Labor, slave? indentured? coerced?

[xoxoxoBruce]

You've probably seen some reference to the "Bully" Fire that's been tearing up northern California. I was surprised to learn of the 2,000 firefighters battling that blaze, 900 are prisoners of the CA Department of Corrections making $2 a day.

They are part of a group of 4,000 "low level offenders" who volunteer for this duty rather than stay in a cell.

There are guards at the base camp, but you won’t see guns, truncheons or barbed wire. On-site warehouses and large white makeshift tents, cooled with fans and air conditioners, are sleeping quarters. There’s a medical tent used by both professional firefighters and inmates. Most here are being treated for poison oak.
Then there’s the food: it’s hearty, to keep the inmates fueled for the rough work. Base camps and fire camps like these are where the inmates will do nearly all of their time. When they aren’t fighting fires they do community work, like building a flood barrier or setting up a park for an ice cream social. Once they’re in the program they never spend a night in a prison facility.

That sounds like a fair deal for the inmates, however look at the flip side. The state is getting a lot of dirty, difficult, dangerous work for cheap, which like a good deal for tax payers. But many of these "low level offenders" are locked up on bullshit charges in the first place, couple of joints, fight in a bar, pissing off a cop.

The program is called, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Conservation Camp program. It sounds like a good deal for the state and prisoners, but what happens in the unlikely case of the labor supply slowing down. The state still wants cheap labor, so they would have to use higher risk prisoners... or would they.

The state still has the option of locking up people on bullshit charges, even trumped up charges, plus there's a growing debtors prison movement across the country.

But this kind of abuse, coerced labor, surely couldn't happen in the land of the free and home of the brave. Anyway, it only happens to poor people, or colored people, or immigrants, or...