by Lawrence Cox, LSPC Regional Advocacy and Organizing Manager
I was born in Oakland, California, into a world where stability was elusive and the foster-care docket turned faster than any child could comprehend. I never learned permanence; I learned placement. By age seven, I was a ward of Alameda County, rotating through foster homes and group facilities where the idea of permanence was more myth than promise. By twelve, I had cycled through six placements, a group home, and finally landed in kinship care. These early experiences taught me two enduring lessons: that systems can fail people, and that people, when organized, can transform those systems.
My adolescence unfolded in a neighborhood economy fueled by substances and survival. In my early twenties, I was sentenced to 23 years inside California’s prison system. But even behind bars, transformation was possible. It was there I encountered incarcerated firefighters: individuals who fought wildfires for $2 to $5 a day, risking their lives without receiving recognition, credentials, or opportunity upon release. These were not just workers; they were heroes denied dignity.
Seventeen years in the prisons of California perfected my education in institutional neglect and survival. Although I never wielded a Pulaski along the fireline, I stood next to men who did— they rose from prison fire camps in the morning to carve containment lines only to return in the evening to a system in denial of the value they brought. I advocated for court filings, organized literacy circles, created grievance forms, and rallied entire yards against unjustified policies, all in the face of correctional staff retaliation. This practice perfected in me procedural endurance that drives my advocacy to this day, especially in the pursuit of Senate Bill 423 (SB 423).
Walking Free, Fighting Back
Thirty months ago, I reentered society with a single mandate: dismantle the systems that perpetuate cycles of marginalization and structural exclusion. Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and All of Us or None became the institutional backbone for this personal mission. After completing the Elder Ronald Freeman Policy Fellowship, I became a regional advocacy and organizing associate, overseeing eight statewide chapters of AOUON. Simultaneously, I took on the role of policy analyst for the Coalition for Family Unity (CFU), leading over two dozen organizations united to advance equity for impacted individuals and their families.
This multifaceted advocacy, rooted in lived experience and carried out through legislative strategy, culminated in my co-leading campaigns to erase involuntary servitude from our state constitution and in crafting policy that would finally translate incarcerated labor into recognized, compensated, and transformative career pathways. In these efforts, no issue called louder than the inequities surrounding incarcerated firefighters.
The Incarcerated Firefighters Workforce Coalition, which I helped found, emerged from the necessity to legitimize lived expertise. This legislation proposed to simultaneously address three critical crises:
- Workforce Shortfalls & Overtime Costs: California has over 3,127 wildland firefighting positions available, and they use $124 million in annual CAL FIRE overtime.
- Recidivism & Public Safety: More than 1,000 camp-trained inmates exit custody each year with no formal certification, going back to communities without marketable job opportunities.
- Regional Inequity: The northern counties’ interiors have vacancy rates in excess of 24%, and areas operating at full capacity receive unequal investment.
Our original bill proposed robust, data-backed measures: an Office of the State Fire Marshal (OSFM)-approved curriculum in every prison firehouse, a five percent civil service hiring preference, and a Community Reinvestment Fund to redirect $34 million in verified savings toward housing, apprenticeships, and mental-health services.
Unfortunately, as of May 24, 2025, legislative editing has watered down SB 423 to the bare essentials. While the ever-critical portable expansion of the education, training and certification remains part of the package, the previously universal statewide initiative has been aggressively rewritten to just two stand-alone entities: a Ventura-only “enhanced training center” and a discretionary five-year hand crew pilot in the County of Los Angeles. Vital provisions like civil service preference points, statewide training mandates, and the Community Reinvestment Fund have been removed.
In Senate committees, where the bill was hailed as bipartisan, its strongest provisions were gutted or substituted with weak replacements. Senate Appropriations saw uncontested language magically modified. Even moves to ensure transparency and to ground the pilot program in proven cost savings were voted down. In quietly converting opposition by the unions to the final version, providing discretionary control to LA Fire Chiefs in the lowest vacancy areas, they have forsaken Northern California, the most needy region.
We countered this backroom politicking with strong evidence:
- Currently, $29.7 million is spent in overtime costs in Northern Interior California—triple Ventura’s.
- For each vacant engine position, the overtime costs exceed the hypothetical $11,000 per-trainee cost.
- This bill would result in an estimated $19 million in future recidivism savings by duplicating Ventura’s supports throughout the state.
Despite this, legislative consultants warned that restoring the North would trigger a “jailbreak” requiring resubmission to the Senate.
Fighting for the Program We Need
From the outset, our coalition rooted SB 423 in the principle of geographic equity. The promise of certified training, organized reentry, and post-release hand-crew employment cannot be doled out selectively. It must be statewide, and it must be to California’s most under-resourced and fire-exposed areas. Counties like Shasta, Lassen, and Susanville experience both the sharpest shortages of staff and the highest risk of wildfires, with vacancy rates routinely over ten percent and with “Very High” fire-hazard severity rankings the default. Any meaningful reforms to public safety must understand that necessity is not tied to ZIP code— it is tied to exposure, vacancy, and capacity.
To address these disparities, we authored amendments to have the concurrent initiation of a northern “enhanced training center” in conjunction with Ventura. Eligibility for hand-crew pilots are not tied to local politics, but to objective standards— wildland staffing shortages and Cal FIRE hazard zone assignments. To guarantee fiscal soundness, we created cost tables and analyses proving the possibility of North-South dual launch: average per-trainee costs were approximately $11,000 per region, particularly where existing infrastructure—heavily in the form of state prison fire camps—was utilized. The language authored in the bill to delay implementation until there was a fiscal budget or stand-alone policy to justify fiscal appropriation amplified this. The math was irrefutable: proportionate distribution would cost no more.
But even in the absence of fiscal friction, political pressure quietly constricted the geography of the bill. The Ventura and Los Angeles carve-outs were no accident: they were strategic, negotiated in back rooms by players afraid of disrupting the workforce and reshuffling the budget. Committee aides acknowledged, in the shadows, that our Northern language was budgetarily neutral, but warned that re-insertion would result in a legislative “jailbreak”—returning the bill to the Senate, where opposition forces would have the opportunity to organize to kill the proposal in its entirety.
This logic laid bare the calculus: better to pass a partial, politically safe bill than risk full equity. As a result, our efforts advocating for parity were ignored. The final engrossed version of SB 423 at the time I write this failed to include even a discretionary pilot in the north. No data triggers. No reporting requirements. No accountability for regional imbalance.
What was voted down by committee was more than just language, it was a lifeline to counties routinely left behind in both disaster aid and workforce preparation. This deliberate exclusion, even by the terms of budgetary neutrality, is now cited by the coalition as a paradigm on how gatekeeping and regional favoritism makes rehab and public-safety equitability obsolete. It drives home the point that the life and labor of jail inmates in Northern California is politically disposable, even as communities around them burn and job opportunities disappear.
This is not only a missed opportunity, but a glaring violation of legislative amd democratic integrity. Our state cannot claim to create a 21st-century wildfire workforce while disqualifying the very regions at the forefront of climate catastrophe. If SB 423 is to realize its full promise, this carve-out needs to be fixed— not in theory, not in future budget periods, but in statute. Until that time, the regional omissions in the bill will remain testimony to the fact that equity denied in language is equity denied in law.
As SB 423 moves forward in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, its disfiguration reveals the cracks of political power. Proposals based on evidence were dismissed. Provisions from non-controversies were modified. Shared language was quietly removed. These moves betoken strategic roadblocking or bureaucratic misalignment. Left behind is a watered-down version of legislation once containing transformative justice and equity.
This is more than just amendments, more than amendments at all; this is the moral understanding between the government and its most excluded constituents. Favouring financial restraint over the safekeeping of the general public and rehabilitation institutionalizes gatekeeping where doors ought to be open.
This silent erosion converts a promising policy into a discretionary experiment—all predisposed to early rescission, blurry implementation, and political desertion. Our ongoing dilemma is to re-establish those guardrails to save public investment and the men and women who earned this moment.
Others call for compromise, but I see evidence of why this battle is worth fighting. California continues to contract its wildfire defense to prisoners earning $2 per day (although that has the potential to change due to another LSPC Co-Sponsored bill by Assemblyman Bryan, AB 247(2025)). Those same workers continue to emerge from prison with no credentials, no preference in hiring, and no way to continue the job they are an expert at. And California continues to spend $124 million in unnecessary overtime. My life demonstrates that when systems focus on investment over punishment, transformation is not just possible— it is inevitable. SB 423 remains that opportunity. So I will keep drafting amendments, organizing coalitions, having 11 PM calls and 2 AM emails- and walking Capitol corridors late into the night. Because wildfires do not ask whether a rope-rescue was learned in Susanville or Ventura— and courage deserves more than a “may.” I used to be the shuffled child in placement. I was the incarcerated individual struggling to be treated with respect. I am now the lobbyist who will not permit the vagueness of the legislation to diffuse the courage. SB 423 continues to promise justice— it just has to have the words and the areas hastily excised reinserted.
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