Colorado Prison Inmates Fight Wildfires For $6 A Day

CANON CITY, CO – By Alex Burness for The Colorado Independent. The firefighters awaken by 4:30 a.m. The forest is dark, but even here, miles from the blaze, they can smell smoke.

There are 20 on this team, the youngest 23, the oldest 46. They have worked together since late last year. They eat breakfast at their campsite, then head to a dawn briefing with the other crews working the fire. They go over maps and roads and the day’s weather forecast, and by 8 a.m., they’ll have strapped into gear and loaded up for what could be a two-hour hike. They lug chainsaws and axes, 40-pound water bags and 50-pound backpacks up to wherever they’ve been assigned, then spend the day clearing brush and building fire lines — hot, brutal work.

Twelve hours later, they will hike back to camp and sleep for about six hours, then get up and do the same thing the next day, and the day after that, for up to two weeks at a time.

When their deployment is done, they return to Cañon City and the place they have been living for past months or years — a prison cell in a small, minimum-security building amid a sprawling 5,700-acre state penitentiary campus.

Read more in The Colorado Independent

From left, inmate firefighters Alex Smitley, Joredan Quigley and Patrick Miller are seen during a work shift Aug. 15 at the Cañon City prison complex. (Photo by Alex Burness)