By Todd South
Chattanooga Times Free Press (Tennessee)
ROCK SPRING, Ga. — Bobby Adams looked down at his hands. Rough and scarred, with a little dirt under the nails, they showed the signs of time and hard work.
The time stretched beyond a decade, and the work began with bad decisions but led to a sense of purpose and pride.
More than a decade ago, Mr. Adams was deep into a methamphetamine addiction and caught up in crimes tied to the drug. Once inside Walker State Prison, he looked for anything to pass the time.
Walker State had something different: a fire department for inmates.
When Mr. Adams left prison a few weeks ago, he carried a set of skills documented in photo albums the inmate crew keeps. Pictures of fire calls and training events fill the pages.
In an interview before leaving prison, Mr. Adams pulled down one of the albums and turned the pages on a decade of his life. One clipping showed the smiling face of a 4-year-old who’d died in a house fire in 2002.
“I’ll never forget that call as long as I live,” Mr. Adams said, pressing so hard on the page his finger whitened.
Inmates on the fire crew value the chance to be seen as doing more, giving something back after their mistakes, said Randy Yarber, prison fire chief.
“The public perceives them different than a chain gang,” Chief Yarber said. “The public loves this fire crew.”
The prison’s fire department has existed in some form since the late 1970s, said the chief, who came to work at the small, ever-changing department in 1982.
Of more than 55,000 people in Georgia prisons, fewer than 150 work in the 21 fire stations across the state that use inmate crews. The inmates’ firefighting operations are funded in the Department of Corrections annual budget, but corrections officials said they did not have dollar figures available.
Inmates don’t stay on the fire crews for long. They must be within five years of their release dates to be eligible, and some have even less time left to serve.
Jason Smith has been on the crew for almost a year and a half. He has one more year before he’s eligible for parole.
In April, Mr. Smith completed his initial firefighter qualifications, running through a day of textbook-based tests and a Saturday full of drills that included using a hose, climbing stairs and crawling blindfolded in a metal box.
Inmate firefighters must complete the same training requirements as volunteer and full-time firefighters in Georgia. But because of their criminal histories, Chief Yarber said, most can find work only as volunteer firefighters if they want to serve after they’re released.
Fort Oglethorpe Fire Chief Bruce Ballew said some area chiefs think training inmates is a waste of resources because they often can’t get paid jobs. That’s a shame, he said.
“Everybody has their reservations, so to speak, until they work with them,” Chief Ballew said. “Once that’s done, they’re firefighters. They’re not prisoners or inmates, they’re firefighters.”
Chief Ballew, who has been with the Fort Oglethorpe Fire Department since 1965, said the department has trained with the Walker prison crew since its inception. He’s written job recommendations for ex-inmate firefighters.
“There’s a whole lot of training there,” he said. “They’ll be a great asset. ... They’ve been in woods fires, structure fires.”
The Walker inmate crew’s reputation extends statewide.
“Around the prisons, Walker’s considered the best in the prison system,” said Benjamin Dickerson, a recently transferred inmate who joined the crew after working on the Hancock State Prison crew in Sparta since 2007.
Mr. Dickerson said he requested a transfer to three other prisons while at Hancock to get more firefighting experience. In the few weeks he’s been at Walker, he’s been on more fire calls than in six months with the previous department, he said.
Inmates must be approved trusties and have positive behavior records to apply for the crew. In 27 years, no inmate firefighter has escaped from Walker, Chief Yarber said. Penalties are high; a prisoner with fewer than five years on his sentence would face 10 more years if caught escaping.
And the hours, days and weeks to go before freedom have a different quality at a fire hall just outside prison walls, an inmate said.
“Oh yeah, time passes way faster,” said Chris Woods, an inmate firefighter since 2007.
In his first live fire, propane bottles blew up an unoccupied cabin just off U.S. Highway 27, Mr. Woods recalls.
Something most of the public won’t pick up if they’re watching firefighting on television is the sensation inside a fire when the hoses are spraying down the flames.
“It feels like someone’s dropping a hot blanket on you,” he said. “A hot, wet blanket.”
Copyright 2009 Chattanooga Publishing Company