[The new series Fire Country revolves around an incarcerated
California firefighter. Based on a real program, the drama is made
possible by California’s budget priorities: few resources for
climate protection or fire services and abundant investment in
prisons.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FIRE COUNTRY IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY AUSTERITY, MASS INCARCERATION, AND
CLIMATE CHANGE  
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Abby Cunniff
October 9, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The new series Fire Country revolves around an incarcerated
California firefighter. Based on a real program, the drama is made
possible by California’s budget priorities: few resources for
climate protection or fire services and abundant investment in
prisons. _

Disavowed by the chief of Cal Fire, the CBS series Fire Country
dramatizes the tribulations of firefighting inmates in California.,
(CBS)

 

A brawny white man in prison blues stands alone, facing the panel that
will decide whether to grant his parole. He apologizes to his robbery
victim and pleads his case for release, but his request for parole is
denied. Then his attorney offers another route out of prison: an
inmate “fire camp” program run by the California Department of
Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). “Cal Fire is hungry for
inmates like you,” she says. The CBS TV drama _Fire
Country_ follows Bode Donovan as he joins the ranks of incarcerated
workers who fight California’s wildfires.

Bode’s lawyer is right: Cal Fire _has _developed an appetite for
cheap and exploited workers. In a budget request earlier this year,
the department finally admitted that incarcerated workers had made
up 192 of 208 hand crews
[[link removed]] directed
by Cal Fire, confirming a long-held suspicion that incarcerated crews
carried out the majority of the manual labor for the state’s
wildfire response.

Each year, thousands of incarcerated workers put in millions of hours
of work for Cal Fire with minimal compensation. _Fire
Country_ offers us a glimpse into that reality. The series features a
predictable dose of unrealistic Hollywood melodrama, but it also gets
many things right — particularly the working conditions that put
firefighters, and indeed all California residents, at greater risk.
What Cal Fire calls an extreme labor shortage is actually the result
of a reliance on incarcerated workers for the past several decades.
Now the situation is growing untenable: the department’s workforce
is unable to keep up with worsening fire seasons caused by climate
change, much less forestall future destruction.

A Baptism of Fire

After CBS announced the show this summer, Cal Fire chief Joe
Tyler disavowed
[[link removed]]_ Fire
Country_ in an internal communication to all staff. The department
also made it clear to the network that they opposed the show, and CBS
conceded slightly by changing its name from “Cal Fire” to _Fire
Country_.

Tyler’s stated problem with the show was that it depicts the
incarcerated crew as integrated with other Cal Fire personnel,
including a scene where Bode punches a civilian firefighter. “The
dramatization of inmate firefighters fighting members of CAL FIRE,”
Tyler remarked, “is a poor reflection of the value of our Camps
Program and the incredible work and leadership of our Fire Captains
who supervise our hand crews.”

There is some truth to his objection. As a part of its funding
structure and official division of labor, it is quite important to Cal
Fire and the California Department of Corrections to maintain an
official policy that forbids nonemergency encounters between these
groups. However, there is a more symbolic truth to _Fire Country_’s
depiction of incarcerated and nonincarcerated workers working side by
side: they ultimately are not that different from one another, no
matter what department name is on their uniform. Tyler’s objection
suggests that portraying these workers as fundamentally similar is
really what’s unacceptable to Cal Fire.

In _Fire Country,_ things go awry for Bode when he is assigned to a
prison fire camp in his hometown that he “left for a reason.” Many
of Bode’s family members and old friends make up the local Cal Fire
staff, and Bode’s and their lives intertwine with great melodramatic
complexity. Through their fallouts and reunions, we see how
incarcerated workers find themselves in collaboration with Cal Fire
officials and personnel — and in tension with the rural communities
that rely on their labor while barely tolerating them as convicted
criminals.

Bode’s story is not impossible: a recent report
[[link removed]] from the
Prison Policy Initiative found that many of the counties with the
highest incarceration rates were in the northernmost region of the
state, which is also prone to wildfires. But it is unlikely, since
more than half of those incarcerated in California come from urban
areas in the southern and central parts of the state, and more than
three-quarters are people of color — unlike Bode, who is white.

Unfortunately, the show doesn’t take pains to realistically develop
other incarcerated characters, even though incarcerated firefighters
have increasingly spoken out about their experiences, offering writers
plenty of grist for the mill. The storyline of one such character,
Freddy, played by W. Tré Davis, could be used to explore how people
of color from Los Angeles County experience the program. _Fire
Country_ instead opts for the predictable “mighty whitey” trope,
focusing on the resilience of a white character as he endures a
baptism of fire in a hostile and unfamiliar environment.

This is not to say the story is conjured out of thin air. The actor
who plays Bode, Max Thieriot, is also a cowriter of the series.
Thierot grew up in Sonoma County, about sixty miles north of San
Francisco, and has remarked on seeing incarcerated fire crews
throughout his life. Just like mass incarceration and wildfires
themselves, incarcerated firefighters are an accepted part of life in
California.

Wildfire Anxiety

In developing _Fire Country, _Thieriot teamed up with Tony Phelan
and Joan Rater, who wrote for and produced ten seasons of _Grey’s
Anatomy_. The latter was a forerunner in the first-responder melodrama
genre, and _Fire Country _follows in its footsteps.

_Grey’s Anatomy _became a hit in a time when hospitals were
becoming increasingly corporate and consolidated, and the faults in
the American health care system were getting impossible to ignore.
Viewers who were uneasy about the depersonalized and inaccessible
medical care in their own lives could fantasize about beautiful
doctors faced with impossible decisions, rather than an impersonal
machine designed to churn through patients for profit.

Likewise, _Fire Country _taps into the profound anxiety that many
Californians have about the state’s worsening wildfire problem and
its cascading health and ecological effects. The past decade has
seen fifteen of the twenty
[[link removed]] most
destructive fires in California history. Smoke inhalation and
wildfire-related health issues caused surges
[[link removed]] in
emergency-room visits in 2020. Because climate change underlies the
wildfire problem, the fires will continue to worsen, causing
increasing problems both for people living in fire-prone areas and for
the rest of us who live downwind.

To many Californians, peace of mind is contingent on daily denial of
this reality. This makes it the natural topic for TV drama, which
allows people to work through their deepest fears, anxieties, and
forbidden desires in a controlled environment, with the near guarantee
of a happy resolution. Bode, his crewmates, and Cal Fire staff are
heroes, with the wildfires serving as their apocalyptic battlefields.
These charismatic firefighters with superhuman abilities (and luck)
seem to always succeed in extinguishing fires, even when things appear
out of control. The story is soothing to the climate-anxious mind.

But as with the crisis in medical care, the environmental catastrophe
facing California will not be resolved by a few brave individuals.
Ecologists and fire management experts agree that a wide range of
labor-intensive efforts must be undertaken across the state to
mitigate the risks of wildfires. These include more year-round
controlled burns, better land use and conservation practices, and the
rejuvenation of indigenous fire management, all of which require more
laborers than have ever worked in forestry and fire in California’s
history.

Hiring more employees is necessary, but even that isn’t sufficient
to solve the problem. Cal Fire’s employees are
notoriously overworked and underpaid
[[link removed]].
For nonincarcerated workers, the agency’s entry-level pay is just
below $50,000 a year
[[link removed]] —
for a work schedule of sixteen-hour days for fourteen days in a row,
combined with smoke inhalation and heat exhaustion. The combination of
poor pay and difficult working conditions made it hard for the
department to attract and retain workers, causing drastic
understaffing
[[link removed]].
Creating altogether better working conditions
[[link removed]] for
exponentially more workers is the only way to implement the
fire-management practices recommended by experts.

Sadly, the state’s approach to funding firefighters and conservation
efforts has been remarkably sluggish compared to its energetic
investment in prisons and corrections.

Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire

In the series pilot, the fictional Cal Fire unit chief delivers an
impassioned speech to convince his superiors that he needs better
equipment for his station. “You all don’t remember the Hanley fire
but I do,” he says. “Fifty-six thousand acres burned, nineteen
fatalities, two of which were firefighters. That area has not burned
since then. This will happen again. The question is what are we going
to do about it?”

The chief’s appeal expresses a sentiment shared by most
Californians: that the state government has not invested nearly enough
money in wildfire management or prevention. Cal Fire has only 10,513
employees
[[link removed]], many of
whom are seasonal. After the worst fire season in California history,
it was allocated only 0.7% of the 2021 budget.

In stark contrast to the state’s neglect of fire and forestry, the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)
underwent unprecedented growth between 1980 and 2000, increasing its
share of the state budget from 2 to 8 percent
[[link removed]]. During this
period, the CDCR built twenty-three new prisons and grew its workforce
to fifty-five thousand
[[link removed]], making
it the state’s largest agency.

In operation since the 1940s, California’s prison fire camp program
became the lynchpin of rehabilitation in the CDCR in the mid-twentieth
century. The CDCR abandoned its commitment to rehabilitation in the
late ’70s, but the fire camp program kept growing. Between 1998 and
2018, the program maintained an incarcerated workforce of 3,000 to
4,500 people. The number of program participants only dropped below
3,000 in 2019, when federal mandates to reduce the overcrowding in
California prisons, combined with new sentencing reforms, reduced the
number of prisoners eligible for fire camp.

Since then, Cal Fire has been telling anyone who will listen about its
shortage of manpower. To its credit, _Fire Country _realistically
portrays the situation faced by Cal Fire’s overworked employees. In
the second episode, the civilian firefighters and incarcerated workers
tackle a dry lightning storm and ensuing spot fires, which stretch
their resources thin across the county and the state. The Cal Fire
chief repeats a classic Cal Fire refrain. “There’s a staffing
shortage,” he warns his crew. “A lot of long shifts and nobody’s
going home.”

As Cal Fire’s incarcerated-worker program has gained media
visibility in recent years, questions have arisen about its
ethicality, whether it serves to rehabilitate incarcerated people, and
whether it offers any long-term employment opportunities. Those
questions are legitimate, but they sit uncomfortably alongside the
fact that many incarcerated firefighters are enthusiastic about
working for Cal Fire. I conducted interviews with incarcerated
firefighters who were active during the 2020 season, and found a
general eagerness to participate in the program, owing in large part
to the fact that the wage rate of fire camp participants is higher
than most other prison jobs in California. Compared to minimum wage,
$2 an hour on an active fire seems laughable, but compared to $0.50 an
hour, it’s considerable. Incarcerated workers’ willingness to
fight deadly fires for $2 an hour reflects how miserable most prison
jobs are, and how bad prison must be for incarcerated people to
compete to become firefighters.

Cal Fire needs workers, and incarcerated Californians want a chance to
escape prison and make some money. On the surface, then, the Cal Fire
incarcerated firefighter program makes sense for everyone. But in
reality, these jobs should pay people to work in firefighting with
dignity, not in a state of hyperexploitation or perpetual precarity.
In order to tackle the state’s interlocking problems, California
must grow and transform its firefighting workforce while also
dismantling its infrastructure of mass incarceration. _Fire
Country_ stops short of calling for transformative action, but it
puts incarcerated workers in the spotlight and asks its audience to
consider the ramifications of these compounding crises.

CONTRIBUTORS

Abby Cunniff is a PhD student in environmental studies at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.

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