Our Future Firefighters
A select group of inmates may be exchanging their prison jumpsuits for firefighting gear in Camden County.
The inmates-to-firefighters program is one of several money-saving options the Board of County Commissioners is looking into to stop residents’ fire insurance costs from more than doubling. [...] The inmate firefighter program would be the most cost-effective choice, saving the county more than $500,000 a year by some estimates. But that option is already controversial, drawing criticism from the firefighters who would have to work alongside – and supervise – the prisoners.
The Camden program would put two inmates in each of three existing firehouses, and they would respond to all emergencies – including residential – alongside traditional firefighters. The inmates would have no guard, but would be monitored by a surveillance system and by the traditional firefighters, who would undergo training to guard the inmates.
The inmates would not be paid for their work, but upon release they would be eligible to work as firefighters five years after their conviction dates instead of the normal 10.
Of course, the long-term goal here is to replace all highly paid workers with prisoners. It’s the ultimate solution to the labor problem. Forget cheap labor. Slave labor is absolutely the way to go. If they die in a fire, who cares! And when they get out of prison early for this, we can just arrest more people to keep the labor supply strong. Then we can give millionaires more tax breaks!
And the fact that the majority of these unpaid Georgia prisoners are black and are working for a white-dominated government has no meaning at all. Like with Troy Davis, there’s nothing to see here….
Well prison labor has a long pedigree. I am not so sure how economically efficient it has been. A lot of studies on the Soviet GULag indicate that the costs of guarding the prisoners was greater than the value the zeks produced by the early 1950s. In the US that has got to be even more true. I do not know about Georgia. But, I do know that the one union that is still going strong in CA is the prison guard union.
Perhaps adding a pair of prisoners to the County Commission would help end some of the BS.
Oh, this will work well! Lemme think….criminals….empty houses….what could possibly go wrong?
{sarcasm}
If residents didn’t want to have their houses looted, they shouldn’t have had fires in the first place.
Moral hazard, people.
Residents need to learn some personal responsibility and remember remove their property from their houses before they catch fire.
It’s just common sense.
{/sarcasm}
If they didn’t want their houses to burn, why did they have houses in the first place? Mygod! It’s not like anyone forced them to sign a mortgage for something INCENDIARY! Sure, they’ll blame it on the banks and the insurance company, but clearly it’s Obama’s fault!
Oh. My. God. It’s like we’re watching our civilization collapse before our very eyes.
Brawndo, Walt?
Ha! There’s a small dog we encounter on our nightly walk, and when we first met him I got no small joy out of learning from the dog’s owner that his name was Brawndo.
When I was a young man in the Army, we did a construction project involving a very large number of sandbags, which were filled by the prisoners in the post guard house / jail. The work our soldiers was doing was also raw labor, but our senior officers made it crystal clear that soldiers and prisoners were never to work side-by-side. Doing that would imply that the officers saw soldiers as no better than convicts; even in 1985, Army officers were more aware than that.
So mixing prisoners and firefighters? Another brilliant plan from our “elites”.
Why stop at firefighters, why not use prison labor to staff police departments?
CEO and CFO, too. Wait, those are already populated by criminals
Use ‘em for Chris Christie’s security team.
But make sure to give them automatic weapons first, as unpopular as Christie is getting.
I’m not sure firefighters are particularly highly paid. But my favorite part is that after these guys are released from prison, they still need to wait 5 years after their conviction dates before they can be firefighters again. Is that awesome or what?
Actually they don’yt have to wait to be firefighters–they can reoffend and go back right away. The five years is only if they want to be paid.
My favorite is this:
The inmates would have no guard, but would be monitored by a surveillance system and by the traditional firefighters, who would undergo training to guard the inmates.
Yep, hard to see how that could go wrong.
How the hell is compelling prisoners to risk their lives (which firefighters regularly do) not fall under cruel and unusual punishments?
Oh, right … Scalia. I forgot for a moment
Our prison-industrial complex-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TpFlOioXys
But it worked perfectly in The Dirty Dozen!
Then again, they weren’t exactly preventing fires…
All efforts to screw some of us will end up by screwing all of us.
Remember that county that refused to fight someone’s fire because they hadn’t paid the annual $50 fee?
“Dat’s a nice house you got dere. Be a shame someone came along and…OOOPS! I shudda put out my cigrette first!”
Seriously though, doesn’t that really just make you think that certain people just didn’t get the right mix of vitamins and protein when they were kids?
That proposal is among the most brain-dead idea I’ve ever heard. Wait, you want to use people you deem a risk to society (and holding against their will) to faithfully execute the job of *risking their lives* for other people and their property? More than that, you think that wage accumulating firemen will tolerate this circumstance? Lastly, you actually believe that this wouldn’t get stomped in public view by state and federal judges?
jaysus.
Careful with that axe,
Eugene, uh, Wayne.Of course, the solution here is obvious: just tell the residents to suck it up and pay a much higher rate for insurance. That won’t impact middle and working class families at all!
Okay, so obviously I’m being snarky and this is a terrible idea, but still, this “cost cutting is a super-secret anti-worker plot and can’t have any other possible motive or benefit to consumers” schtick is getting a little tiresome.
Seriously? You don’t see the community’s desire to use convict labor to avoid paying market price for their mix of fire protection and fire insurance to be anti-worker? You usually troll better than this.
It might be, I don’t know. I don’t know what the local government’s budget looks like. It’s sort of strange to pretend that local governments don’t have real budget constraints though, or that there might ever be a real interest in controlling costs in things beyond just “hey lets screw workers.”
It might be, I don’t know.
Do you often have this kind of trouble understanding extremely simple facts and concepts?
We know exactly one thing, Brien: They don’t have a volunteer fire department. They have a fire fighting budget. That means they have some form of tax revenue, which means they’re screwing their residents with obviously substandard emergency services.
They might try raising taxes on rich folks you know.
Without knowing the exact income realities of the area, in general it’s not that easy for local governments to tax rich people heavily, since it’s relatively easy to move around jurisdictions.
Along with everything else wrong with this: if there are people in prisons whose offenses are considered minor enough, and whose personal conduct is good enough, that it’s considered safe to let them participate in this program: what the fuck are they doing in prison?
Why did this post in response to Brien Jackson, wtf
The school budget for the county indicates they generate $24,000,000 from proprty taxes (to help fund a $70,000,000 budget) for 44,000 residents in total (10,000 students).
It sounds to me like they have a fair bit of money there.
Also, you try to sell a house lately, Brien?
They can’t move as easily as you make it seem.
Soak the bastards. And I say that as one of the bastards. It’s their houses that are at risk, too.
Brien is worried because, after all, if we allow for good quality jobs under union contracts, he might have to grab coffee for Peter King or Chris Berman sometime.
I shudder to think what will happen when you discover the existence of volunteer fire departments.
It will make me realize that the potential of you having to get coffee for Peter King for a year when you were 23 would have been the worst thing in history. If we could only crush all unions, we would be free from such horrors.
Except…this really has nothing to do with anything…and I don’t support crushing unions. And as I said, this is obviously a stupid idea, but the assumption that a local government might not face actual budget issues and couldn’t possibly be doing anything other than trying to screw workers is also pretty weird.
I assume you don’t get red faced angry that some locales rely on volunteer fire fighters, do you?
Volunteer fire fighters are a totally different phenomenon, usually in rural and largely western areas where there isn’t the taxpayer base for a real fire department. Nonetheless, I see absolutely no reasonable comparison between this and using prison labor. I am impressed that you’d choose to make a stand on a post denouncing the use of prison labor. But hey, whatever gets your goat.
Except…I didn’t. I’ve clearly stated the prison labor idea is crazy at least twice. It just seems very strange to me that you can’t imagine a local government might actually be having a real budget problem multiple years into a massive recession. Progressives have only been talking about the huge problem of state and local government budget crunches and their effect on the macroeconomy for the better part of three years now.
but since these programs don’t seem to save money unless the guarding function is either ignored or done for free, what does the budget have to do with it, except in the possibility of employing fewer paid firefighters?
Did I say it was a good idea that would work? No, I believe I said just the opposite.
Also, this doesn’t even make sense as a comeback on either count.
Yes, that’s why I just edited it. Posted too soon.
If you click through to the original report from jacksonville.com, this prisoner program is being prompted by a possible downgrade of the county’s fire protection ratings – suggesting that the system has gotten worse the last time the insurers evaluated it. I’d kind of like to know how the good people of Camden County have voted on any recent bond issues and tax increases for firefighting and other county services, because if they’ve been voting to reduce services – well, actions have consequences.
Oops, should read “suggesting the system has gotten worse SINCE the last time the insurers evaluated it.”
Yeah, the funny thing is thinking this is going to work. This is pretty much a money losing venture. The value of service provided by the convicts will not exceed the cost in attention from real fire fighters. No way. It may save them money, but insurance premiums (and fires) are going up.
unless they employ many fewer paid firefighters
My wife suggested another area where local governments could see savings by using convict labor: public schools, right?
Well the right is already trying to spend public money to send them to Catholic schools. Close enough, right?
China has near free labor.
The only way to compete with that is a return to slavery.
Why wouldn’t you want criminals to go into burning houses filled with valuables?
Damn! They are bringing back the chain gangs. Prison labor, often for private individuals paying the county/state has a long history in the region. Oddly enough most of the prisoners were black then, as well as now.
How about a convicted arsonist on the arson squad? Burglars on the burglary detail, rapists on the……
None of this even touches on the hundreds of hours of entry-level classroom and field training required of career firefighters (i.e., paid). Without it these prisoners would be l, at best, very ineffective as firefighters and EMS providers and more likely would be an active hindrance to the crew.
This idea is utterly unrealistic.
I think “braindead stupid” is the proper descriptor here.
I just recently read Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore and what struck me the most in reading it is just how the same arguments over crime and punishment (and really just about anything else) come up again and again over time. We’re so well rehearsed in these subjects one would think we might be able to do better. Oh, well:
Ach, here: http://www.theonion.com/articles/historians-politely-remind-nation-to-check-whats-h,26183/
Jesus. Jumping. Jiminy. Cricket. H. Christ. So what is valuable is low insurance rates. What is notvaluable is professionals who put out fires. I’m damned near giving up here.