POLITICS
22/08/2020
13:00 BST | Updated 22/08/2020 18:37 BST
Climate Change, Wildfires And COVID-19 Are
Creating A Hellish Combo For California Prisons
People incarcerated in California are already fighting
for their lives against a devastating pandemic. Now they are surrounded by
flames, too.
By Jessica
Schulberg
Chris
D'Angelo, HuffPost US
.More than
500 wildfires have been ignited across California this week, the result of a
record-shattering heat wave and about 12,000 lightning strikes. The governor
has declared a statewide emergency, and tens of thousands of people are under
evacuation orders, yet many of them are reluctant to head to shelters amid the
coronavirus pandemic.
The
thousands of people incarcerated in California prisons — some of which have
already been devastated by COVID-19 — do not have the option of fleeing the
flames. Instead, they are forced to wait out the crisis behind bars, breathing
in smoke and polluted air that could make them even more vulnerable to dying of
the coronavirus. Some of the prisoners are fighting the flames themselves,
earning just a few dollars a day for the life-threatening work. And because of
the coronavirus’s toll on the state’s prisons, the firefighting crews
dispatched from the prisons this year are stretched thin.
It is a
convergence of crises on a level the state has never seen.
“What does
it say about a civilized society, that they leave people to die of COVID in
prisons — and then regret that decision that they left them to die in prisons
because now it’s fire season and we need them to die for us on the fire line,”
Kate Chatfield, a senior adviser at the Justice Collaborative said in an
interview. “It’s really quite barbaric. And this was entirely foreseeable. We
have fire season every year.”
Incarcerated
firefighter crews are the “backbone” of the state’s wildland firefighting
operations, a high-ranking firefighter told HuffPost in 2018. Those who are
accepted onto crews earn $2 to $5 a day, and they get an extra dollar an hour
when actively fighting a fire. They receive time off their sentence in exchange
for the high-risk, low-wage work. But because of the state’s restrictions on
individuals with felony convictions, many people who serve as firefighters
while incarcerated are unable to get a job with a fire department after they
are released.
The
exploitative system saves the state of California nearly $100 million a year.
Prison labor is so intrinsic to California’s firefighting efforts that
officials — including those in the attorney general’s office under Kamala
Harris’s leadership — have fought criminal justice reform measures aimed at
combating overcrowding because it would cost the state access to incarcerated
firefighters. (Sen. Harris, now the Democratic vice presidential candidate, has
said she was unaware of her office’s efforts and eventually ordered it to
stop.)
Now, as the
pandemic forces California to depopulate its prisons, the state is grappling
with its reliance on prison fire crews. Last month, after more than 2,000 California
prisoners tested positive for COVID-19, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) ordered the
expedited release of up to 8,000 people nearing the end of their sentences, a
long-overdue effort to create more distancing space in the prisons. Some of the
people approved for expedited release were incarcerated firefighters. As a
result, there are 236 fewer incarcerated firefighters right now than there were
in August 2019.
The
conditions in California have overwhelmed the state’s Department of Forestry
and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire. With so many blazes,
firefighters are overextended and equipment is sparse. “California’s
firefighting resources are depleted as new fires continue to ignite,” Cal Fire
public information officer Jeremy Rahn told HuffPost earlier this week.
The state
has used $72 million in emergency supplemental funds to backfill more than 800
seasonal firefighter jobs, in part to offset the loss of incarcerated
firefighters, Newsom said at a Friday news conference.
In less
than a week, the wildfires have charred more than 771,000 acres (roughly the
size of Rhode Island), 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.
Asked repeatedly to describe their evacuation plan, a spokesperson for the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation declined to provide
one.
“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. The plan, he added, “is for staff to save themselves —
and then us, if possible.”
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.
In a March
episode of “Uncuffed,” a podcast made by incarcerated people in California that
airs on KALW public radio in San Francisco, several people imprisoned at Solano
recalled the last time a wildfire threatened the prison, in 2018. As the fire
crept down a hill behind the property and their cells filled with smoke, prison
staff fled, they said.
“The power
went out and all the air in the building was gone, and then the building
started to fill up with smoke,” Bryan Mazza, who is incarcerated at Solano,
said in March. “They left us in there, locked inside that building like that.”
Even people
in prisons that aren’t in immediate risk of catching fire are struggling with
the poor air quality caused by the flames. Prisons have notoriously poor
ventilation, a problem that may have exacerbated the spread of the coronavirus.
It also means that people imprisoned near the fires are likely breathing in
fine particulate pollution, which can cause short- and long-term health
problems, including respiratory diseases. Exposure to wildfire smoke may also
increase an individual’s vulnerability to COVID-19. San Quentin State Prison,
located near Bay Area fires, is currently the biggest COVID-19 cluster in the
country.
Adnan Khan,
the executive director of Re:Store Justice, who was formerly incarcerated at
Solano State Prison and San Quentin, was told by a friend who is still in
Solano that correctional officers are walking into the building with ash on
their shoulders and their hats. “Whatever the air quality was outside, whatever
the temperature was outside, that’s what the ventilation system would blow in
the cell,” Khan said, recalling his time at Solano.
Staff and
incarcerated individuals near the fires have been provided with N95 masks,
according to Francis, the CDCR spokesman, although it is not clear how many
N95s, which are designed for single use, are available for each person. Khan
was told by his friend in Solano that N95s had not been available to every
person in his dorm.
Until
recently, the California Medical Center, a prison for those who are terminally
ill or medically vulnerable, was using outdoor tent structures to create more space
for social distancing and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Because of the
dangerous air quality and encroaching flames, people housed in those tents have
been moved back inside the prison — a move that potentially decreases their
risk of being harmed by the fires but could increase their risk of contracting
the coronavirus.
The power went out and all the air in the building was
gone, and then the building started to fill up with smoke ... they left us in
there, locked inside that building like that.
Bryan Mazza, a man incarcerated at Solano state prison
Fires have
become a near year-round ordeal in the Golden State, with devastating effects
on communities, forest ecosystems and the firefighters who respond. Multiple
factors are driving California’s wildfire crisis. Decades of fire suppression
have left forests overgrown. A growing number of people living in wildland
areas often means more homes are destroyed in a blaze. And, of course, global
climate change is driving up temperatures, fueling drought and triggering
larger and more extreme fires.
Anthropogenic
climate change has doubled the amount of land that’s burned in Western forests
since the 1980s, a 2016 study found. And without drastic cuts in greenhouse gas
emissions, the amount of land scorched annually in California is expected to
increase 77% by 2100, according to a 2018 state climate assessment.
The Trump
administration has responded to California’s wildfire crisis not with
thoughtful leadership or the empathy it has shown for Republican-led states
reeling from disasters, but with threats and partisan politics. It has
repeatedly dismissed and downplayed the role of climate change. “This has
nothing to do with climate change,” Trump’s first interior secretary, Ryan
Zinke, told a Sacramento TV station during a visit to the fire-scorched state
in 2018. Trump has blamed fires on everything from a lack of raking to a
nonexistent water shortage resulting from “bad environmental laws.” In late
2018, Trump signed an executive order to boost logging on millions of federal
acres to combat extreme fires.
In a
Thursday address at the Democratic National Convention, Newsom slammed Trump
for threatening — yet again — to withhold federal wildfire relief funds over
perceived forest mismanagement by the state. At a campaign rally in
Pennsylvania earlier that day, Trump insisted California has “gotta clean your
floors, you gotta clean your forests” of “leaves and broken trees,” adding that
“maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t
listen to us.” Many of the state’s worst fires have been on land managed by the
federal government, not the state.
“The hots
are getting hotter. The dries are getting drier,” Newsom said in his DNC
address. “If you are in denial about climate change, come to California.”
On Sunday,
the temperature in Death Valley, California, soared to a disturbing 130 degrees
Fahrenheit ― potentially the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth.
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