Here's how fire season works in California: developers build luxury homes in areas that have burned multiple times before. The public pays billions to protect these private investments— $3 billion in federal firefighting costs alone in 2018. And when the flames come? The state sends in imprisoned people to risk their lives fighting fires for pennies in a system that can only be described as modern-day slavery. It's so perfectly dystopian it would seem heavy-handed if you wrote it as fiction.
Malibu: Where Luxury Meets Literal Fire
Take Malibu, the wildfire capital of North America and possibly the world. Since 1970, five major firestorms have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unfortunate homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation. Yet the development continues: patches of Malibu coastline have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930, but the rebuilding never stops – bankrolled in part by taxpayers who cover the costs of suppression and recovery. It’s like a bizarre game of architectural chicken with nature.
The kicker? The system is designed to keep this cycle going, with taxpayers footing the bill. According to Mother Jones, the federal government has spent billions to address the aftermath of fires—money that often goes to bailing out communities and rebuilding infrastructure in risky areas. FEMA alone spent $94.3 million in aid after the Carr Fire in Shasta County. In 2018, wildfire suppression cost over $3 billion—nearly five times the inflation-adjusted amount spent two decades earlier. The U.S. Forest Service’s budget tells the story: firefighting expenses rose from 16 percent of its total budget in 1995 to 52 percent in 2015, and they’re projected to reach 67 percent by 2025. The agency has effectively transformed into a firefighting organization that dabbles in forestry! We’re literally burning through money—mostly to protect homes that probably shouldn’t have been built in the first place.
The Price of Fire
California’s wildfires shatter lives, disproportionately affecting those with the least to begin with. Farmworkers, service workers, and caretakers often lose not just their homes but their jobs, community ties, and the fragile stability they’ve worked so hard to build. Rebuilding isn’t just about resources—it’s about who gets to recover. Wealthier homeowners in fire-prone zones often rebuild with robust insurance policies and government assistance, while the most vulnerable are left with nothing. Disasters that should unite us instead deepen existing inequalities.
These challenges aren’t the result of any one person’s choices but a legacy of systemic failures. Decades of flawed fire policies, unchecked development, and a housing crisis have left many with few options. Most people are making the best decisions they can within a broken system—one that subsidizes unsustainable growth while leaving vulnerable communities without the resources to recover.
Adding to the crisis is California’s fragile insurance market. High-risk areas like the Pacific Palisades stretch the state’s FAIR Plan, a last-resort insurer, to its limits. Skyrocketing claims make premiums unaffordable, while reinsurance companies (insurance for insurance) pull out of the state entirely. Without affordable insurance, homeownership becomes a privilege for the wealthy. Middle- and working-class families are priced out, unable to secure mortgages or rebuild after disaster strikes. And all of this—to protect homes that, in many cases, should never have been built in fire-prone zones to begin with. Taxpayers are funding a cycle of firefighting and rebuilding that props up unsustainable development, leaving the most underserved populations to bear the brunt of the devastation.
Priorities, Priorities
Meanwhile, Los Angeles just cut its fire department's funding by more than $17.5 million in the 2024-2025 budget while giving the police department a nearly $126 million boost. This was the second-largest departmental operating cut in the city's 2024-25 fiscal year budget, which shaved funding from most city departments— just not the police. The LAFD makes up about 6 percent of the city's expense budget; the LAPD receives 15 percent. This shift reflects a troubling pattern: even as fire risks escalate, public safety funding prioritizes policing over lifesaving fire suppression efforts.
But here's where California's priorities become crystal clear. In 2024, voters rejected Proposition 6, a measure that would have banned involuntary servitude in California prisons—even as conservative states like Alabama and Tennessee had already ended the practice. When the state needs more firefighters, it turns to prisons for about 30% of its wildfire workforce. Right now, 395 imprisoned firefighters across 29 crews are working alongside Cal Fire's nearly 2,000 firefighters battling the LA blazes. These imprisoned firefighters earn $5.80 to $10.24 per day in camp and $1 per hour for active firefighting – a vast improvement to 2018 when they were only paid $1.45 per day, but still akin to slave labor when compared to the wages of professional firefighters. The labor is grueling and dangerous: working in 12- to 14-person crews, they carve containment lines through steep, hazardous terrain, using chainsaws to clear all vegetation until only bare soil remains. The conditions are so severe that one fire captain described it as facing “most known elements of violent, erratic, and extreme fire behavior.” The physical toll is immense, leaving lasting damage on bodies that, in effect, belong to the state.
Exploitation in a Burning World
The human cost is devastating. Take Shawna Lynn Jones, who died at 22 while fighting a fire in Malibu, just 45 days before her release. Or Maria, who attempted CPR to save Shawna's life that day. While in the fire camp, Maria fell in love with another incarcerated firefighter, and they married on the day of her wife's release. But after they both got out, their attempts to continue firefighting hit a wall—they applied for wildland firefighting positions but never heard back. Maria later died from what appeared to be COVID-19, after struggling in her post-release life.
The bitter irony? California trusts imprisoned people with chainsaws to fight its fires but makes it really, really hard to continue the work once free. A 2020 law, A.B. 2147, promised to help by expunging records for incarcerated firefighters. Yet the law fails to stop criminal records from showing up in employer background checks, effectively locking these trained professionals out of firefighting careers. Without meaningful pathways to connect experienced firefighters to jobs, California perpetuates a cycle of exploitation and abandonment: laboring in dangerous conditions for pennies while incarcerated, only to face closed doors and despair upon release.
The climate crisis is only intensifying this exploitative practice. A study published by the American Geophysical Union found that between 1972 and 2018, the acreage burned annually in California jumped fivefold, and the acreage burned in summertime forest fires surged eightfold. California's wildfires emitted 45.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018 alone—roughly equivalent to putting 9.1 million cars on the road. That was more than twice the amount by which California's annual emissions fell between 2013—when the state implemented its carbon cap-and-trade program—and 2016. These numbers expose a framework that prioritizes private gains while failing to address root causes like climate change and land-use policy.
The math is brutal but simple: while developers reap massive profits by selling homes for nearly $1 million in fire-prone areas, the people risking their lives to protect these properties earn as little as $1–$2 an hour while battling active fires. The true cost, however, extends far beyond these meager wages. Taxpayers subsidize both the development and its protection, footing billions in firefighting costs. This arrangement effectively funnels public funds toward safeguarding private profits while leaving those doing the most dangerous work with poverty wages, trauma, and little hope of securing firefighting jobs after release. It’s a system designed to perpetuate exploitation while prioritizing wealth over justice, where the people doing the hardest, most dangerous work are left with trauma, poverty, and closed doors.
Breaking the Profit-Driven Inferno
What's the solution? Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, puts it plainly: “In some instances, would it just be cheaper to buy the land and keep it from being developed? The answer's clearly yes.” But it’ll take more than land purchases to fix this mess. Among the most urgent reforms are:
Transforming prison fire camps into a Conservation Corps program that pays minimum wage, provides comprehensive training, and offers social services support.
Redirecting federal disaster relief from rebuilding high-risk fire zones to purchasing vulnerable land for conservation.
Implementing strict fire-risk zoning laws and ending subsidized fire insurance in areas repeatedly destroyed by fires.
Creating a direct employment pipeline for formerly incarcerated firefighters, eliminating conviction-based barriers to firefighting jobs.
Shifting billions spent on fire suppression toward prevention measures like controlled burns, forest management, and climate change mitigation.
As California's fire seasons grow longer and more destructive, we face a choice: continue a system where private profits are protected by imprisoned labor and public money, or fundamentally change how we approach development, firefighting, and justice. The fires are coming either way—the only question is who we'll sacrifice to fight them.