The Abolitionist Labor Politics of California’s Incarcerated Firefighters
October 7, 2025
Thanks to Nathaniel Moore and the Freedom Archives for their help obtaining and licensing one of the images for this piece.
Amid the gut wrenching scenes of the Palisades and Altadena fires in January of this year, the world looked on as incarcerated firefighters rushed headlong into the flames. The perilous conditions facing these workers spurred conversations among celebrities and California residents alike about the ethics of the program and what it would mean to compensate them adequately. State legislators, taking note of such discussions, and are on track to implement AB 247 by January 2026, a bill that would increase the pay for incarcerated firefighters to the federally mandated minimum wage of seven dollars and twenty-five cents per hour while working on active fires, instead of the roughly one dollar per hour that they currently make. But despite the newfound concern about these workers’ wages in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires, the problems facing this workforce are anything but new. And as we enter an era characterized by more frequent and severe megafires, we need to understand the political position of the incarcerated workers upon whom we rely for mitigating and fighting them.
Incarcerated workers have been indispensable for California’s natural resource management—including in departments like Forestry (today known as CALFire), Transportation, Parks, and Wildlife—over the past century. Today, they find themselves trapped between the gargantuan California prison system and the rising tides of climate-induced disasters. Although recent discussions regarding the pay, benefits, and protections afforded to California’s incarcerated workers are certainly necessary, these workers have a history of articulating unique political demands themselves, stemming from their status as both prisoners and workers.
More than fifty years ago, for instance, thousands of incarcerated workers went on strike from their firefighting and forestry posts to demand improvements to their immediate conditions, the right to unionize, the closure of specific prisons, and the redistribution of private assets. These workers were the protagonists of a united struggle for worker power and prison abolition. Yet, despite their poignant articulation of the connection between these two movements, today these political struggles are widely understood as unrelated, if not oppositional.
Incarcerated workers receive time off their sentence for every day that they work in the Conservation Camp Program, as many Republicans are apt to note. Most incarcerated workers credit that benefit as their main motivation for “volunteering” for this grueling work. As prison sentences have become longer and prison conditions more overtly repressive amid the rise of mass incarceration, more incarcerated people see the Conservation Camp Program as their fastest way out of prison. However, once individuals pass through the physical and classroom training programs, they are unable to leave the program without forfeiting the “good time credit” that they accrued, thereby delaying their release date.
This essay sketches the distinct political and working conditions of incarcerated laborers in California fire and forestry by looking at moments of rupture in their labor relations, the political demands made by this class of workers, as well as the aftermath of punishment and political repression. Incarcerated workers have been the foundation of CALFire’s operations since 1946. They have organized for an alternate vision of both labor organizing and state resource management, and have fought an uphill battle for worker solidarity in some of the most degraded working conditions in the country. While these workers are rightly applauded for their heroism, what often gets overlooked is these workers’ political devotion and incisive vision for upending racial capitalism—the same system of racialized labor exploitation which has created these intertwined crises of mass incarceration, climate change, and wildfire that California grapples with today.
California Relies On Carceral Environmental Labor
Since the nineteenth century, carceral environmental labor has played a key role in enabling California’s natural resource extraction industries. Quietly negotiated between state agencies, incarcerated labor has been used for fire suppression, fire-hazard reduction, road construction, reforestation, stream clearance, game rearing, insect control, fish propagation, trail maintenance, and campground construction. As a 1961 report about the division of labor time between state agencies explained, “there is virtually an unlimited field of work which should be done by inmate labor to conserve and develop the state’s natural resources.”1California Senate Fact Finding Committee on Governmental Administration, Expanded Use of Prison Inmates in the Conservation Programs: Progress Report (Sacramento: Senate of the State of California,1961), available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102112568. Incarcerated workers have been set to work on this laundry list of tasks that are either too labor intensive, too dangerous, or too marginal to pay free labor to do .
Incarcerated workers were the cheap labor force that made California’s superior highways system possible. In 1880, incarcerated people were sent to Folsom Prison and forced to build a hydropower dam on the Folsom River, and to extract rock from the on-site Folsom granite quarry to be used to build state roads.2Shelley Bookspan, A Germ of Goodness: The California State Prison System, 1851–1944 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). The hydropower dam’s electricity was critical in the operation of the Folsom quarrying operation, as it enabled incarcerated workers to run the first state-owned rock crushing machine for concrete gravel, which was in high demand.
In 1969, workers in the Conservation Camp Program launched their own political network, inspired by radical organizers and Black revolutionaries who were gaining a foothold in California prisons in the 1960s…By 1971, incarcerated workers involved in the Afro-American History Culture Group were hosting regular study groups featuring Communist and socialist texts, like Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide.
In 1915, many regions were still left out of the state highway system, which hindered commercial trade and the expansion of automobile tourism to state parks like Yosemite. Lobbyists from the nation’s largest automobile club, based in Los Angeles, convinced Governor Hiram Johnson to institute a program for incarcerated workers to start building these cumbersome roads. The lobby specifically highlighted the importance of using free labor to build key stretches which would otherwise be “an economic impossibility,” as they were extremely labor-intensive roads and low on the priority list for the state Division of Highways.3“TO EMPLOY THE CONVICTS; California Has a New Road Law Relating to Prisoners,” New York Times, May 23, 1915, https://www.nytimes.com/1915/05/23/archives/to-employ-the-convicts-california-has-a-new-road-law-relating-to.html. This program operated for twenty-two years, during which time incarcerated workers built hundreds of miles of automobile roads, including fifty miles of Highway 1 on the Central Coast—a crucial section of Highway 101 in Mendocino County—and the first automobile accessible highway into Yosemite National Park through Mariposa County.4Milton Chernin, “Convict Road Work in California,” (PhD Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1937); Ward M. McAfee, “A History of Convict Labor in California.” Southern California Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1990): 19–40, https://doi.org/10.2307/41171510.
During World War II, the convict roads work program was transformed into a firefighting workforce called the Conservation Camp Program to maintain a standing firefighting force during the war. The Division of Forestry, newly formed and formalized after the creation of the Clar Plan of 1940, had an almost unimaginable workload and few paid staff. Incarcerated people became the primary workforce of this department’s massive fire suppression campaign. We now know that fire suppression policies led to a dearth of good fire–an indigenous practice of setting fires intentionally for land management and other cultural purposes—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which in turn has played a significant role in causing the megafire outbreaks that we are suffering from today. As more incarcerated people were placed in the Conservation Camp Program in the 1950s and 1960s, the scope of the work assigned to camp crews grew into a year-round hazard reduction, habitat restoration, and wildland firefighting workforce.5C. Raymond Clar, California Government and Forestry II; During the Young and Rolph Administrations (Sacramento: State of California, 1969); Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California,” Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (2009): 702–26, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/96.3.702; Lloyd Thorpe, Men to Match the Mountains (Craftsman and Met Press, 1972).
Throughout each iteration of carceral environmental labor, incarcerated workers have provided uncommodified inputs for key industries. Road construction was critical for natural resource extraction and cultivation—namely mining, agriculture, and oil—which represented 59.3 percent of the state’s total income at the start of the twentieth century. In the postwar period, these workers remediated habitats that had been destroyed by timber and mining companies, for recreation and public use. They carried out the bulk of the labor hours for Forestry’s aggressive fire suppression campaign, which has allowed for the growth of California’s total population, housing stock, and economic activity writ-large throughout the state. The labor of incarcerated workers was tremendously valuable for allowing other industries to penetrate deeper into California’s natural resources and to manage the aftermath of extractive sites, despite the difficulty of tracking the exchange value of public work and goods.6Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1951); Richard A. Walker, “California’s Golden Road to Riches: Natural Resources and Regional Capitalism, 1848-1940,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 1 (2001): 167–99, https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00238.
Strike! Huelga! Strike!
After several decades of laboring hard for little pay, incarcerated workers were fed up. Workers in the Conservation Camp Program kicked off a strike wave in 1971, borne out of two interlocking phenomena: all-time high labor hour outputs demanded by state agencies and a revolutionary network built by incarcerated workers in the Conservation Camp Program in response.
Between 1960 and 1971, total annual labor hours skyrocketed, as a result of more incarcerated people working in the camps and more labor being extracted per worker. The total number of hours worked by all incarcerated people in the Conservation Camp Program steadily rose from 2.98 million hours per year in 1959 to 6.83 million hours in 1967, where it continued to hover around 6 million hours per year until 1971. This was largely thanks to the efforts of Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown’s administration, which converted the loose network of prison forestry camps into a military style program. More than thirty camps with three massive prison training centers, known as conservation centers, held a total of 5,700 workers. At the same time, the average number of hours worked per person per day also increased from 5.1 hours in 1959 to 8.0 hours in 1968.7Division of Forestry, California Conservation Camp Program 1959-1972, State of California Resources Agency, Department of Conservation, University of California Berkeley Forestry Library, (1960–1972).
In 1969, workers in the Conservation Camp Program launched their own political network, inspired by radical organizers and Black revolutionaries who were gaining a foothold in California prisons in the 1960s. The first chapter in this network, called the Afro-American History Culture Group, was established at the Susanville Conservation Center and was followed up by the formation of four groups in nearby camps and centers. By 1971, incarcerated workers involved in the Afro-American History Culture Group were hosting regular study groups featuring Communist and socialist texts, like Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide. They were actively theorizing their own experience and forming coalitions with other groups inside their camps and centers, including La Raza Unida, the California Prisoners’ Union, and several organizations outside of prison were based in the San Francisco Bay Area like Connections, Glide Community Church, and the Soledad Brothers’ Defense Fund.8Letters held by the Freedom Archives in Berkeley document the meetings and structure of the Afro-American History Culture Groups and La Raza Unida. In regards to radical reading materials, Crystal Creek members wrote in 1971 letters requesting “Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide,” the Tricontinental, The Psychology of Fascism, and The Blue Notebook.
Courtesy of the Freedom Archives.
Finding a window of opportunity to organize themselves, these workers coordinated four strikes across Northern California camps and centers between April 1971 and October 1972. The first action took place at Susanville Conservation Center. All nine hundred incarcerated people in the facility participated in a hunger strike, and seven hundred of them also partook in work stoppages. This strike was a political response to the violence from guards against Black Panther Charles Bursey, who had become a leader of the Afro-American History Culture Group in the Susanville. After two full days of striking, prisoners held steadfast in their demand that the Superintendent, a new name for the warden, meet with the seven hundred striking workers. Later that afternoon, Superintendent William G. Black ordered guards to use force to move all incarcerated people back into their cells. Following this strike, Superintendent Black created the Conservation Camp Program’s first Inmate Advisory Council and promised to investigate the mismanaged Inmate Welfare Fund, though neither of these were central demands of the strike.9 “Strike! Huelga! Strike!” Anvil 1, No. 1 (June 1971); “Lively Encounter Restores Order to Susanville Facility,” Sacramento Bee, April 15, 1971.
The second strike took place in late Spring 1971 at Eel River Conservation Camp on the coast about sixty-five miles south of Eureka. A letter from the Crystal Creek Afro American Group mentions that there was a “Unity Day,” a commonly used code word for a work stoppage, in the late Spring of 1971.10Mchaguliwa and Mbaya, “Crystal Creek Afro-American Group to Connections,” (June 24, 1971), Freedom Archives (Box: Prison Inside Organizing, Folder: Afro-American Group Susanville-North Coast). In June 1971, several local newspapers noted that the incarcerated workers of Eel River Conservation Camp built a house for visiting families and began allowing seventy-two-hour family visits, which was likely a concession provided by camp officials to the striking workers.11Staff Correspondent, “Furniture-Materials Needed For Eel River Prison Camp,” Press Democrat, June 21, 1971, available at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/.
The third strike was several months later in August 1971 at Jamestown’s Sierra Conservation Center. Ten days after George Jackson’s takeover of a wing of San Quentin Prison and his subsequent death, “‘perhaps 70 percent of the camp’s 1100 inmates,” or 770 prisoners, refused to report for work at the Jamestown Sierra Conservation Center.12“Soledad Transfers End Sierra Work Stoppage,” San Francisco Examiner, September 1, 1971. After the one-day work stoppage ended, 24 prisoners were transferred to Soledad prison in retaliation.13“Soledad Transfers End Sierra Work Stoppage.” These strikes likely both included political content and took place during the fire season of 1971, meaning that incarcerated workers were leveraging their position as a critical workforce to win better visitation rights and show solidarity with the Black revolutionary prison movement in prisons.
By their fourth strike, incarcerated workers had significantly increased their capacity to organize and strike. On Monday, October 30, 1972, eight hundred of the nine hundred and fifty total prisoners staged a sit-down work stoppage at the Jamestown Sierra Conservation Center.14“800 Inmates Start Sit-Down at Sierra Center,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1972. On the third day of the strike, Wednesday, November 1, 1972, five hundred continued to strike and enunciated a long list of twenty-nine demands, including a law library, the removal of hair length restrictions, and better visiting and telephone protocols.15“18 Camp Inmates in Strike Moved to Soledad,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1972. The strikers held out against several rounds of transfers, with eighteen people transferred on November 1 and sixty-four more transferred on November 2. After the second round of transfers, forty-five prisoners remained on strike.16“Prison Camp Sitdown Strike Ends,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 1972. Much remains unknown about the outcome of this strike, but by gaining the attention of statewide newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, incarcerated workers had ratcheted up the intensity of the strike and the dedication of their ranks.
Workers had been pushed to the brink by the grueling environmental manual labor in higher demand than ever before between 1967 and 1971, and they responded loudly with work stoppages involving more than two thousand incarcerated people. These strikes were led by organizers in the Afro-American History Culture Group’s political networks and drew clear political lines between Black revolutionary politics, multiracial convict unity, and labor exploitation. The involvement of a majority of workers in these strikes meant that the labor organizers in Conservation Camps were building strong coalitions and mobilizing workers to take direct action.
The Organizing Goals of a New Political Class
As prison movements around the country were articulating the demands of incarcerated people in the 1960s and 1970s, incarcerated workers in the Conservation Camp Program began advocating for themselves from a distinct labor-centered and abolitionist political perspective. Incarcerated workers developed four organizing strategies through radical group study and coalitional organizing work in the preceding years, all of which informed their self awareness and their cleareyed assessment of the value of their labor. The first organizing strategy included demands related to immediate improvements to their condition, including an end to racist abuse by prison guards, the installation of law libraries, improved visitation protocols, and better food.17Dorothy Stevens-Roby, a Black woman who served as the director of human relations for the Department of Corrections described Susanville as, “‘one of the most racist institutions in the state’ — a place where ‘people are out front with their racial slurs.’”;Sigrid Bathen, “Susanville Strike: Prison Scenery Belies Ugliness,” Sacramento Bee, May 15, 1978. Without a doubt, these demands were central to alleviating the conditions that individual incarcerated people faced in this period, and they also aligned with protecting worker organizing in a collective sense, by securing rights to legal action, external oversight, and communication with people outside of prison.
The [incarcerated workers'] fourth organizing goal was the radical redistribution of private assets. This organizing goal was the product of time spent studying and observing the role of their labor— extracted by state forces and utilized by private landholders and timber operators to limit damage to their property.
The second organizing goal expressly related to labor protections for incarcerated workers; they demanded the state’s recognition of a union with collective bargaining, improved wages, and oversight over wage deductions. As part of the twelve demands published in radical newspapers during the 1971 Susanville strike, incarcerated workers outlined their demand for a union: “We demand that a convict union be established to secure the full payment of the money paid to the Department of Corrections by Forestry for convict labor.”18Black Panther Party, “Convicts of Susanville Unite! Statement to All Susanville Inmates,” Black Panther, April 17, 1971. Incarcerated people had caught wind of the fact that their labor was valued at several dollars per day and compensated at this rate between state agencies, yet they were only being paid fifty cents.
The third organizing goal was to close prisons. This goal was not made explicit in the first year of strike activity, but came above the surface in 1972. Upon his forced departure from the Crystal Creek Conservation Camp in June 1972, John X wrote a letter to the organization Connections, urging them to stay true to the political aims of the Afro-American History Culture Group. “My comrade, you must continue to educate (through your deeds and action) the many among the misinformed that look upon prisons as a place where monsters and madmen are stored and bring us closer together with our respective communities, and closer to our ultimate goal of abolishing prison forever.”19John X, “Crystal Creek Afro-American Group to Cathy Kornblith Connections San Francisco,” (June 24, 1972). Freedom Archives (Box: Prison Inside Organizing, Folder: Afro-American Group Susanville-North Coast). When it was announced that Susanville Conservation Center would be closing in December 1972, incarcerated workers celebrated the news with the back page of their newspaper jubilantly declaring, “NOTICE The Conservation Center at Susanville Will Officially Close July 1, 1973…1 down 12 to go —AS THE MOP FLOPS.”20 “Notice,” Mountaineer, December 1972; “Susanville Center Will Be Closed,” Sacramento Bee, December 8, 1972. At the time, the state of California had thirteen prison compounds, including the Jamestown and Susanville Conservation Centers. Upon the closure announcement, organized incarcerated people made their intentions to close all known prisons.
The fourth organizing goal was the radical redistribution of private assets. This organizing goal was the product of time spent studying and observing the role of their labor— extracted by state forces and utilized by private landholders and timber operators to limit damage to their property. In a letter dated September 1971 workers reported, “We have been gone for a few days to protect the corporate structure’s precious timber from the wrath of nature, perhaps I should be more realistic and say the people’s timber in escrow.” 21L. Wilson-Banks Mchaguliwa, Jr., and Lefty Lee Kinder Mbaya, “Crystal Creek Afro-American Group to Cathy Kornblith Connections San Francisco,” (September 20, 1971) in Freedom Archives (Box: Prison Inside Organizing, Folder: Afro-American Group Susanville-North Coast). Their reference to the “people’s timber in escrow” implied a plan for the redistribution of California’s natural resources, likely in line with the Black revolutionary movement in prisons at the time. What’s more, their analysis upended the state’s propaganda about extending “civil service” opportunities to prisoners, as they clearly did not view their forestry work as neutral community service, but instead as a battleground for the upheaval of the current order.
After more than two thousand people went on strike across these four sites in the Conservation Camp Program, prison officials raised the wages of incarcerated workers and banned political content from entering the camps. In 1971, for the first time in the program’s history, the wage was raised from fifty to sixty cents per person per work day.22 Bob Wells, “Conservation Camps Fill New Prison Need, ”Press Democrat, March 4, 1973, available at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/. In contrast to the increased wages, revolutionary newspapers were designated contraband literature in late 1971, which included those that prisoners had previously used to express political speech, like the Black Panther, Anvil, Berkeley Barb, and Berkeley Tribe. Corrections Director Raymond Procunier testified in a Congressional hearing that after August 1971, California prison officials limited the access of radical activists, like the coalition partners of the Afro-American History Culture Group, from communicating with prisoners.23US Congress, Revolutionary Activities Directed toward the Administration of Penal or Correctional Systems: Hearing before the House Committee on Internal Security (Washington DC: US Congress, 1973). The political repression faced by incarcerated workers intensified throughout the next several decades, meaning that explicit political discussions in Conservation Camps were pushed underground and have largely stayed that way since.
Incarcerated people have been the bedrock of California’s environmental labor force for the past century—hyperexploited, overexposed, and vulnerable to hazards inherent to this type of manual labor. Workers in the Conservation Camp Program have long been lauded for their bravery, but amidst today’s conversations of what incarcerated workers need and deserve, it seems like the possibilities for change are quite limited. To connect labor organizing with prison abolition, we must return to the theories and actions of the incarcerated workers who took up both struggles as one. These workers developed a distinct strand of abolitionist and proworker organizing, which they put into action during the work stoppages of 1971–72. These strikes illuminated the political consciousness that fueled their radical demands, and galvanized a wave of political repression in prison in the aftermath of the strikes. Both of these legacies bear down on today’s incarcerated workers, as they show up for work with tools in hand, ready for another day of hard labor. As one incarcerated organizer put it in April 1971, “the black convict must see the existential nature of his prison and convert it into opportunity…I pick up my axe. I check the clean steel blade and I return to my labor.”24Le Afrique Dale, “A Day’s Work,” Black Scholar 2, nos. 8–9 (1971): 47–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1971.11668617.