Inmates’ Spark of Hope

Even after serving time for carjacking, Jakiesha Smith could have an edge over other candidates seeking an entry-level position as a firefighter.

It’s not only because she is a woman who could improve diversity in most fire departments. Or an African American woman, for that matter.

It’s because 19-year-old Smith is experienced.

While serving a two-year term at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, Smith received training and is now working as a firefighter. She has done so well that she was appointed swamper, the highest-ranking position on the crew.

Last month, Smith was escorted by correctional officers to the Los Angeles Convention Center, where she took a test to become a city firefighter. Of 400 test takers, she was the fifth to finish the exam.

She hopes that when she is paroled next month to Los Angeles County, she will have a job as a firefighter awaiting her.

Smith and other young women throughout the state who have run afoul of the law are benefiting from the nation’s only fire camp for teenage and young female inmates.

Now in its eighth year, members of the California Youth Authority’s Crew Five at the correctional facility camp in Camarillo are undergoing rigorous training, preparing for the first big blaze in this year’s fire season.

The incentive behind Smith’s unwavering dedication goes far beyond her penchant for wearing khaki, flame-retardant jackets and pants and parading through mud swinging a Pulaski power tool.

Smith, like many fire camp inmates, is a mother. She arrived at the facility one-month pregnant. A doctor on the premises delivered the boy, who is now a toddler being raised by Smith’s mother in Los Angeles.

“I’ve got to keep focused on my job,” she said. “Not only do I want to give back to society, I want to be able to support my son.”

Female Wards Once Had Limited Options

Nine years ago, the idea of an all-woman team of firefighters met with strong resistance and skepticism.

At the time, a successful firefighting program was already in place for male convicts at the Camarillo facility. Female wards, ages 17 to 24, were then limited to training programs that involved mainly laundry, cooking or dog grooming.

“We believed the young women should be afforded the same opportunities as the young men,” Kate Thompson, then the Camarillo facility’s assistant superintendent, recalled.

Since about World War II, the California Department of Forestry has routinely trained male convicts to fight wildfires. A decade ago, the department began training adult women felons, who, like their male counterparts, respond to wildfires and other disasters throughout the state.

When a fire erupts, the inmates and wards are called into action. Accompanied by correctional officers and fire captains, they are taken to the blaze in a firetruck. They hike to the hot spot and begin the grueling task of “cutting line.”

Using heavy tools from chain saws to Pulaski and McLeod power equipment, they slash through thick brush and trees, creating a clear pathway around a fire. The purpose is to contain the blaze and prevent it from spreading. Crew members work around-the-clock until a fire is contained, sometimes camping out at a site for several weeks.

Prior to the Youth Authority’s fire camp effort in Camarillo, no agency in the nation had ever put teenage girls to the test.

“We had a series of meetings with officials at the Department of Forestry to discuss the possibility,” said Thompson, who moved on to become superintendent of the El Paso de Robles Youth Correctional Facility in Paso Robles. “They said they were already having a problem with getting the women through the training programs.

“They felt that females lacked adequate upper-body strength to do the job,” she said.

Before joining Crew Five, the women undergo physical training for one to three months. In part, they have to be able to lift a 50-pound barbell over their head 20 times, do six pull-ups, 25 push-ups and run a mile under 8 minutes, 30 seconds.

Stephen Heil, who runs the fire operation in Camarillo, said the biggest glitch in starting up the all-woman firefighting team had to do with a Youth Authority policy.

The policy prevented female wards from mixing with adult male inmates, a situation that sometimes crops up when crews from the Youth Authority and California Department of Corrections are sent to battle blazes.

After a new policy was put in place, Heil said, officials decided to give it a try. The program opened in May 1990, and the girls sprang into action a month later when the deadly Painted Cave fire in Santa Barbara County flared.

“It’s such a hard job and they’re doing very well,” Heil said. “A lot of it has to do with the fire captain. The captain has to be a good motivator to get the best out of the crew. One thing we’ve seen with Crew Five is they seem to have better team work than others during those 24-hour shifts.”

Charles Kubasek, the Youth Authority facility’s assistant superintendent the past three years, said the women’s performance has exceeded expectations.

“History has shown that the females sometimes surpass the males,” he said. “They’ve won an award for cutting the best fire line, and the girls in training sessions outshine the male crews. They seem to have more spirit and more enthusiasm than the males.

“They’re seen as underdogs,” Kubasek added. “There’s a feeling, ‘We have to prove ourselves and we will.’ ”

5-Mile Hikes With 30 Pounds of Gear

On one misty morning, members of Crew Five filed into a brick-red firetruck that would take them to the rugged terrain above Ojai. Fire Capt. Pat Easley parked at a gate near Valley View Road, and the girls began their circuitous 5-mile hike along the steep slopes of Nordhoff Peak.

The all-day training and conditioning sessions always begin with a hike. Dressed in firefighting gear, they each lugged about 30 pounds of equipment, food and water at a brisk pace up the dirt grade.

As the fog rolled in and it began to drizzle, the girls trailed each other in military fashion.

“Move it, keep your dime!” hollered Easley, who led the 13-member crew. The next member in line, Smith, yelled the same command to the girl behind her.

One by one, “Keep your dime!” echoed through the rocky bluffs.

Finally, the last woman was reminded to keep a distance of 10 feet from the person in front of her. Each crew member carried a tool with a long wooden handle that could whack someone walking too closely behind.

Susan Magni, 20, was the dragspoon, the second-highest ranking crew member who walks last in line to keep an eye on the others. She also offers encouragement during difficult hikes.

“Just tell your legs they have no choice, they must keep moving,” Magni said.

After a short lunch break, the crew made the final trek and began cutting a fire line.

Over the loud whir of chain saws and an occasional coo of a quail, the girls plowed through the solid mass of chaparral.

“Punch a hole right in the middle of it and move on in,” Easley told the cutters. After they cut the thick ironwood, sumac and scrub oak bushes, other crew members pulled the branches down to the bottom of the slope.

Less than two hours later, a 20-foot section of the hillside was bare.

“I’ve never been so dirty in all my life,” cracked one crew member. All were covered in black muck from their goggles to their boots.

“Good job, ladies, it looks great,” Easley announced. “Good team work. You cut as fast as the guys, I can tell you that.”

A Troubled Life and Wrong Choices

During the long hikes, Magni can’t help mull over her troubled life and try to make sense of why she continually made wrong choices.

Growing up in Lake Elsinore, she said she lived in a typical middle-class neighborhood. Her dad is a computer operator, her mother a senior loan officer.

As a child, she felt her older brother demanded most of her parents’ attention.

Because her brother was needy, she said she became fiercely independent. But her resentment grew, she said, until her anger eventually turned to rage.

With a group of friends, she started robbing liquor stores and gas stations. The group eventually started breaking into homes. After the crimes, she said, she didn’t give the burglaries another thought.

The day of her arrest, she and her friends had found a girl about Magni’s age in the home they entered. They brandished a gun, tied her and stripped duct tape across her mouth. A neighbor saw the youths hauling out furniture and called police.

Magni was behind the wheel of the getaway truck when police arrived. But it wasn’t until her lawyer told her she was facing a prison term that she felt a twinge of guilt.

“I looked at my dad, and he had his head in his hands,” Magni said. “He was crying. My dad never cries. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I made my father cry.’ ”

Now at the end of her 2 1/2-year sentence, Magni says she has matured. With her demanding duties as a firefighter, she said she has developed a strong work ethic.

“Something really clicked inside me,” she said. “You can’t go out and rob people anymore.”

She said she wants to pursue firefighting when she is paroled to Riverside County. She also wants to make her parents proud.

“I’ve hurt my mom and dad so bad,” she said. “I made them go through hell and they didn’t deserve it.”

A Scarred Hand Serves as a Reality Check

By contrast, La Vona Jones, 19, of Bakersfield had anything but a typical childhood. She was taken away from her mother and placed in a foster home when she was 3.

Child protective officials stepped in after her mother had rushed Jones to the hospital for a hand injury. The doctor became suspicious when he treated the toddler for severe burns on her left hand. Officials questioned Jones’ mother, who said the child had burned herself while washing her hands.

Officials determined otherwise. The injury was too serious, they said. They believed Jones’ mother, who was the only adult in the house, had held the girl’s hand in scalding water for a long period.

After a day of fire training, Jones pulled off her gloves and examined her badly scarred left hand.

“I look at my hand and it’s a reality check,” Jones said. “It makes me sad. I miss my mother.”

After living in foster homes and with relatives, Jones decided to return to her mother when she was 11. She said the abuse was so bad she almost immediately ran away. She finally left for good at 14.

She supported herself by selling cocaine, she said, mostly to fellow gang members. When a friend asked her for help robbing a store, she agreed.

“I think I was looking for love and affection, the things that my mom didn’t give me,” Jones said in the day room of the correctional facility, where other wards were watching a rerun of “Seinfeld” on television.

Jones said she and her friend pulled off the armed robbery, but Jones was arrested a day later at a room she was renting. During the robbery, her accomplice had called her by her moniker, Pretty Girl, which is also tattooed across the inside of her right forearm. Police quickly tracked her down.

Jones is eight months into a two-year sentence. Although she complains the male fire crews get more privileges than the girls, she said working as a firefighter has given her confidence for the first time in her life.

“I’m getting skills I never thought I would get,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t believe it. Me? A firefighter? Yeah, I’m a firefighter.”

Working outdoors reminds her how much she misses freedom.

“I’m out there breathing fresh air every day, air that’s not trapped in an institution,” she said. “So for that time I do feel free.”

Jones, who like the others wards participates in weekly counseling sessions, voiced her feelings with ease.

“Actually, I’m glad I got locked up,” said Jones, who is choir director at the facility’s Protestant church. “It gave me a break from the outside world and gave me time to find out who I really am.”

She said she wants to be a preschool teacher so she can give to children the kind of love she didn’t receive.

“If people think criminals can’t change, that’s a lie,” she said. “I’ve been able to find my goals. Now it’s a journey to get there.”

Another crew member, Jennifer Stillman, was celebrating her 19th birthday by baking herself a chocolate chip cake. A family member sent her the mix.

Receiving packages is one of the perks of firefighting. The 540 wards who are not male or female firefighters at the facility do not get that privilege.

Stillman was allowed into the program even though she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Normally, officials do not accept wards who have committed crimes such as murder or manslaughter.

But Stillman displayed maturity and remorse for her crime, officials said.

At the time of her arrest, Stillman was 16 and living with her family in Clear Lake in Northern California. She and her parents had been drinking one night when the three decided to go to a party.

Without a ride home, the trio began walking home. A man walked up to them and started harassing her, Stillman said. A fight ensued and Stillman joined in, beating the man in the back of his head with a wooden baseball bat. Her dad pulled out a switchblade and stabbed the man to death.

All three landed in prison. Stillman has served half of her three-year sentence.

The firefighting work, she said, has given her a different perspective on life. She is learning new skills, such as how to be disciplined. When she is released, she said, she plans to live with her grandmother in San Francisco, where she hopes to attend college.

“I used to be very impulsive,” she said. “I had a big mouth and I would cuss you out in a minute. Now I’m a lot more calm and polite to people. People see me changing too. Dang, yeah, I am changing! I’m not the same person I was before. And I like this person better.”

5 Crew Members Hired as Firefighters

Assistant Supt. Chuck Kubasek has watched dozens of young women transform their lives through the hard work and commitment the firefighting program requires.

Some have translated that work into jobs after their release.

Since the program began, five members of Crew Five have gone on to become firefighters across the state. Some employers never know their candidates have a criminal record.

When wards complete the institution’s program and receive an honorable discharge from parole, they can petition the court to have their records expunged.

But some fire departments know exactly who they are hiring.

“There are other employers who share our values that people do change,” Kubasek said. “They see that the individual is highly trained and has a record of being a good employee.”

In the case of Jakiesha Smith, Kubasek believes she will have a good chance for a job.

“She’s a very experienced, effective firefighter and one of the top, so there’s an advantage of hiring her. She’s an employee they won’t have to train.

“Some employers say there’s a pattern of maturity and responsibility and responsible behavior, so we’re going to take a chance on you,” he said.