The United States incarcerates about 2.3 million people per year, more per capita than any other country, a full quarter of the world’s total prison population. For every 100,000 people living in the U.S., 698 are in jail. We as a nation have chosen to deprive thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men and women of their liberty — one of our highest ideals — with little reflection or remorse. Imprisoned men and women suffer mental and physical breakdowns inside and the disintegration of family outside. Their children do worse in school, and their partners suffer emotionally and financially. Once they are free, most former inmates can’t vote (yet another ideal taken from them), and many have trouble finding meaningful work. America’s prison system represents a deep moral failure, but we appear mostly fine with it, and with the $80 billion per year we spend on corrections.
The problem is just as dispiriting in the West, if not more so. Montana, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Arizona have even higher per capita incarceration rates than the nation as a whole, with Arizona at the top. Nearly 43,000 people are imprisoned in Arizona, in a system that is notoriously cruel, negligent and understaffed. In May, Democratic lawmakers called for the firing of Chuck Ryan, the director of the state’s Department of Corrections.
Yet amid all this comes a surprising opportunity: wildland firefighting. As Associate Editor Maya L. Kapoor writes in this issue, Arizona prisoners who are allowed to fight fires come to see themselves in a new way. Though they are severely underpaid for their work (yet another moral failure), prisoners find a new sense of self on Arizona’s firelines. The work they do is important, and, because there is no prison garb in firefighting, the public views them as heroes. Even their children look at them differently.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Where the incarceration and wildfire crises meet.
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