half of CA wildfire firefighters are prisoners, but....

[dead0man]

but once out of prison, they are banned from getting paid to do it, and that's funked up.

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[dead0man]

Just another way regulations hurt poor people for no good reason.  But some of the regulations might actually be needed, so lets not even discuss it.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

They can get a HUGE raise from their current $1 as a prisoner to minimum wage as an ex-con fighting wildfires. Of course that's really bad pay in high cost California, and they are locked out of any stable higher paying firefighter job.

Oh yeah, and Kamala Harris' office actually argued against early release because the state needed the labor.

https://thinkprogress.org/california-tells-court-it-cant-release-inmates-early-because-it-would-lose-cheap-prison-labor-c3795403bae1/

[dead0man]

wow, that's just as messed up.

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[Cassandra]

This is common across the US; prisoners who learn trades in prison are generally banned from practicing that trade once free.

[dead0man]

Not letting ex-prisoners work is as bad as forcing companies to hire ex-prisoners.

[Robert California]

Not letting ex-prisoners work is as bad as forcing companies to hire ex-prisoners.

Not to say that all those with jobs are good people, but it strikes me as the type of policy that would unintentionally lead to these men and women going right back into crime. The concerns by trade members of people with government-subsidized training flooding the workforce are understandable, but I don’t think that should in itself be a complete obstacle to work in X field.

[Take your vitamins and say your prayers, Brother!]

but once out of prison, they are banned from getting paid to do it, and that's funked up.

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This is the most important issue in criminal justice; creating a path to where a felon's good name can be restored and through which they can gain entry to those jobs which give them entry into the middle class.

Now I do believe that this pathway back needs to be earned, to a degree.  Lots of prisoners are in prison for non-drug offenses that they committed, in no small measure, because they had become addicted to drugs.  As a former substance abuse counselor, I have known many former inmates who could remain clean and sober in jail/prison, and in treatment, but would relapse once on their own.  They commit crimes of theft and dishonesty to support their active addiction, and this situation is even worse today given the problems we have with identity theft.  And there are others that are flat-out sociopaths who WILL hurt others if there is profit for them if given the chance.  There are real issues of corporate and municipal liability that arise when such folks are hired for sensitive positions and they abuse them; it creates a presumption that the employer should have known that the worst would happen when they hired these folks.

That reality, however, should not be a reason not to move forward with REAL re-entry into society for its prisoners.  We can change our liability laws.  What we also need to do is change the mindset of much of the general public who believe that they ought to be favored because they never committed a crime.  And while I agree with that at one level, I would state that the reward for not committing a crime is remaining at liberty, where the penalty for committing a crime is confinement, sometimes for years, or even decades.  The permanancy of a felony conviction is, in far too many cases, a barrier to people's entry into the middle class that ought to be examined and cut back to some degree.  

[dead0man]

Not letting ex-prisoners work is as bad as forcing companies to hire ex-prisoners.

Not to say that all those with jobs are good people, but it strikes me as the type of policy that would unintentionally lead to these men and women going right back into crime. The concerns by trade members of people with government-subsidized training flooding the workforce are understandable, but I don’t think that should in itself be a complete obstacle to work in X field.

yeah I agree, screw the concerns of trade members.  There well being shouldn't come at the cost of poor people's well being.  Life has already benefited the trade members not in prison, the law shouldn't pour concrete on to those benefits.  If you've paid your debt to society, you shouldn't be further punished by rules designed to keep you from getting a job in a trade you learned while paying that debt.

[Take your vitamins and say your prayers, Brother!]

Not letting ex-prisoners work is as bad as forcing companies to hire ex-prisoners.

Not to say that all those with jobs are good people, but it strikes me as the type of policy that would unintentionally lead to these men and women going right back into crime. The concerns by trade members of people with government-subsidized training flooding the workforce are understandable, but I don’t think that should in itself be a complete obstacle to work in X field.

yeah I agree, screw the concerns of trade members.  There well being shouldn't come at the cost of poor people's well being.  Life has already benefited the trade members not in prison, the law shouldn't pour concrete on to those benefits.  If you've paid your debt to society, you shouldn't be further punished by rules designed to keep you from getting a job in a trade you learned while paying that debt.

Perhaps some folks here who agree with this need to look at how they want to run folks out of jobs for #MeToo issues where there isn't even a criminal charge brought, let alone a conviction.  I'm not talking about sexual assault and rape; I"m talking about incidents of misdemeanor domestic violence, and non-criminal "harrassment", some of which are long in the past, or have been alleged, but not proven.

One can respond to this by referring to the "Pattern of Behavior" such folks manifest.  I would point out that many felons have their own patterns of behavior and their own histories of crimes which go undiscovered, in addition to the crimes they were committed for. 

I very much wish to reduce the barriers to employment for felons who have committed their sentences as much as possible, and removing unnecessary barriers that have nothing to do with public safety is a good start.  But if I'm taking this posture, I view it as hypocritical to advocate hounding the #MeToo cases out of THEIR jobs simply for prior bad acts.  Perhaps we need to come to terms with the principle, all around, that punishment for wrongdoing, short of murder and heinuous sexual/violent offenses, needs to come to an end at some point.

[Sic Semper Tyrannis]

Of course you turned this into an opportunity to soapbox about the evils of big guberment.

[CookieDamage]

Of course you turned this into an opportunity to soapbox about the evils of big guberment.

It's scary. And he has the gall to have his icon be green. It should be blue considering all the unempathetic things he posts.

And @jfern, a quote from the article your very intelligent self posted:

"California Attorney General Kamala Harris told BuzzFeed News she was “shocked” to learn that the lawyers in her department had argued against parole credits because they wanted to retain their labor force. “I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court,” Harris said in an interview with BuzzFeed published late Tuesday. “I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court.”