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They've dug fire lines and cut trees. They've hustled families to safety and wielded garden hoses in hopes of saving homes.
They're the unsung heroes in fighting Southern California's wildfires -- and they're convicted felons.
"We save million-dollar homes for a dollar an hour," said Ricky Frank, 33, doing a 10-year stretch for theft. "You get to help people. It's better doing this than being locked up."
More than half of the state's 3,800 full-time wildland firefighters are prison inmates earning $1 an hour as they work off sentences for nonviolent crimes such as theft and drug possession. About 2,150 offenders -- either minimum security wards of the California Youth Authority or adults sentenced to the California Department of Corrections -- have been out battling the flames.
"We wouldn't be half the fire department we are now without them," said Karen Terrill, forestry department spokeswoman. "I could tell you stories that would bring tears to your eyes."
The convicts usually are out of sight -- as they were Sunday, laying more than a mile of hose, cutting fire lines and grubbing stubborn pockets of flame with shovels, rakes, pickaxes and hoes.
On the day the fire in San Bernadino County flared into a wind-whipped monster, however, residents there caught a rare glimpse of the prisoners in the unusual role of trying to protect houses.
The inmate crews are neither trained nor equipped for fighting house fires. But a 28-inmate strike team happened to be one of the first to arrive. They grabbed garden hoses and borrowed chain saws from homeowners. Burglars and thieves risked their lives to rescue prized possessions from doomed homes.
"The ceilings and light fixtures were coming down around us. You're wondering if you'll have to go out a window" to escape, said Greg Welch, 34, serving seven years for selling drugs. "It was chaos."
The homeowners didn't know that the firefighters dressed in bright orange were inmates.
One family asked crew members back for dinner -- an invitation they had to decline. Another family spotted them leaving a restaurant days later and rushed to thank them.
Another night, "a guy and his wife just drove up and handed us about a hundred hamburgers. That was pretty cool," recalled convicted burglar David Townsend, 34. "They treated us just like another human, which is nice."
The state began using inmates to do roadwork in 1915, and opened its first temporary inmate fire camps during World War II. The program now has 4,100 inmates in 38 conservation camps: 33 operated by the forestry department, five by Los Angeles County. Three of the camps -- two state and one county -- are for women.
"There's nothing charitable going on here," Terrill said. "These guys get the same training, equipment and do the same work as a regular crew."
When they're not fighting fires for $1 an hour, they're earning as little as $1.40 a day cleaning up parks, rebuilding trails, or making or renovating children's toys. But every day they work, they get two days off their sentence.
"It knocks a year off my time. You can't beat it. It's better than sitting around prison," said Allen Preslar, 53, serving a seven-year drug sentence.
The inmates perform "lousy, backbreaking, very hard work," said John Peck, who manages the Corrections Department's conservation camp program.
Yet, often for the first time in their lives, they're forced to work together as a team, to respect and obey authority, and are rewarded with real, measurable accomplishment.
"We're trying to do something to save taxpayer money, we're trying to do good quality work, we're trying to get these guys to see how good it feels when you're not on the street corner selling drugs," Peck said.
Violent criminals, sex offenders and escape risks aren't eligible. Those selected for the program generally have short sentences remaining, so there's an incentive not to flee or cause trouble, which could earn a longer term or a transfer back behind bars.
Peck and Terrill tell the story of a convict crew that was ready to pull back from a dangerously explosive 1993 fire in Malibu when they spotted a family trapped atop a steep ridge.
"These inmates, making a buck-an-hour, formed a human chain to get these people down the hill," recounts Terrill. Seconds after all were safe, the hillside erupted in flame.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press.
4,000 of the front line firefighters are convicted felons presently serving sentences with the California Department of Corrections. Trained as firefighters in state forestry camps, these inmates are paid one dollar an hour to risk their lives suppressing wildfires. Additional firefighters are provided by the California Youth Authority and the local jail system. Under other conditions, politicians and their media acolytes would be advocating longer sentences, less rehabilitation and more Spartan living conditions for these men.
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