CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“FIREFIGHTING DOUBLETALK: MORE FODDER FOR GOVERNMENT DISTRUST”
Many Californians now deeply distrust
state government, and with good reason. Start with the Public Utilities
Commission, proven to have decided multi-billion-dollar rate cases after
lengthy private contacts and email exchanges between commissioners, their staff
and utility executives.
Then
there’s the state Energy Commission, which handed tens of millions of dollars
in “hydrogen highway” grants to a commission consultant who two years ago drew
the map of where that money was to be spent, then resigned and formed a company
which three months later applied for and got most of the available money.
No
member of either commission has been punished for this
cronyism and
favoritism. Nor have their procedures changed significantly.
Now comes the state Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation, caught in what’s doubletalk at a minimum on
whether or not it has for years put violent criminals into situations where
they could escape with ease if they chose.
More than 1,400 such prisoners today
work on firefighting crews sometimes overseen by officials of the Department of
Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire) rather than prison guards. The current
type of “trusty” prisoner has produced an average of nine escapes per year over
the last five years, all but one inmate escapee recaptured fairly quickly.
The subject arises because last year’s
Proposition 47 converted many drug violations and some other crimes from
felonies to misdemeanors, cutting the number of non-violent criminals available
for firefighting.
The measure also allowed many former
drug-related felons to resume normal lives unplagued by convictions that once
put many jobs and other opportunities beyond their reach.
Prison rules long stated that only
non-violent criminals could be sent outside prison walls to fight fires. But no
more.
The
change came to light after public opposition killed a corrections department
plan to extend from five years to seven the remaining time allowable for
sentences of criminals on firefighting crews.
For sure, in this so-far extremely
destructive fire season, work done by teams of convicts has been essential. But
it turned out prison officials were untruthful for years about who was on those
teams.
Their website said no violent prisoner
could serve on the crews. In pulling back their proposal this fall, department
officials let slip the fact that they have long used inmates whose crimes are
legally defined as violent.
“Not
all violent offenses represent violent behavior by the individual,” Corrections
Secretary Jeffrey Beard told a reporter in a classic example of bureaucratic
doubletalk. An example of what he meant, he said, was that robberies involving
a mere threat of violence are different from those where victims are physically
assaulted. Never mind psychological or emotional violence from being
threatened, sometimes at gunpoint.
It
turned out the department’s website long said members of fire crews “must have
no history of violent crimes.” This passage is now excised, and the department
reported last month that 1,441 out of 3,732 inmates then in fire camps were
convicted of crimes legally defined as violent. Only doublethink could allow
those convicts to be considered non-violent.
Prison
system spokesman Bill Sessa insists they may once have been violent, but aren’t
anymore. “Having that on our website was a mistake, not an attempt to deceive,”
he said. “We look at the very specific circumstances of every inmate
before anyone is even allowed to be trained for this.”
Even
with the violent criminals, the number of convict firefighters is far down from
previous levels of about 4,400, mostly because of a combination of Proposition
47 and prison realignment, which sees many inmates paroled or remanded to
county jails in their home areas.
Lowering the prison populace by tens
of thousands over just two years created a manpower shortage.
Nevertheless, said Sessa, “It would be
ludicrous for us to put a dangerous inmate in that situation.”
The prison system admitted to the
Associated Press that inmate firefighters committed hundreds of assaults and
batteries, indecent exposures and other crimes over the past 10 years, but
later insisted all those incidents were in fire camps, not in surrounding
communities or on active fire lines.
Still, the corrections department’s “mistake”
in leaving the “no violent criminals” pledge on its website for years after it
was no longer in force renders its word unreliable.
This makes at least three demonstrably
untrustworthy major state agencies. Should anyone trust the others?
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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