As wildfires continue to ravage the communities of thousands across Los Angeles, Calif., thousands of firefighters are working tirelessly to contain and mitigate the damage. However, many of these firefighters serve under quite peculiar circumstances: they are incarcerated.

According to The Guardian, over 1,000 incarcerated firefighters have seen service across Los Angeles since the wildfires exploded in size just last week. According to the LA Times, this is nothing particular to the current Los Angeles wildfires, as typically around 30%of California’s wildfire responders are prisoners. When not dealing with emergencies like those at present, they assist in more general efforts at prevention and maintenance to mitigate both wildfire and flood risk. Furthermore, these incarcerated firefighters aren’t going anywhere soon, with California rejecting a major prison labor reform law this past election season.

The prison firefighting program isn’t a bad idea in the face of it — such voluntary labor opportunities can benefit both the prisoner and the state more than simple incarceration. For a prisoner, serving in a dangerous community service position such as firefighting can be rewarding monetarily or for sentence reduction offers but also personal fulfillment in service of a more significant cause. Extreme wildfire events like what we’ve seen over the past two weeks also serve to prove the necessity of the labor provided by these programs. Firefighters are already struggling to contain the Los Angeles fires, and cutting their numbers by thirty percent would be incredibly disastrous. One could argue that more significant payment for non-incarcerated firefighters could bolster the workforce in an alternative way. Still, without such measures, prison labor is an appropriate way of filling in the gaps.

Similarly, paying prisoners to serve sentences while fighting wildfires is a much more productive use of state funding than holding them in prison. Most prisoners already engage in labor while incarcerated, with the American Civil Liberties Union  stating that prison labor across the U.S. produces more than $2 billion in goods per year, often receiving “little or no pay” for their services. Given this, opportunities for shortened sentences and possible future employment make firefighting a worthy alternative to remaining behind bars. However, much of the difficulty in endorsing the program comes from the specifics of these opportunities and compensation.

A serious flaw in the program is the pay provided to prisoner firefighters. These incarcerated workers are typically paid well below minimum wage and the regular wages of non-incarcerated firefighters (in some cases as low as $5.80 a day) and only have the choice between working 12 or 24-hour shifts, according to the LA Times. The nature of this labor is highly taxing to inmates, both physically and mentally. The program also fails to provide many of its supposed benefits to prisoners. Although proponents of the program often extol the future career opportunities that the program gives inmates, a great many of them never receive any aid in finding a firefighting job after release, and some are outright ineligible for non-incarcerated service. While what little prisoners receive for their labor may be a good opportunity compared with their poor circumstances, proposing these sorts of conditions for any other group would seem outright ridiculous.

It’s also tricky to sincerely call the program voluntary. Although inmates have a choice in whether or not they participate, their alternatives are hardly ideal; according to Matthew Hahn in a Washington Post article, “fire camp,” a name for California’s prison firefighter program, “represents a reprieve from [the] risk” of staying in prison. The particular offerings of the program are also hard to ignore. A bill introduced in 2020 allows certain criminal records to be expunged in return for firefighting service. For prisoners eligible for these deals, choosing to join the wildfire fighting program can be called coercive at best.

For many, however, firefighting is a good opportunity. It provides a more productive, fulfilling alternative to having a hard time behind bars and can serve to relieve lengthy sentences for hard-working inmates. In this sense, it may even serve a better job at rehabilitation than prison time itself, with inmates leaving with valuable work experience and productive community service. However, the exploitative nature of this program, both in the coerciveness of their opportunities and the lack thereof in terms of pay and future work for released prisoners, makes it fall short.

Ultimately, California’s prison firefighter program doesn’t need scrapping but reinvention. Adequate wages, appropriate post-incarceration opportunities, and non-coercive alternatives to fighting wildfires would serve to transform the current program from a draconian source of labor exploitation to a valuable service for both prisoners and their communities. The root of the issues, far less than prisoners volunteering to be put in harm’s way, are the harmful attitudes and measures that keep those prisoners and the rest of those in prison across America from being fairly compensated and treated. Before we can fix prison firefighting, we need to fix prison labor as a whole.