COVER STORY : Firefighting Felons : Female Prisoners Battle Blazes, Clear Away Tinder and Gain Self-Esteem While Serving Out Their Sentences at Malibu’s Fire Camp 13

After firefighters finished dousing the massive San Luis Obispo County brush fire last month, homeowners heaped praise on their soot-covered saviors.

The residents may not have known, however, that their heroes included 97 convicted felons, all of them women, from Malibu’s Fire Camp 13.

The Malibu camp houses nonviolent female prisoners who have chosen the hard labor of firefighting--typically the preserve of males--rather than serve their time in a cramped cell at the California Institute for Women at Frontera.

For the women, that made the residents’ gratitude all the more welcome.

“Giving us the thumbs up and saying, ‘Good work,’ made me feel really good about myself,” said Cathy Andrews, a 41-year-old serving time for petty theft. “I felt like I really contributed to something. It’s not an experience that I had out there (outside prison). . . . My only regimen was getting up in the morning and getting more drugs and more drugs.”

Fire Camp 13, high above Malibu in remote Encinal Canyon, is run jointly by the Los Angeles County Fire Department and the state Department of Corrections. There are three such camps for women in the state and 35 for men.

State officials say the camps--with a total population of 4,000--could help ease overcrowding in the California corrections system. Overall, there are now about 8,000 female prisoners statewide, nearly four times as many as 10 years ago. That compares to 117,000 male prisoners, about three times more than in 1984.

But the main asset of the camps, officials say, is that they contribute to the inmates’ rehabilitation.

“We’ve found that the camps provide inmates with a means to improve their social habits and work ethics,” said Bill Gengler, a California Department of Corrections spokesman. The inmates, he added, “work as a team . . . and raise self-esteem.”

The camps’ mission of using inmate labor for firefighting is very much in evidence this year at Fire Camp 13. The women have been sent to 40 fires this year, three times as many as last year--all before the fire season’s official start date of September, camp officials say. The worst blaze so far this year was the fire in San Luis Obispo County, which charred more than 48,000 acres and consumed 37 homes.

For camp residents, the training is every bit as demanding as the firefighting.

The women, including former housewives, secretaries and store clerks convicted of nonviolent crimes such as check forgery or drug trafficking, begin their morning workouts with a grueling run and a hike in the mountains. They race along trails with names such as “agony.”

After such heart-pounding physical tests, the women usually clear brush--swinging axes, hacking with heavy Pulaskis (a grubbing tool) and guiding snarling chain saws through the gnarled wood. Prison wages are $1.45 to $3 a day, enough to maintain what appears to be an inmate-wide cigarette habit--though smoking on the job is not allowed.

For the 100 women who inhabit the camp, home is a bed-lined barracks with lockers, metal-frame beds and gray wool blankets. There are TV rooms and a mess hall. But there are few of the most oppressive features of a prison. No bars. No locks on the doors. No guard towers--not even a gate at the camp’s entrance.

Seven informal head counts are taken every day. There has been only one attempted escape--in the late 1980s, according to the camp commander, Lt. Scott Little, who added that the woman was quickly caught. Women rarely try to escape because most have children and are reluctant to risk more jail time, he said.

Though the camp’s primary aim is to benefit society and save taxpayer dollars, some inmates find themselves transformed emotionally--as well as physically--by the experience.

In at least 11 instances, parolees have landed firefighting jobs. Another parolee got a job with the county Parks and Recreation Department at Leo Carrillo State Beach. A number of women who will soon be released from Camp 13 say they have filed job applications with state, federal or local firefighting agencies.

“With something like this, we’re adapting to society,” Andrews said as she moved huge pieces of dead brush down a steep hillside. “When you leave prison, you’re just thrown back in society. This gives you self-worth.”

The women, chosen from the prison population’s best-behaved, are taught by 10 Los Angeles County firefighting specialists. They are separated into five, 14-member crews. Like male firefighters, they learn to cut a three-mile fire line in just three days, donning standard firefighter gear that includes blue jeans, a T-shirt, a long-sleeved work shirt and a pair of three-pound, calf-high work boots.

Some are proud veterans of the Nov. 2 Calabasas/Malibu fire, in which 350 homes were damaged, 35,000-acres were burned and three people were killed.

“During the Malibu fires, the girls not only showed themselves, but they showed me how much more endurance they had than I thought they had,” said Tom Benton, a firefighter specialist who runs a camp crew.

“(During) one stretch we were up for 30 hours,” he added. “We (burned brush in) Old Topanga Canyon ahead of the fire (to deplete the fuel supply). We checked on homes and cut six-foot fire lines along the edge of the flames.”

Firefighting specialist Roark Paschall, called Mr. P by his crew, says there are some differences in the performance of males and females.

“What a man can do in two swings takes a woman twice as many,” he said. “But women cut cleaner, better fire lines because they are meticulous.”

On a recent trip out to clear dense brush from hills behind Coastline Drive near the Pacific Palisades, the blue-clad women from Fire Camp 13 piled out of half a dozen red firetrucks in 90-degree heat and hiked up a steep hill behind some houses.

They formed a line that snaked from the top of the hill to a truck parked on the street below, then passed large branches from trees and bushes down to a woman operating a chain saw. The woman sliced through the masses of wood, reducing them to manageable pieces that were then piled into a truck for removal.

Careful to pick up any twigs or branches that fall in their tracks, the women--who have been given such nicknames as Lucky, Kool-Aid and Thumbelina by foremen--urge each other to keep pace.

“I am learning something from the system that I can take out with me,” said LaTonya Blackburn, 28, as she passed a huge piece of dead manzanita over her head to the next woman in line. “You go out every day and you are not locked up. . . . There is more freedom.”

Blackburn said that, since entering the camp, she has become physically fit and “spiritual.” But she added, referring to the work: “I also never want to do it again.”

Up the line from Blackburn, stood Andrews, breathless from exertion, her hair pulled up in her helmet and her face smudged with dirt.

“Mr. P is one of the best,” Andrews said during a break in the brush hauling. “It’s a working relationship we have. They’re the bosses, we’re their employees. . . . I’ve been to prison before, and before I’d say, ‘I’m never coming back.’ But I never really meant it. Now I say it and I know I can do those things (necessary) to stay out of prison.”

If there was an oft-repeated sentiment from the dirt-specked women, it was that the intense labor is a cure for recidivism.

“They say the state of California doesn’t have rehabilitation centers,” quipped Teri Williams, who stood near the end of the line. “Quite frankly, this is rehabilitation. Doing hard labor, risking your life. . . . Prison is like a vacation compared to here.

“Let me put it this way, I came in wearing size-36 jeans,” she said. “Now I am wearing a size 30. And that is in five months.”

She added: “You don’t want to go back to prison once you get in camp. You can see the kind of work we do. . . . Why would I want to do this ever again for almost no pay?”

After experiencing Fire Camp 13, some women say that they would have preferred the less strenuous prison life.

“I could make the same amount of money sewing boxers in prison, about $100 a month,” said Ethel Miranda, 34, who was convicted of robbery. “Your can get comfortable there. (Here) it’s physically harder.”

The camp, which became a women’s camp in 1985, is jointly funded through the county forester and fire warden and by the state Department of Corrections. The other two fire camps for women in the state are in San Diego County, where camp lore has it that labor and workouts are less strenuous.

The fire camps were created when an equal rights court order required that California prisons give female inmates the same training opportunities as men.

Thanks to the low-cost inmate labor, Fire Camp 13 saved state taxpayers nearly $900,000 in 1993-94, according to state corrections officials. The cost to house an inmate at the Malibu camp are about $12,000 annually, compared to $20,000 at the California Institute for Women at Frontera.

The recidivism rate of men and women who serve their time in the camps--39.1%--is only about one percent lower than that of high security prison inmates, according to state corrections officials.

But such statistics do little to dampen the enthusiasm and optimism that seem to be the norm among correctional officers and firefighter specialists in charge of Fire Camp 13. Benton, called “Boss” by his crew, takes great pride in his crew’s achievements and clearly believes that the camp can change the women’s lives.

“I feel very good about our camp,” he said recently. “Instilling them with a positive attitude, that is the unwritten part of our program. . . . So many of these girls come from abusive homes and go out and become baby machines and get the s--- kicked out of them . . . running drugs for some idiot. After our program, they realize they don’t have to take it. They can hold a 9 to 5 job.”

Last week, the crew foremen and corrections officers expressed high hopes for Debbie Oberlin, a camp success story as far as most of them were concerned, as she was released.

The 30-year-old inmate, who was convicted of forgery, spent 10 months in camp, working her way up from the bottom of the fire line pecking order to “drag spoon”--the crew member who gives orders and looks out for crew safety. Among female prisoners, her position was second only to the “Swamper,” who serves as the foreman’s primary assistant.

“I’ll never come back again,” Oberlin said as she waited on a camp picnic bench for her mother to pick her up.

She said she had filed job applications with two firefighting agencies.

“I’m getting out of here and I am going to try and get a job with a (firefighting) hot shot crew in San Bernardino. I worked hard. . . . In base camp, when you are fighting fires, you sleep on the ground, showers are three minutes, it’s not even like being human. . . . Now I know I can do anything.”