Doing Time on the Fire Lines : Women Successfully Trade Prison Cells for Hard Labor, Surprising Themselves With New Self-Esteem

A dusty red fire truck pulled into Encinal Canyon Fire Camp 13, laden with weary firefighters home from a day of clearing brush in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The crew members swatted fine tan dust from their dungarees. Their big black boots thudded heavily as each jumped from the transport to the ground.

Then, peeling away the macho illusion, the firefighters doffed their hard hats and work gloves. Folds of long hair tumbled into view and colorful ovals of pink nail polish caught the bright sunlight.

Big Surprise

The 100 women of Fire Camp 13 are surprising everyone, including themselves.

They are prisoners--convicted felons--sent to camp from the overcrowded California Institution for Women at Frontera, which has been swamped by an unprecedented doubling of its population since 1981.

Isolated in simple barracks on a stretch of road high above Malibu, the women--none of whom are considered hard-core criminals--have traded cramped prison cells for a life of hard labor once reserved for male prisoners.

Paid prison wages of about $2 a day, these former secretaries, housewives and store clerks heave the giant combined axes and grubbing tools known to firefighters as Pulaskis, and wield deafening chain saws that slice through the scrub wood like knives through cake.

“I have 20 years on as a firefighter, and quite frankly I am very impressed,” said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Bob Martin, the camp boss the women call simply “Cap.”

Trained by Martin and his county team of expert firefighting foremen, the women, wearing full gear, are capable of cutting a three-mile fire line in just three days. Many are proud veterans of the 6,500-acre Decker Canyon fire in Malibu last October, in which they and a 1,000 other prisoner and professional firefighters were credited with saving scores of homes.

The women have been whipped into shape like clients at an expensive fat farm.

“I’ve lost 20 pounds and look at my legs!” said Rita Tatum, 32, pounding her thigh. “They’re hard, hard as rock.”

Martin said that when the big brush fires hit last fall, “the first reaction of my foremen was, ‘OK, where do we hide these women?’ . . . We had expected them to do 75% or 80% of what the male prisoners had been doing. But instead, we got 100% and more from the females. We’re talking General Patton.”

After that, Martin said, “the men wanted the women out front.”

The camp, which opened last summer, is jointly funded by the county Forester and Fire Warden and the state Department of Corrections. It is one of only two fire camps for women inmates in California. The other, in San Diego County, opened in 1983. The two camps are believed to be the only ones of their kind in the United States, the result of a court order requiring California prisons to give women inmates the same training opportunities as men.

Welfare Fraud

Convicted of crimes such as drug dealing, welfare fraud and robbery, many of them dislike the rough work and pray for the day they can return to their families. Those who don’t like firefighting but make a good effort often get assigned the less rigorous “in-camper” jobs such as auto mechanic and chief of maintenance.

“Nobody’s ever going to tell you the truth about this place,” said one woman, who asked not to be identified. “The hard work, the exercise, the pain--it’s the worst.”

But only two women have asked to be returned to prison since the camp opened, and fewer than a dozen have been sent back because they couldn’t cut it physically or emotionally. The vast majority say they are grateful to have been selected from the cream of the prison population--hard work or not.

For instance, there’s Opie, dubbed so by the captain because she looks more like a fresh-scrubbed character from the “Andy Griffith Show” than a prisoner with a felony rap.

The 22-year-old from Oroville, whose real name is Tonya Mabry, said she is “incredibly thankful” to have been sent to camp, where she put in her final day of time April 18.

At Frontera, where she was first assigned, “we were bunched up together with sick women--people who have done crazy, crazy things,” she said. “You’ve got stabbings in there, women tortured in there, sexually assaulted by other women. We don’t have that here, thank God.”

And there’s Petra Sanchez, who has discovered that she wants more than anything to become a firefighter.

“I love camp,” said Sanchez, 39. “I know it’s a hard job, a lot of work, and I have a long time to go until 1987. But I like the work. I found out how much I like to help people. . . . I feel like I’m part of something good.”

Outward Bound

The camp is part prison, part Outward Bound.

There are no bars, no locks, not even a gate across the main entrance. Seven mandatory head counts and usually one surprise head count each day are the only reminders that the women are not free.

“Everywhere you turn, there’s a road you could take out of here. But nobody does,” said Estella Hernandez, 34, the camp carpenter who goes by her Indian name of Evening Star.

A pond at the entrance is frequented by ducks and peacocks, which the resourceful Martin says he “scrounged up somewhere.” Rich green foothills ring the compound’s low buildings, giving it the feel of a wilderness retreat. Chewy and Max (short for Maximum Sentence), the affable camp dogs, gently growl and wag at strangers. Laughter wells up in a far corner of the camp as Martin prepares to spray breath deodorant into the mouth of the hapless Chewy.

Clearing Brush

The women work for the county Fire Department weekdays until 4 p.m., clearing dry brush, sand-bagging flood-threatened homes, fighting fires. After that, they’re on their own. Some call home, while others work out with weights or sunbathe near their barrack-style dorms. The food is better than in prison, the women say, and during fire activity they eat especially well, downing steaks and sausages to keep them rolling. When they are actually fighting fires, prison pay jumps to $1 an hour.

On weekends, visitors are allowed in camp for most of the day. Husbands and children are allowed to stay overnight in an apartment designed for conjugal visits, but the wait for that privilege can be as long as a couple of months.

“When my daughter came up here she said, ‘God, this looks like the camp I went to as a kid,’ ” said Anita Sisto, who at 49 is the oldest inmate.

Sisto repairs, sharpens and maintains the firefighting tools, one of the most important in-camper duties.

Friendly Grandmother

She painted an incongruous picture, this friendly grandmother from Santa Monica. Her curling, slightly graying hair was pressed flat to her temples by a pair of industrial goggles as she hoisted a Pulaski onto her buzzing sharpening wheel. Sisto gritted her teeth against the ensuing metallic din. White sparks flew past her. Protected by a heavy bib, Sisto nodded toward the newly gleaming ax.

“I love tools, you know?” she shouted above the screeching wheel. “It’s pretty rough work, but so what? I’ve sharpened and painted every tool here! Then I said, ‘Hey, it’s a girl’s camp, so why not pink?’ So I painted the (tool room) floor bright shocking pink!”

Many of the inmates are mothers; a few are grandmothers. When they talk about their children, their faces alternately glow with pride and grow solemn with worry.

One 29-year-old has a teen-age son who tells his friends his mom is away at college. She hopes they can get counseling together when she gets out “so we can work it out, you know?”

Son at Home

Another, Shadi Poma, has a 4-year-old son who was a baby when she went to prison. He calls her by her first name, and knows someone else as Mommy. “When I phone he says, ‘Hi Shadi, how ya doing?’ He doesn’t understand,” she said.

She keeps the pictures of her three children tucked inside the two-foot-wide locker that holds most of her worldly possessions.

“I can’t look at ‘em,” Poma said slowly. “It hurts. I keep ‘em put up, in my locker. Being a first-timer, never being in prison before, I found myself trying to live two lives . . . and you just can’t do that.”

“I have a friend who was in prison, who’s out now, doing well on the outside,” she said. “He says, ‘Don’t worry about the weather Shadi, let the wind blow. You can’t do anything about what’s on the outside.’ ”

The women, some groaning and cajoling Martin--”Let’s take a day off, huh Cap?”--begin each weekday about 6:30 a.m. with breakfast followed by calisthenics and a grueling hike through the nearby foothills. They have christened each trail, in honor of the captain and foremen, with names rich in meaning: Martin’s Mother, Bonus’ Buttbuster and Birdy’s Bitch.

The thing about Birdy’s Bitch, the women say, is not how bad it makes your thighs burn with pain, or how fast it turns your knees to uncooperative mush, or even how much it makes you wish you were back in prison vegetating.

Nope. They say the thing about Birdy’s is what place you finish in when the foreman scribbles your name in his clipboard at the end of the punishing trail.

Always First

One 80-degree morning, exactly 23 minutes after she sped out of camp in her thick hiking boots, Kyong (Tina) Jago was zipping through the gray-green brush that towers over the final leg of Birdy’s. Her dark head bobbed like a yo-yo, vanishing, then reappearing, in the wildwood. Jago always finishes in first place.

“That chick’s an animal,” Martin said with satisfaction, like a football coach gloating over his star tackle.

“I don’t have to run with them, but I think it forms a bond,” he said. ‘When I’m really hustling, I’m right between Jago and the pack behind us. At 5-foot-1, she’s my top physical girl. Awesome endurance.”

Not far behind was Kapiolani Neely, 30, who whipped up the hill cheering encouragement to her “bucker”--a firefighting partner who clears the brush cut by Neely’s chain saw. “C’mon!” Neely cried. The bucker, Sandra Uriquiets, huffed and puffed, unable to respond, several yards behind her.

“It’s really brutal,” said Martin. “The first time the brand new ones hit this, they’re almost dead, really almost dead. You’ll hear that from the women, and they aren’t kidding.

“When they come in here I tell them, ‘If you’re expecting an easy job, you’ve come to the wrong place.’ ”

Magic of Camp

Therein lies part of the magic of Camp 13. Lt. Maxine Wortham, the ranking prison official at the camp, said the work, and the sense of accomplishment, have given the women something to hang their hopes on.

“Back in prison, their life style is controlled every moment, completely,” Wortham said. “But times have changed, and women are seen differently now, with equal rights. So they got a camp, and what they do here--it’s not like somebody coerced them. They do it on their own.”

Neely, known as Kappy, is probably the strongest, largest woman in camp. Martin says she can scale a tree with a chain saw and top it as well as any man.

She commands respect among the women, but not simply because of her physique.

“When I first went to prison I thought four years of my life were going to be wasted,” Neely said.

‘You Learn So Much’

“I feel different now. All Cap’n’s got to do is point me in the direction and I’ll go. My chain saw doesn’t stop after that. I can tear apart a chain saw all the way down to nothing. And dealing with the science of wild-land firefighting, you learn so much. . . . That’s taken a lot of my bitterness out--because I can say it hasn’t been wasted.”

Wortham, who was assigned to the camp this spring, said that when she arrived, “I was all ready to be saying, ‘No!’ and ‘This is the way it’s going to be.’ But then I saw that the women didn’t need any of that. There is a great sense of independence, getting the job done. The women are of that caliber.”

The camaraderie among the women is radically different from the bitter factions that form in a male prison fire camp, county officials say.

Martin said the women call the way they cope “hanging.”

“We started noticing it when a woman went down on the trail, and two would go help her,” Martin said. “With the males, maybe somebody would go back, maybe not. What we lacked in physical dexterity among these girls, we picked up in sheer raw desire. Their attitudes were incredible. . . . I’d go back and say, ‘How ya doing?’ And they’d say, ‘We can hang, Cap.’ ”

He said the camp’s most heavyset woman, Karen Glenn, couldn’t make it over the trail her first day, and was pushed and pulled along by two women she barely knew.

Glenn, nicknamed Onion, laughed uproariously at the memory.

“You should have seen the other girls helping me! I’ve lost all this weight since November and I’m more--what’s the word?--more toned than when I got here.”

Discipline Rules

Nevertheless, the women who helped Glenn were written up, under camp rules that require them to complete Martin’s Mother in 45 minutes. With too many write-ups for infractions like talking back or absence from work, an inmate can be assigned additional work duties. Beyond that, they can be punished by getting less “good behavior” time taken off their sentences.

“It’s an automatic write-up from the captain, saying they didn’t complete their run, or whatever, but they risked it for me,” she said. “Camp is pretty nice that way.”

One of those who helped, Diana Bettencourt, 37, said she didn’t mind the write-up.

“If we put in a good day for our foreman, they’ll take us out for an hour at the beach, or do something nice for us,” Bettencourt said. “If you don’t do what’s expected, that’s on you.”

While the camp is hardly free of the racial tensions and personality differences common to prisons, Martin said only two or three fights have erupted.

The women credit the correctional officers, the captain and the county foremen with encouraging them to break away from negative prison attitudes.

“It takes a special woman to be able to hang in a fire camp,” said Shadi Poma, Martin’s secretary and one of the best-liked inmates. “But you know what really makes this camp? The correctional officers make this camp, the foremen and Capt. Martin.”

Away From Home

Teresa Whatley, 31, of Marysville in Northern California, said she has had a hard time adjusting to being away from home, “and being in trouble--both for the first time.”

The camp’s guards have been like counselors to her, she said, “and have really understood me. They’re not like typical prison guards, they’re people.”

Poma said the captain’s favorite saying is, “Shadi, tell me your success story when you get out. I want to hear your success story.”

“Baby, the captain is great,” said Poma. “I work with him every day. Side by side sometimes, long hours. He is a man I look up to with respect like a father, or a hero. Some women here think the big thing is to get out and, excuse my expression but, get laid and take drugs. What I’ve learned is that when I get out, I’m going to live a different life.”

Because he and the foremen work so closely with the women, Martin has strict rules that prohibit sexual gestures, suggestive talk and even swearing. Martin, who is married and a devout Mormon, says he and his men are “the first really decent guys” many of the women have ever met.

‘The Good Guys’

The captain and foremen do not live at the camp. However, Martin said, “the boy-girl situation is one of our biggest concerns. We have 100 women and they’re extremely vulnerable, let’s face it. . . . We’re the good guys, white knights.”

Women who aren’t getting along emotionally are called in for a “father-daughter” talk with him. Those who have serious problems, and who face being returned to the institution, are given one final chance to wipe the slate clean.

Although Martin quips that the inmates “aren’t here for singing too loud in church,” he takes pains to explain that hard-core offenders are not allowed.

“She could be the sweetest girl on the face of the Earth but have blown somebody away, and she can’t come here,” he said. “We take no convicted murderers and no kidnapers.” For obvious reasons, arsonists are also not allowed.

A few exceptions have been made for women convicted of manslaughter, in cases where their prison records were excellent.

Poma, for instance, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after witnessing a killing in a drug deal that went sour. She has been in prison since 1982, and, with more than a year to go, is considered one of the long-timers.

“I’m awfully fortunate,” she said. “I had to beg and plead to come here-- beg and plead, to get out of (California Institution for Women). It took a year, and was I happy when they said yes? Huh! I was ready to cry.”

Rose Menharez, 22, sounds like a much older woman when she talks about her past life on the streets, a fuzzy whirlwind of drugs and crime. But in camp she sleeps with a stuffed animal.

The locker near her bed is stuffed full, like a closet about to avalanche. Pico Pete hot sauce is jammed next to shampoo, hair conditioner and Miracle Whip. Pearly fingernail polish and make-up are crammed up against her dust-covered hiking boots.

A slim young woman, she shyly turns her face to the ground when she grins, so nobody can see her missing front tooth.

Menharez has a son, 5, named Jimmy. She can’t wait to hold him again.

“He misses me a whole lot,” she said. “My sister and brother tell him, ‘Learn this song, and then when your mom calls you can sing it to her.’ He’s trying to be real good for me. I’m very grateful that I have my mom and my brother and my sister and I’m happy that they’re straight, because that’s the only way to raise a good child. When you’re little and you’ve got a good environment around you, I think you’ve got everything.”

Making an Afghan

Menharez pawed her way to the far corner of her locker, finally drawing a huge burgundy, pink and cream afghan from its depths. She is making it for someone at home. She is trying desperately to stay close to her family.

“When it comes to Christmas and birthdays, I say, ‘God, what am I going to give them?’ ”

But for now, Menharez is a saw-girl in Camp 13.

And, to be sure that she returns to her son in one piece, she wears a pair of dungarees with a four-inch-long tear on the left leg--a reminder of a mishap that nearly maimed her for life.

She was cutting through some brush when a construction worker on a hill above her threw a log, unaware that she was directly below. The impact knocked the wind from her lungs and propelled the wildly buzzing chain past her legs. The chain narrowly missed her calf as it sliced through her jeans.

“We have to be so cautious, because you could go through life without a hand, or you could make someone else go through life without a hand,” she said. “That’s why saw-girl and bucker are volunteer jobs. When we’re working, I like to keep my bucker right beside me with her hand on my shoulder, so I know where she is.”

The sobriety of their task has given many of the women a new perspective on life outside.

“Camp is changing a lot of the girls’ sense of values,” said Anita Sisto. “So many of them were dope fiends; they’ve always been used to hustling. And now they see people who are dead, they cut through the brush to retrieve a body or stop a fire, and they begin to see how it really is out there.”

Retrieving Body

Last October, the crews were assigned the gruesome job of recovering a murder victim from a burned-out car near the bottom of a ravine in the nearby foothills.

“Her organs were hanging out and she had been tied up,” Menharez said softly. “That really makes you think. It makes you realize what death is, instead of an illusion like when you’re on the streets all messed up on drugs.”

Martin and Wortham say the experiences the women have at camp will pay off in the outside world.

After the series of brush fires ended last fall, Martin said he sat them down and told them: “You’re no longer inmates, you’re firefighters. And that’s a prestige thing to be.”

Today, dozens of the women who have been released keep in touch, sending Martin and the guards postcards filled with news of their new lives--especially their kids and new jobs.

“They always say exactly how much they make an hour: $5.25, or $6.28. Exactly. Then they say, ‘Can you believe it?’ And I say, ‘Guess what? You can do it.’ ”

But it was Kyong Jago who, in the broken English that often earns her a quick chuckle from the captain, summed it up the best:

“When I get out,” she said, “I’m going to really get my feet together.”