California must rethink EMT restrictions

Individual success stories to do with battling two of California’s biggest problems — its wildfires, and its entrenched governmental bureaucracies — are hard enough to find.

But reporter Will McCarthy at our sister papers in the Bay Area uncovered a twofer having to do with both problems in the person of Benjamin Fowler, who until recently was serving a second 10-year prison term. Former owner of a landscaping firm, Fowler was good at outdoor work, and had been spending part of his incarcerated time as an inmate firefighter.

Problem was, all the participants in the program knew that it was literally a dead-end job. Though they were gaining plenty of hands-on experience, the prisoners knew there was a Catch-22 once they were released: their felony records would keep them from working as firefighters.

But in late 2020, AB 2147 was passed in the Legislature and signed by the governor. It created a process “allowing incarcerated people who served as inmate firefighters to have their records expunged,” McCarthy reports. “Prior to its passage, many inmates were unemployable as firefighters after leaving prison because of their criminal records — even if they had spent years doing the exact same job, and even though California had a shortage of firefighters.

“‘As soon as I heard about that law being passed, it was probably a two-year process,’ Fowler said. “But when I got to the fire camp, I knew that’s where I was supposed to be.’”

Now a year out of prison, Fowler graduates tomorrow from a California program that helps former prison firefighters get jobs they have trained so well for. In a few weeks — just in time for peak fire season — he takes a job as a United States Forest Service firefighter in Sonoma County.

“When they’re with us, they’re choosing to be better people for themselves, for their friends and family, for their community,” said Cari Chen, the forestry and fire recruitment program’s Bay Area director. “It’s not just a job. It’s not just a career. It’s a lifestyle.”

You don’t have to be a criminologist to deduce that having a full-time job — and an exciting one, at that — when released from the Big House exponentially reduces recidivism.

“When you’re in prison, you’re a number,” Fowler said. “But I was able to give back. It became a true drive.”

California is seeing important progress on this front, but there’s more to do. For instance, criminal conviction histories continue to prohibit EMT — emergency medical technician — certifications, which are key to getting municipal fire department jobs. Court challenges to this were denied last year.

That needs to change.

“People who are safe and qualified for certification as EMTs should be certified as EMTs,” says Andrew Ward, an attorney at the Institute for Justice.

“It helps them support themselves, and it helps California, which desperately needs more first responders. AB 2147 was a step in the right direction, but it was always a narrow exception. It’s not that California needed a special law for inmate firefighters. It needs to get rid of these senseless bans in the first place. The government shouldn’t be denying anyone the right to work because of unrelated crimes.”

Advocates at the institute point out that California categorically bans anyone with a felony conviction from obtaining an EMT certification for 10 years after release from prison, and that it bans people with two felony convictions forever.

EMTs are not paramedics. The certification is an entry-level one so that firefighters can perform basic, non-invasive first-response techniques, such as CPR, checking blood pressure and giving oxygen. Especially given that we are now doing an excellent job training inmate firefighters given the oversupply of wildland fires every summer and fall in California, it’s absurd that we are not allowing them to compete for stable, non-seasonal firefighting jobs.