The Atlas of Essential Work seeks to foreground the essential workers who make the places where we live, work, and play more habitable amidst the climate crisis. Wildfire and indigenous burning practices have been central elements of Pacific Northwest ecology for millennia. Yet as forests became major economic and strategic resources for the settler state, state agencies and private landholders created a tremendous apparatus to protect timber assets from fire. Today the Pacific Northwest relies on an enormous material and human infrastructure for fire suppression, including heavy equipment—engines, bulldozers, water tankers, helicopters and airplanes—and firefighting crews from volunteer, municipal, state, prison, private contract, and federal sources.

Oregon’s policy of “aggressive” fire suppression seeks to preserve standing timber assets on state and private land by extinguishing fires as soon after ignition as possible. For over seventy years, incarcerated people have served as an essential, albeit often invisible, labor force deployed to help realize this objective. Today, the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) contracts with the Department of Corrections (DOC) to deploy incarcerated crews for active fire suppression, fire camp cleaning and cooking, and preparatory positioning of firefighting equipment. Oregon is not alone. Every Western state except Utah mobilizes incarcerated fire crews, although there are significant variations in state programs’ size, organization, and incentive structures. The low cost of incarcerated labor is not the only attraction for states. Because the movement of incarcerated people is entirely controlled by state officials, these crews can provide critical stop-gap labor power in busy fire seasons when private contract crews are in high demand across the West.

In Oregon, every incarcerated person is constitutionally required to work forty hours per week or participate in equivalent on-the-job training. At $6 per day¹, Oregon’s incarcerated crews earn miniscule wages in comparison to general population crews, but this pay is considerably higher than most other kinds of prison work available. Although the work is physically demanding, dangerous, and low-paid, incarcerated workers often report preferring it to staying inside prison, valuing these jobs for their sense of purpose and the opportunity to engage with general population crews.

Every fire season, media reports on some of the most visible and dramatic forms of incarcerated firefighting work, while advocates call for greater attention to the unique vulnerability of this workforce. Yet to date there has been no systematic account of how much and what kinds of work incarcerated crews do, over what durations, or where they perform this work. This chapter begins to answer these questions in hopes of contributing to a common vocabulary for future policy and advocacy amidst the climate crisis.

This chapter presents cartographic and data visualizations of a unique data set of all Department of Corrections fire crew deployments from 2015 through 2021. To create this data set, we linked crew deployment data obtained via public records requests² from the Department of Corrections with state and federal geospatial fire records.

The previous maps locate incarcerated labor on the land, but do not depict the scale or duration of deployments. Work is typically measured in days, not hours. For this reason, we use the metric of “person-days”. The Oregon Department of Corrections refers to adult incarcerated people as “Adults in Custody”, or “AICs”. Incarcerated fire suppression crews usually consist of groups of ten AICS, though there may be as few as eight or as many as twelve AICs. A crew of ten working for one day yields a total of ten person-days. Camp support crews, including staff for mobile kitchen and shower units, may be composed of fewer than ten people. Each crew is supervised by at least one correctional officer. AICs are paid $6 per day³ while performing active fire suppression work, and considerably less for camp support.

Three colored bins differentiate the magnitude of deployments. Each box represents one event to which incarcerated workers were deployed. The size of the box represents the total number of “person-days” all incarcerated crews worked on the event. Diagonal hatching indicates “pre-position” deployments. Click inside each bin and roll over the events to see details of each deployment.*

The three magnitude categories highlight the diverse ways in which the incarcerated labor force supported the state’s fire suppression efforts. Of the 324 total events in DOC records, more than 70 percent were limited deployments numbering fewer than one hundred person-days. Many of these deployments were to small fires that were extinguished quickly. Twenty-five percent of all events were one day deployments of a single crew; incarcerated people were sometimes the only responders. Many limited assignments were “pre-positions” (depicted with diagonal hatching) in which crews were deployed to field locations to prepare equipment and engines to be rapidly dispatched as needed. Around twenty percent of deployments were of a more significant scale. On these events, AICs worked between 100 and 500 person-days, with crews from two or more correctional institutions assigned to the same incident. Usually, DOC crews were part of larger incident responses that included private contractor and state crews. In maximal deployments ranging from 500 to nearly 4,000 person-days, DOC crews usually came from three or more correctional facilities, with different crews assigned to suppression and camp support work. Though these events comprised only 6 percent of all deployments, they accounted for over half of all person-days worked by incarcerated workers.

The magnitude of AIC person-days worked did not necessarily correlate to the size of a fire, nor to the scale of general population personnel deployed. For instance, the Bootleg fire was the second largest fire in the US in 2021. During the most intense suppression efforts, over 2,200 resources (including personnel, aviation, and machinery) were assigned at one time. Yet DOC crews only worked a total of 462 person-days on this fire, in part due to Covid precautions and in part due to concurrent deployments on the Applegate and Game Hog Creek fires.

The following case studies provide more granular pictures of selected deployments, illustrating various combinations and durations of DOC crews’ work. Due to data limitations, we do not depict the general population crews deployed to the same events, but in most cases DOC crews worked as part of significantly larger incident responses.

This interactive map displays person-days worked on each fire by crews from each correctional institution from 2015 through 2021. This includes fire suppression, camp support, and pre-position work. The bottom left corner of the map depicts two types of deployments whose locations cannot be placed. The first type, “locations unknown”, depicts crews deployed to named fires that could not be linked to geospatial records.⁵ Second, “pre-position deployments” usually involve preparing engines, rolling water hoses, and readying equipment so it can be rapidly dispatched when needed. Work may be done early in fire season, in association with a large fire that is expected to grow, or immediately before a period of especially dangerous fire weather. Crews often work near field offices of the Oregon Department of Forestry or Forest Protection Association, or at safe distances from active fires.”

Generally, crews worked limited person-day deployments on fires close to the correctional institutions where they were based, while crews from multiple institutions across the state were deployed to large fires, especially in southern Oregon’s timberlands. Exceptions to this pattern are visible in 2020 and 2021, when Covid guidelines limited deployments, mobility, and combinations of crews from different institutions.

The story of incarcerated fire work is not just about fighting large, dramatic fires.  From 2015 to 2021, many incarcerated crews did indeed work long stretches within complex incident response teams. Yet more often, they were deployed to small incidents that never made headlines. They also prepared and positioned firefighting equipment in the field and performed crucial roles in camp support, cooking and cleaning in large fire camps for general population and/or incarcerated suppression crews.

For decades, Oregon has struggled with a shortage of firefighting labor as experienced wildland firefighters—often off-season forestry workers—retire, and declining wages in forestry fail to attract young workers. Moving forward, escalating fire risks are likely to make this labor shortage more acute. In the absence of countervailing forestry and labor policy, there will be clear economic incentives for state agencies across the Pacific Northwest to double down on inexpensive and immobile incarcerated labor for fire suppression.

A high road to resilience for Northwest forests and workers is possible, but it will require greater valorization of incarcerated and general population labor. It will also require breaking the cycle of aggressive fire suppression and giant conflagrations that have characterized the region for over a century. It is well recognized that implementing prescribed burning and other forest management techniques outside of fire season can reduce the intensity of future fires, while generating more consistent and less dangerous employment. Developing prescribed burn skills across all types of crews could prevent greater segmentation and exploitation of incarcerated labor and improve post-release employment prospects for incarcerated people. Any serious effort to revalue work done to control fire must at one and the same time value the work done by and with fire.

We sincerely thank individuals at the Oregon Department of Corrections and Oregon Department of Forestry for their generous assistance with data and interpretation. This chapter has benefited from formative exchanges with Abby Cunniff, Adam Gregg, Ben Barron, Emily Jane Davis, Heidi Huber-Stearns, Kari Norgaard, and Laura Pulido. Thanks to Alison Deak and Shelby Weiss for geospatial guidance.