By Michele Goodwin

On August 31, 2017, The New York Times published a provocative news article, “The Incarcerated Women Who Fight California’s Wildfires.” California is particularly known for its wildfires.1 The dry-air, hot-weather conditions that persist much of the year and limited rainfall create the conditions that make pockets of the state ripe for devastating wildfires. Strong winds, often referred to as the Diablo (or the devil), radiate in the northern part of the state, exacerbating the already vulnerable conditions. The Santa Ana winds do the same in southern counties. Fighting these fires can be a matter of life or death. In fact, Shawna Lynn Jones died in 2016, only hours after battling a fire in Southern California. She was nearly done with a three-year sentence—barely two months remained of her incarceration. However, the night before, at 3 a.m., she and other women had been called to put out a raging fire. Tyquesha Brown recalls that the fire that night required traversing a steep hillside of loose rocks and soil.2 This made their task even more challenging. Another woman told a reporter that Jones struggled that night—the weight of her gear and chain  made it difficult for her to establish footing to hike up the hill where the fire blazed.3 However, she and the other women of Crew 13-3 performed their duties, holding back the fire so that it did not “jump the line.”4 By doing so, they saved expensive properties in Malibu. However, Jones was dead by 10 a.m. the next morning.5 For “less than $2 an hour,” female inmates like Shawna Jones and Tyquesha Brown “work their bodies to the breaking point” with this dangerous work.6 The women trudge heavy chains, saws, medical supplies, safety gear, and various other equipment into burning hillsides surrounded by intense flames. On occasion, they may arrive “ahead of any aerial support or local fire trucks,”7 leaving the prisons in the peak of night, when it is pitch black, arriving before dawn to the color of bright flames and intense heat. Sometimes the women are called upon to “set the line,” meaning they clear “potential fuel from a six-foot-wide stretch of ground” between the source of the fire (or whatever is burning) and the land or property in need of protection.8 They dig trenches, moving toward the fire with tools in hand, keeping about ten feet apart from each other while calling out conditions.9 The women cut wood, clearing it before the flames lick at its brittle brush. After, they scrape or shovel—all in syncopation—while clouds of smoke envelope them. For protection, thin bandanas or yellow handkerchiefs cover their mouths. They operate in a frightening rhythm of sorts: saw, hook, shovel, and rake charred earth, trees, or whatever remains from the blazing fire. To the naked eye, the women could appear to represent progress. For too long, state, federal, and local agencies excluded women from professions that demanded the service of their bodies at the front lines of anything other than childbearing, motherhood, and domestic duties. Women waged legal battles to become firefighters and police officers.10 Thus, a glance at the women battling California’s fires might convey a message of hope and that the only battles left are the fires themselves—and not the persistent claims of institutional and private discrimination,11 such as colleagues urinating on their beds,12 sexual harassment,13 and retaliation for performing their jobs well.

New York: Cornell Law Review, 2019.

By the Brookings-AEI Working Group on Criminal Justice Reform

U.S. criminal justice figures continue to make us numb, elected officials and citizens alike. Yes, we know the U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world. Yes, we know that when we rank the per capita rate of incarcerations, the U.S. is followed closely by countries like El Salvador and Turkmenistan. We know that our recidivism rates are too high, and that we police our racial/ethnic minority communities too much and too often with tragic results. We know our fellow citizens, mainly people of color, living in those communities continue to suffer from higher rates of crime and police violence. And, lastly, we know these conditions prevail even though U.S. crime rates have fallen to 50-year lows (even considering the recent COVID-era surge) making America about as safe as it was in the 1950s. It is almost as if over policing, prosecution, and imprisonment are habits that the United States just cannot break. 

For two decades now, there has been a bipartisan effort to tackle these systemic problems. Action by President George W. Bush in the mid-2000s to foster improved reentry pathways for men and women returning from prison opened the door to the passage of the bipartisan Second Chance Act and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in programs designed to reform numerous aspects of the criminal justice system including mandatory minimum sentences and felony hiring initiatives. President Barack Obama expanded and accelerated these initiatives adding his own programs including  Banning the Box, presidential commissions on 21st century policing and mass incarceration, as well as pilot programs to reinstitute access to Pell Grants for prisoners. Just last year, President Trump signed the First Step Act beginning the process of reforming sentencing practices and providing funding for training and vocational education for incarcerated people to be more prepared for the labor market after prison. And now President Joe Biden has promised to accelerate criminal justice policy with an eye toward reforming the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, of which he was a principle author, to reduce crime and incarceration. By slow and steady steps, we are moving away from “tough on crime” policies that created the world’s largest prison population and one of its costliest and, from the perspective of rehabilitation and recidivism, most ineffective criminal justice systems. George Floyd’s death at the hands of police last spring and the frequent, though less-noticed, events like it in other American cities, towns, and rural areas, has added new urgency and momentum to the drive to reform our criminal justice system. Unfortunately, the debate has too often collapsed into an unhelpful binary: “support the blue” or “abolish the police.” Either of these poles would tend to have a negative impact on the very communities who have suffered disproportionately under our current criminal justice and law enforcement policies. Excessive policing and use of force, on one hand, and less public safety and social service resources on the other, can both be detrimental to communities that are exposed to high levels of criminal activity and violence. We must find a path of genuine reform, even transformation, that fosters safer, more peaceful, and more resilient communities.   

This volume is a “down payment” on the policy debate America needs right now to continue moving toward a criminal justice system—police, courts, prison, reentry, community supervision—that is focused on the safety, health, and well-being of communities rather than on maintaining a harsh, semi-militarized revolving door system from which, for too many, there is often no escape. The essays in this volume are intended to provide policymakers in Congress and the Biden Administration with research-grounded guidance and insight on core issues and strategies that can sustain bipartisan support for critically needed criminal justice reforms. Our authors come from a broad spectrum of domains and policy perspectives. In fact, most chapters paired scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders from different disciplines and political ideologies. In this regard, each of their chapters concisely summarize the state of research on a given topic and offer bipartisan recommendations for short-, medium- and long-term reforms that will move each of the key sectors of the criminal justice system toward a more humane and effective footing.

Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2021. 95p.