Inmates Earn Respect in Line of Fire

The Marple fire may have been one of the season’s biggest, but Carolyn Steinhoff wasn’t impressed.

“This is a bad fire for me. It’s boring,” said Steinhoff, a California state prison inmate and firefighter who was taking a lunch break with fellow inmates in the blackened hills above Castaic Lake this weekend.

For Steinhoff, 27, a “good fire” is one like the California Highway 58 blaze this season. She and her crew worked for 36 hours at a stretch, delirious on their feet. “You get a rush from it,” she said. “You don’t even feel the heat.”

Steinhoff, a peppy former drug dealer who was coated with sweat and dirt as she worked, is one of 564 state prison inmates helping to fight the Castaic fire. Inmates comprise 25% of the firefighters deployed on the blaze.

For 50 years, such crews have been quietly trained and put in the field by the California Department of Forestry and local fire departments, working with the state Corrections Department.

The state’s 4,000 inmate firefighters are a critical work force for the Forestry Department and also provide backup on floods and other emergencies. Often, they make up half the firefighters responding to rural brush fires, working alongside civilian crews in the heat of battle. In the last decade, three have died on the job, said Lt. Mack Reynolds, a corrections spokesman.

For inmates, the work--”dirty, hot and dangerous” in Reynolds’ words--is both punitive and electrifying.

Many have never done anything like it. During Steinhoff’s first fire, “I thought I was going to die. But I was laughing the whole time,” she said. “I like it. I love it. . . . But I hate it here, too.”

The inmates live at 35 men’s camps and three women’s camps throughout California. They get at least three weeks’ training before being deployed, and training continues once they are firefighters, as do the grueling workouts.

The inmates are carefully selected for physical fitness and good behavior, and they do not include murderers, sex offenders “or anyone who would be inappropriate in a camp environment,” said Reynolds.

Drug offenses and theft were the most common crimes committed by those interviewed on the Marple fire lines.

The program saves money because keeping such inmates in conservation camps is cheaper than keeping them in prison. But also, there’s the hope that inmates will learn cooperation and not break off into hostile packs as they do in prison, said Reynolds.

The crews are competitive. Each boasts of its superiority over the others. And although there are tensions, inmates say the worst arguments are about people not pulling their weight--something seldom seen inside a prison.

“Some people just can’t hang out here,” said inmate Gary Shoemaker of Riverside, sentenced for drug possession. “They have an I-don’t-care attitude and they don’t do any work. Well, they can just go back on the bus.”

Shoemaker is a member of a crew nicknamed “The Hogs,” a handle its members clearly delight in. The Hogs agree that being assigned to a fire crew was bad enough to make them not want to return. But they also displayed a certain swagger, like recruits out of boot camp.

Their esprit de corps surprised Forestry Department Fire Capt. Norman Howell when he was assigned to lead inmate crews on forest fires. At first he was concerned by the idea of “20 inmates on a fire line with chain saws and axes, all hiking behind me.”

“But then you learn they have a lot of pride. . . . Once they get working as a unit, they can go against any hand crew in the state,” he said.

Although inmates work under the command of firefighters on the job, corrections officers accompany them to each new encampment and are called to the scene of any disciplinary problems.

Reynolds said such problems most often occur with inmates “who get totally beat and tired and refuse to work.”

There have been escape attempts, he said, but none that he knows of was successful. Earlier this year, a small group of runaways fled from a fire line in Northern California and were out for a week before being apprehended, he said.

Some inmates, though, have other goals in mind.

Steinhoff, for instance, chose fire-crew duty over a program that would have allowed her to serve her time with her 2-year-old daughter, she said. Rather than allow the child to grow up in prison, “I thought, if I’m going to do time, I might as well make it a career,” she said. “I plan to continue this once I’m out.”

A few inmates enter firefighting professions when they leave the system, Reynolds said.

“It’s really opened my eyes,” said Tara Parker, a 26-year-old Ridgecrest mother of two whose previous job experience consisted of waiting tables and selling drugs. “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. You’re always asking yourself, ‘Can I do this?’ Then you just do it. . . . I know I can do something else now.”