Rural Areas Increasingly Reliant on Imprisoned Emergency Responders
It is well known that several state prison systems use incarcerated firefighters. Lesser known is that many rural areas have become almost completely dependent on prisoners for emergency responders. In an essay published on April 15, 2024, a research professor at Texas A&M University argued that “incarcerated people have become increasingly embedded in local emergency response efforts as EMTs and firefighters” for two reasons: “the vulnerability of rural communities and vulnerability of the incarcerated workers.”
Just as the decline of rural communities accelerated in the last half of the 20th century—driven by job losses, especially in manufacturing and mining—the U.S. went on a prison-building spree. Many new lockups were cited in rural areas to staunch the employment declines. But with so many people gone, the tax base shrank, starving communities of funds to pay emergency responders. There weren’t enough volunteers left to staff the empty positions, either. So prisoners were put to work, filling the vacant slots.
However, according to J. Carlee Purdum of Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, the result has been resentment all around. Taxpayers in urban areas object to subsidizing prisoners to staff emergency response positions in rural areas. The remaining volunteers in those areas distrust the prisoners they are expected to work with. The prisoners, who are promised on-the-job training, discover only much later that the barriers to entry they will face getting one of these jobs after prison are sky-high.
Then there are the risks prisoners face while doing the jobs. Purdum notes that some 200 Georgia prisoners in a firefighting and EMS program must sign a waiver releasing the state’s Department of Corrections from liability if they get hurt on the job—in which case they aren’t eligible for worker compensation benefits, either. Prisoners must also wait five years after release before applying for a similar paid job. However, they probably won’t get an offer from the rural agencies they’ve been called on to help while imprisoned; those small communities can’t afford more staff, which is why they use prisoner labor in the first place.
California has taken a step to balance this topsy-turvy situation, allowing prisoners in its firefighting program to apply for expungement of their criminal records after release, which makes it possible for them to be hired as firefighters. Better still would be ending prison slavery, along with the many ways it distorts the labor market outside prison walls. At the very least, residents of states like Georgia would be forced to reckon with the shortage of paid emergency responders in rural areas, rather than tossing prisoners into the fire.
Source: The Conversation
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