency-response hours in support of CAL FIRE.

Participation is restricted to people serving sentences for offenses CDCR classifies as eligible, generally excluding those convicted of violent felonies, sex offenses, or arson, and subject to medical and custody screening. Candidates complete a physical-fitness regimen and a multi-week training in fireline construction, hand-tool use, and safety protocols before they are certified to deploy. On an active incident, a hand crew of incarcerated firefighters performs the same core function as a free CAL FIRE or contract crew: cutting containment line by hand on terrain too steep or remote for engines and dozers.

The pay framework: Penal Code § 2700 and the wage floor that wasn’t

Compensation for prison labor in California is governed by Penal Code § 2700 and the surrounding provisions of Article 1, Chapter 5 (§§ 2700–2717). The statute directs CDCR to require labor of able-bodied prisoners and provides that compensation “shall be set by regulations promulgated by the Secretary.” Critically, that framework sets pay administratively and independently of California’s minimum-wage law—the reason an incarcerated worker can earn cents per hour for work that a free worker could not be paid less than the statutory minimum to perform.

Under that regime, camp crew members long earned between $5.80 and $10.24 per day for the routine work and training they performed while housed at camp, plus an additional $1 per hour when assigned to an active fire incident. For a multi-day deployment on a major fire, the active-incident premium might add a few tens of dollars; the base rate is paid regardless. A free entry-level CAL FIRE firefighter, by contrast, earns a wage measured in the low-to-mid five figures annually plus overtime, and a journey-level professional considerably more. The disparity is the economic engine of the program.

What the state saves

Estimates of the program’s value to the state treasury have for years clustered around $90 million to $100 million annually in avoided labor costs. The figure is necessarily an estimate—it depends on assumptions about how many free firefighters the crews displace and at what wage—but even the conservative end of the range makes the point: the savings exist precisely because the workforce is paid far below market for hazardous duty. That arithmetic is what critics mean when they call the program a subsidy extracted from the incarcerated. It also shapes the politics of reform: a state that has come to depend on the crews for a meaningful fraction of its hand-crew capacity, and on the budget savings that capacity represents, has an institutional interest in keeping the program intact even as it adjusts pay at the margins. Reform that raises wages without reducing reliance on the labor leaves the core bargain—cheap, compelled, and dangerous—largely in place.

The Thirteenth Amendment’s punishment clause

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That clause—the punishment exception—is the constitutional foundation on which compelled prison labor rests. Federal courts have generally read it to permit work requirements for the lawfully convicted, treating the exception as a near-categorical answer to Thirteenth Amendment challenges brought by incarcerated workers.

The doctrine is not entirely static. Courts have on occasion distinguished between labor that is part of a sentence and labor extracted from pretrial detainees or under conditions amounting to abuse, and scholars have urged narrower readings of the exception. But as a practical matter, a person convicted and sentenced has little Thirteenth Amendment leverage to refuse a work assignment, and the fire camps sit squarely inside that settled space. The live reform efforts have therefore targeted not federal constitutional doctrine but state constitutions and statutes—the levers a legislature or electorate can actually pull.

Proposition 6 and the 2024 ballot

Proposition 6, on California’s November 2024 ballot, asked voters to amend the state constitution to remove language permitting involuntary servitude as criminal punishment and to bar the state from forcing incarcerated people to work. It failed. Roughly 54 percent of voters rejected the measure against about 46 percent in support. Supporters and analysts attributed the loss in part to ballot language that did not clearly convey what the amendment did; comparable measures framed explicitly as anti-slavery provisions had passed in other states.

The defeat left California’s constitutional structure intact: the state may continue to compel labor from incarcerated people, and a prisoner who declines a work assignment remains subject to disciplinary consequence. For the fire camps specifically, Prop 6’s failure meant the consent critique stayed exactly where it was—a moral and policy argument without a constitutional remedy at the state level.

The 2025 wage reform: AB 247 and “Firefighting to Freedom”

Where the ballot failed to change the constitution, the Legislature changed the wage. Assembly Bill 247, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan and signed by Governor Newsom on October 13, 2025, raised the active-fire pay for conservation camp participants to $7.25 per hour—the federal minimum wage—while assigned to an active incident, regardless of skill level. The bill was the centerpiece of a multi-bill package the Governor’s office branded “Firefighting to Freedom,” and it passed both houses with unanimous support.

The increase is significant in relative terms—a jump from roughly $1 per hour to $7.25 on the fireline—and it represents the first time these workers have been guaranteed a recognizable hourly wage for their most dangerous duty. It is also limited. The $7.25 rate attaches to active-incident time, not to the day-to-day camp work and training that consume most of a crew member’s hours, and it sits at the federal floor rather than the prevailing wage for comparable hazardous work. AB 247 narrows the pay gap; it does not close it, and it does nothing about the underlying question of whether the labor is freely given.

The reentry problem: licensing and AB 2147

For years the program carried a bitter irony: people trained and proven on the fireline while incarcerated often could not get hired as firefighters after release. Many fire agencies require Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) certification, and California’s Emergency Medical Services framework—Health and Safety Code § 1798.200—authorizes denial, suspension, or revocation of an EMT certificate based on a conviction “substantially related” to the duties of prehospital personnel. In practice, a felony record could foreclose certification, and thus the very career the prison program had nominally prepared the worker to enter.

Assembly Bill 2147, authored by Assemblymember Eloise Gómez Reyes and signed in September 2020 (effective January 1, 2021), was designed to dismantle that barrier. The statute allows a person who successfully served as a conservation camp crew member, and who was not convicted of a disqualifying offense, to petition the sentencing court for expungement (relief under Penal Code § 1203.4) upon release. The mechanics matter: on petition, the court directs the appropriate authority to obtain CDCR certification of the petitioner’s successful camp participation, and the court may grant the relief along with early termination of probation or parole, provided the petitioner has not violated its terms. Certain offenses—including violent felonies, sex offenses, and arson—remain ineligible.

AB 2147 is a meaningful fix to a real and cruel obstacle. It is also a narrow one. Expungement under § 1203.4 dismisses the conviction for many purposes but is not a full sealing, and it does not guarantee EMT certification or employment—a certifying authority may still weigh the underlying conduct. The reform clears a path; it does not pave one. And it addresses the after-the-fact licensing barrier while leaving untouched the wage and consent conditions of the labor itself.

Safety, injury, and death on the line

The work is genuinely hazardous, and the record includes fatalities. Shawna Lynn Jones, a Los Angeles County crew member, was killed in February 2016 when she was struck by a rolling boulder while working the Mulholland Fire near Malibu; she is identified in reporting as the first incarcerated woman to die in the program. In May 2017, Matthew Beck, serving a burglary sentence, was killed when a tree fell on him during a crew project in the Hoopa area, with emergency response hampered by a weak radio signal. Reporting has also cited data indicating incarcerated firefighters suffer object-strike and smoke-inhalation injuries at markedly higher rates than their free counterparts.

Those deaths sharpen the wage critique. A worker performing the same dangerous task as a salaried professional, and dying in the same way, was until 2025 compensated for that risk at roughly a dollar an hour. The injury-rate disparity, if it reflects differences in equipment, training depth, or assignment, raises a separate question about whether the program meets the safety standard the state owes anyone it sends to a fire—and whether the cost savings are partly a function of doing the job more cheaply in ways that show up as harm.

The broader labor and reentry debate

The fire camps concentrate, in unusually visible form, the tensions that run through all prison labor. Defenders point to genuine benefits: structured outdoor work, time outside crowded prisons, accelerated good-time credits, marketable skills, and for many participants a sense of purpose and public service that the testimony of crew members repeatedly reflects. Critics respond that none of those benefits answers the structural facts—that the labor is compelled under a constitutional exception built for it, paid below market, and relied upon by the state for tens of millions in savings precisely because it is cheap.

Both things can be true. A program can offer real rehabilitative value to the individual and still rest on a coercive foundation the state has a financial incentive to preserve. The reforms of the last five years map that ambivalence: AB 2147 fixed a downstream licensing injustice, AB 247 raised the most conspicuous wage floor, and Prop 6 failed to disturb the constitutional bedrock. Each was a discrete intervention; none confronted the whole. Continuing commentary on these developments, and the docket of related measures, is tracked in the case tracker.

Where this is heading

The next phase of the debate is likely to be statutory and incremental rather than constitutional. With Prop 6 defeated, advocates have little near-term prospect of stripping the involuntary-servitude exception from California’s constitution, so the pressure will continue to fall on wages, conditions, and reentry: extending the $7.25 floor beyond active-incident hours, tightening safety and equipment standards, and broadening the relief AB 2147 made available. The deeper question AB 247 surfaced—whether a workforce the state cannot legally compel to quit can ever be paid a wage that looks like a real bargain—will outlast any single bill. For now, California has chosen to pay its incarcerated firefighters more while continuing to require that they fight. That combination is stable enough to persist and unstable enough to keep generating reform proposals, and the litigation and legislative record of the coming sessions will show which way it tips.

Golden Gate Legal Review publishes commentary and analysis on developments in California and federal law; it does not provide legal advice, and readers facing specific questions about expungement, certification, or employment should consult qualified counsel.