Absence of CYA Crews Upsets City Officials : Camarillo: Two councilmen believe fire details were withdrawn because they voiced fears of inmate escapes. The Youth Authority denies there is retribution.

After first complaining that Camarillo residents did not want dangerous inmates working in the city on California Youth Authority fire crews, two City Council members say they are now upset that prison officials have banned the crews from the community altogether.

Councilmen Michael Morgan and David M. Smith said they believe that Camarillo is being penalized for concerns that they relayed to prison officials four months ago--that inmates with histories of violent crime were escaping from fire crews working off-grounds.

“There’s a game being played here,” Morgan said. “We complained. Now we’re not getting services. That’s wrong.”

“We certainly never expected them to respond that way,” Smith said.

But CYA Ventura School Supt. Manuel Carbajal denied last week that any retribution was intended in removing the fire crews from brush-clearing duties and other projects in Camarillo.

He said he removed the crews from Camarillo only because he thought that was what the council wanted, adding that he would be happy to send his crews back into the city if the council officially requests it.

“I hope that they don’t feel we’re playing games with them regarding this,” he said. “That was not the point at all.”

Carbajal said he hopes to resolve the matter at a meeting with the council on Wednesday.

The council learned only recently that the correctional facility stopped providing public services such as clearing weeds, maintaining ball fields or doing small construction projects in Camarillo after Morgan and Smith met with Carbajal in February.

Morgan said he and Smith had asked Carbajal to be “a little more picky” in choosing which inmates could be on the fire crews, but not to stop providing Camarillo the same public services that other cities receive countywide.

“We were concerned that a murderer, 17 or 18 years old, was allowed to be on a fire trail,” Morgan said.

But Carbajal said the most dangerous inmates at Ventura School are not allowed the off-grounds privileges given to trusted fire crews.

“If we felt they were dangerous and if they were any threat to the community, we wouldn’t be putting (the crews) out there,” he said.

Not all wards committed to the Ventura School, which now has a co-ed population of nearly 800, can work on a fire crew. Murderers, rapists and arsonists cannot qualify, officials said.

But Ventura School’s escape record is high contrasted with other CYA facilities, correction officials have said. Eleven wards have escaped in the last 13 months, six of them from fire crews. All but one of the 11--including two murderers who cut a hole in a chain-link fence--are still at large, officials said.

About 70 inmates are assigned to the CYA’s fire camp, which has its own dormitories and is separated from the main institution by a road and a fence. Unlike the prisoners living in the main facility, the fire crews have the privilege of going off-grounds.

In response to the council members’ concerns, administrators at the fire camp have taken 18 inmates with the most violent records and longest terms from the crews and transferred them either to camps at other institutions or back inside the prison.

But without these 18 prisoners, the number of 15-person fire crews fell from five to two. This forced camp officials to weigh the needs of the community against the camp’s, camp Supt. Cynthia Brown said.

“We want to support the community as much as possible,” Brown said. But she added that the 2-year-old camp program could not survive without more fire workers.

“If we drop below 12, it is no longer a fire crew,” said Teddy Reese, camp administrative captain.

Camp officials have since brought in 10 more inmates, men and women, and re-evaluated their criteria for fire crew eligibility. They continue to accept those who have committed crimes as serious as assault with a deadly weapon, but take only those with 15 rather than 24 months until parole.

The thinking, Brown said, is that inmates with little time left are less likely to try to escape.

To join the fire crew, an inmate must prove that he or she can be trusted, Carbajal said, although he cautioned that “there’s no camp that can say they have no escapes. . . . We usually put our best kids in the camp and we’ve been very, very successful with them.”

The purpose of the fire crew program, officials say, is to instill discipline and responsibility while teaching inmates a vocational skill that will make them more qualified than many others in what one prisoner called “the free world.”

An unarmed state Department of Forestry employee accompanies each 15-person crew. Before budget cuts last December, a Ventura School security guard also went with each crew.

The crews spent 165,000 hours last year clearing brush and weeds, chopping down trees, responding to fire calls statewide when needed, and fulfilling work requests from public agencies in the county, Brown said. At $6 an hour, that translates into $990,000 worth of public service, she said.

Many inmates don’t want to join the fire crews because the work challenges inmates physically and can be dangerous. However, if a prisoner is drafted into the camp, he or she has no choice but to go.

“Most individuals come into the program and they’re not excited about it because it’s really hard work,” said fire crew member Laura Stark, 22, of Oxnard. “But once they’re in a program, they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else . . . I like it because you stay in shape and you learn.”

Stark, convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, is the longest-serving member of the camp’s only female crew that fights fires. Another female crew, a new training unit, cannot go on fire calls until its members prove that they can handle it.

“Here, I’m treated like a firefighter,” Stark said this week during a lunch break. “I’m not just a number.”

Stark was paroled in September, 1991, took fire science classes at Oxnard College, but was back in camp six months later after violating parole. Proudly displaying her hands, calloused from working with tools, she says she plans to be a firefighter when she leaves the camp again in July.

Esterlene Jones, 20, of Oakland has come to enjoy the physical exertion.

“We hike. Sometimes they hike us so hard, we start crying,” she said, laughing. “It’s fun, but it’s hard work.”

Jones was convicted of robbery in March, 1989, and was released in May, 1991. She was sent back to the school on a parole violation three months later, and will be up for parole again in August. She said that she too wants to be a firefighter on the outside.

Other fire crew members such as Paul Meinhard, 18, of Van Nuys say firefighting gives him a thrill.

“It’s like adrenaline. It makes you get pumped up,” said Meinhard, who was convicted of burglary in January, 1991. “It’s like you against the fire.”

But Meinhard, unlike many of the others, has other plans for the future when he gets out next March.

“I kind of want to be a recording artist or a professional baseball player,” he said. “I like firefighting in here, it’s another thing I learn how to do. But as far as my actual career, I don’t think it will have anything to do with it.”