California and the West : Firefighting Grueling but Rewarding for Inmates : Corrections: In battling blazes, state relies heavily on prisoners, who get a chance to help the community--plus enjoy better food.

With a wall of flame about to engulf him and his crew, Joe Hendrick had to wonder what strange twist of fate had led him to the smoky, arid patch of earth in Riverside County where his life and those of 16 fellow firefighters seemed to balance on a simple shift of the wind.

They had been clearing a fire line downhill through heavy scrub oaks, chain-sawing hastily through thick brush, trying to choke the raging wildfire when the wind suddenly changed direction. In an instant, Hendrick and his compatriots found themselves on the wrong side of the flames.

“It came real close,” said Hendrick, recalling his introduction two summers ago to California’s seasonal fire wars. “We had to run through the wall of fire to get through.”

Hendrick was back on the front line in Riverside County last week, this time near Idyllwild, joining 4,000 other inmates battling wildfires across the state.

It wasn’t very long ago that the former carpenter from Palm Springs was tending another conflagration--a raging addiction to methamphetamines that had him stealing and selling merchandise for drug money. Convicted on five counts of burglary in 1994, Hendrick was sentenced to 11 years in the state prison at Chino.

There he heard about the Department of Corrections’ firefighter program. Here was a chance to reduce his sentence, escape the gray walls of prison and earn the princely sum--for a convict--of $1 an hour.

Prisoners make up the largest portion of the California Department of Forestry’s statewide firefighting effort. Inmate units also work with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Like Marines storming a beachhead, Hendrick and other prisoners are the first to go in, the ones who do the grunt work, the grueling, dangerous removal of surface vegetation on a fire line.

Their job is to stop a fire head-on by removing trees, grass and weeds, scraping the soil down to the bare earth, a swath anywhere from 4 to 15 feet wide and miles and miles in circumference. They use chain saws and shovels and other tools.

Last week, 159 inmate crews were deployed across California, along with 23 more crews assigned to Los Angeles County. During peak fire season, inmates work 12-hour shifts, sleeping four to six hours a night, barely squelching one wildfire before being whisked to another.

When inmates arrive at a staging area, their behavior is strictly supervised by corrections officers. “They don’t mingle,” said Walt Prather, deputy chief for conservation camp operations in the Forestry Department. Fraternization with other firefighters is forbidden by state law.

But Prather said the regulations don’t necessarily chafe. “They’re having more contact with humanity in the job than they ever did behind the walls, and they protect that,” he said. “They want to stay in camp.”

Besides, there are perks. Inmate firefighters get two sumptuous meals a day and a bag lunch. On Monday night, convict crews returned from a fire line near Idyllwild to a dinner of barbecued pork ribs, beans, corn bread, salad and cherry pie.

“Fire food” was just one reason Joseph Johnson wanted to be a firefighter. The 39-year-old inmate from San Diego sounded a theme common to convict firefighters: “It teaches you discipline and teamwork. It teaches you about life. You learn to get along, that there’s more out there than what got me incarcerated. It opens your eyes to a lot of the goodness in the world.”

Rehabilitation is an unstated goal. Quasi-military in its ethos, the program attempts to break down racial and cultural barriers and build a cohesive esprit de corps.

For Brenda Hansen, it is a conscious path to redemption. A recovering drug addict, she had been collecting warrants for writing bad checks from Los Angeles to Stockton when she decided to turn herself in.

Remanded to the California Institution for Women in Frontera, Hansen, 35, was endorsed for the firefighter program and passed the rigorous physical and classroom demands. Last week’s Pine fire near Idyllwild was her first, and she had yet to see action in the field. She found herself working on the mess line, serving up ribs, but itching to get to the fire line.

“It makes me feel better about my life to have done something like this,” she said. “It makes me feel like I’m giving something back to the community that I’ve taken from.”

Inmates began fighting fires for purely practical reasons during World War II, when the military call-up depleted the California Conservation Corps and the state became desperate for replacements.

Today there are no conscious efforts made to teach values, said corrections Lt. Mack Reynolds. “It seems like that’s just built-in. These people have to work as a team,” he said. “Their own survival depends on it. They come in and have that bravado, that stereotypical convict attitude. In a couple of weeks you can see the transformation, and it’s remarkable.”

Reynolds said it costs $12,000 to $14,000 per year to house an inmate in a fire camp, compared to $21,600 a year in prison. Inmates live year-round at the Forestry Department’s 159 camps, some of which are near prisons. When not fighting fires, they train, work on conservation projects, clear fire hazards, even build Little League diamonds.

Admission to the program is highly selective. Violent criminals or sociopaths need not apply. “These are people who are in for drug and alcohol abuse, for minor property crimes, most of which were done because of their support of their drug habit,” Reynolds said.

Perhaps because of the selective screening, inmate firefighters have less recidivism than the average prisoner: A recent study found that 55% of fire camp inmates return to prison after parole, compared with 67% for the general prison population.

For Hendrick, the fire camps offered a place to contemplate his life--and plan a new future. He is up for parole in October and has lined up a job as a telephone lineman. “The work is so hard and sometimes you’ll go for a straight 24 hours,” he said. “You’ll be so tired that you work yourself into a meditative state of mind. And you have plenty of time to focus . . . on where you went wrong and what you could do to change things.”