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Firefighting is grueling work — 24-hour work days, backbreaking labor, and of course, the heat. It’s no different for incarcerated firefighters, who are responsible for nearly half of the emergency hours spent combatting California’s wildfires.
Once they leave prison, many former firefighters struggle to find work, including at California’s firefighting department, Cal Fire.
On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that would help improve the job prospects for formerly incarcerated firefighters. The measure, Assembly Bill 2483, by Assemblymember Sade Elhawary, a Los Angeles Democrat, will standardize the credentials that incarcerated firefighters receive when they leave prison and give them priority in hiring for certain entry-level positions.
“Sometimes folks didn’t get any paperwork at all, coming home,” Elhawary said, in an interview with CalMatters. If formerly incarcerated firefighters did get a credential, she added, “it was just kind of like, ‘Here’s the paperwork, good job,’” with little consideration for what employers actually wanted to see.
By 2028, the bill will give formerly incarcerated firefighters credentials that match the requirements for entry-level jobs at Cal Fire. The positions are a pathway to meaningful work, a six-figure income and a state pension.
Elhawary introduced a similar bill last year, which failed to pass through a committee. One of the differences, she said, was that this time, Royal Ramey, the chief executive of the nonprofit Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, was more involved in negotiations surrounding the bill.
Ramey knows Cal Fire. While incarcerated in 2013, he was on the front line of the massive Rim Fire, which burned more than a quarter of a million acres of the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park. Like many Cal Fire firefighters, he worked around the clock, sometimes more than 24 hours, clearing flammable or hazardous debris. He was often exhausted, he said.
Still, for those in prison, firefighting is a chance to learn skills and escape the monotony of incarceration. Under a law Newsom signed last year, it also pays substantially better than other prison jobs.
“It changed my life,” Ramey said. “At first it was grueling and it sucked, but I embraced it. Once I fell in love with it, I wanted to pursue it as a career.” He left prison in 2014 with a certificate of completion from his firefighting program, but said he was reluctant to show it to any employers out of shame that a hiring team would recognize he had been in prison.
Instead, he enrolled in the fire program at Victor Valley College in Victorville. “I just wanted to show that I went to a regular academy, you know, nothing that’s associated with being incarcerated,” he said. After working for the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire, he founded the nonprofit that worked with Elhawary to pass the bill.
Elhaway said this year’s bill was successful in part because Ramey helped her negotiate with the Cal Fire union, which opposed the bill last year. The previous bill created a hiring quota for formerly incarcerated firefighters, she said. This year’s bill only gives them a hiring preference but no job guarantee.
Ramey said that preference is still helpful because it minimizes the stigma formerly incarcerated applicants already feel. “The bill tells incarcerated firefighters that their hard-earned experience counts.”
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