By Ryan Sabalow
The Record Searchlight
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California prison and fire officials told lawmakers Monday at least a third of the state’s inmate fire crews might be disbanded by 2013 if county jailers are unable to provide the state with enough prisoners to keep them full.
Lawmakers, including State Sen. Doug LaMalfa, said the potential cut to the fire-camp population raises major worries about whether there will be enough inmates to fight the state’s wildfires. La-Malfa said the labor shortage also might force prison officials to place more dangerous inmates into the minimum-security camps to fill a void caused by the prisons transferring inmates from state to county custody.
“That’s a grave concern,” LaMalfa, R-Richvale told the Rural Fire Protection Working Group meeting Monday at the state Capitol.
Inmates are the state’s only firefighting hand crews, and realignment could eliminate about 1,500 of those positions, said Richard Subia, a deputy director of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The orangeclad prisoners use hand tools and chainsaws to cut fire lines and mop up contained fires. The inmates save the state about $100 million each year, because without cheap inmate labor the state would have to pay professionals to do the job.
Under the state’s inmate prisoner shift plan, which took effect in October as a budget-cutting measure, counties have been asked to provide inmates to the state’s 41 camps. There are a handful of fire camps in the north state including Sugar Pine Conservation Camp in Bella Vista.
At Monday’s meeting, county government lobbyists and members of the state’s sheriffs association said many cash-strapped counties are balking at the proposal since the state is providing local jailers only a limited amount of funds for each new state prisoner they receive. Under the current plan, the fire camps would then charge the counties $46.19 per inmate for each night they’re at a camp.
Butte County Sheriff Jerry Smith said that’s too much, but if the state lowered the cost, his and other counties would be able participate.
“It costs me more money to ship inmates out to fire camp than it does to provide some sort of incustody program,” he said.
But Department of Finance analyst Justyn Howard said the $46 figure was the lowest the state could go while still covering the costs of keeping the camps open. He noted the counties also save money in the long run since inmates’ sentences are reduced by half when they’re working at the camps, reducing the overall numbers of prisoners the counties must oversee.
Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, who didn’t attend the hearing, said he shares the same costs concerns as Smith.
For instance, Bosenko said it would be significantly cheaper to put inmates in satellite-tracking ankle bracelets rather than paying to move them to the camps, though the exact figures showing how much so weren’t unavailable Monday.
Like LaMalfa, Bosenko said he’s worried the pressure to keep the camps staffed might cause inmates with dangerous tendencies to make their way into the minimum-security facilities. He said state prison officials have told the state sheriffs’ association that would happen if the counties don’t fund the program. But CDCR’s Subia rebuffed that claim on Monday.
He told the panel that even with fewer inmates coming in from the counties, there are no plans to put more dangerous criminals into the camp population, which is why they’ll be forced to reduced the camp populations by so much.
“We don’t intend on changing our criteria at all,” Subia said.
This spring, Record Searchlight published the results monthslong investigation showing how at any time at least one in five of the 4,500 inmates at the state’s conservation camps has been convicted of violent crimes, despite assurances from state prison officials only nonviolent prisoners are placed on the fire crews.
Twice in recent years, escapees from the camps had violent encounters with police, one of them a fatal shooting of a San Francisco police officer.
After reading the stories, La-Malfa held a hearing in Sacramento in August at which he asked state prison and fire officials to explain how they chose inmates for the camps system and how the state planned to staff them under the state’s prisoner “realignment” plan.
At the August hearing, prison and fire officials acknowledged that more than half of the inmates who currently staff the fire camps are those who would eventually be in county custody.
At the time, they said they’d hoped the counties’ newly-acquired low-risk state prison inmates would be sent back to the camps.
Cutting the camp program and limiting the state’s firefighting workforce was a solution embraced by no one at Monday’s hearing.
LaMalfa said he was especially irked since rural Californians are being asked to shoulder a $150 a year firefighting fee, even as the state is reducing its firefighting workforce.
The working group’s chairman, Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries, R-Lake Elsinore, urged those in attendance to come up with unorthodox plans that avoid that scenario, even if it means changing the way the state’s firefighting system works.
“Plan B may be very uncomfortable,” Jeffries said. “Be prepared to make an ugly decision some in the state may not like.”
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