Kim Kardashian wants higher pay rate for inmate firefighters: ‘I see them as heroes’
Kim Kardashian, who has increasingly used her celebrity to advocate for criminal justice reform, is calling for higher pay for California’s incarcerated firefighters who are battling L.A.’s deadly blazes.
As the Palisades, Eaton and other fires continue to scorch the region, the reality star-turned-beauty mogul praised the hundreds of inmate firefighters on the front lines of the historic firestorms that have already claimed 25 lives, destroyed thousands of structures and displaced tens of thousands of people.
Kardashian — the aspiring lawyer and daughter of the late Robert Kardashian, onetime O.J. Simpson defense attorney — used her platform to highlight the plight of incarcerated firefighters and advocate for better wages.
Those individuals, who are prisoners in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, make up about 30% of California’s wildfire-fighting force in any given year and earn as little as $26.90 for a 24-hour shift, according to Times reports. More than 900 of them have helped battle the wildfires ravaging Southern California over the last week.
“The Kardashians” star noted Saturday on Instagram that there are hundreds of firefighters “risking their lives to save us” as they work 24-hour shifts, “get paid almost nothing,” risk their lives or die in the process “to prove to the community that they have changed and are now first responders.
“I see them as heroes,” she wrote in posts for her 358 million followers.
But the reality star lamented that those firefighters get paid $1 per hour — a rate she said has been the same since 1984. According to CDCR’s website, inmate firefighters typically make between $5.80 to $10.24 per day and can make more than $26 a day during wildfire season. They can get another $1 an hour from Cal Fire when they’re responding to active emergencies.
“It has never been raised with inflation. It’s never been raised when fires got worse and many died,” Kardashian lamented, noting that one proposal for a pay hike “got shot down last minute.”
“I am urging @cagovernor [Gavin Newsom] to do what no Governor has done in 4 decades and raise the incarcerated firefighter pay to a rate [that] honors a human being risking their life to save our lives and homes,” she wrote.
The Los Angeles-based Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to ending mass incarceration, started a fundraiser on Friday to support the fire crews of California’s prisons.
Kardashian also thanked the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection firefighters from the Ventura Training Center for saving her community when the Kenneth fire threatened her Hidden Hills home last week and forced evacuations for her and her reality TV family.
“These are all FORMERLY incarcerated firefighters who have come home, and want to continue serving our community as firefighters. Due to bills passed by [the Anti-Recidivism Coalition], these guys can now get their sentences reduced, expunging the felonies from their records for their fire service. And when they come home can get six-figure jobs working for the fire departments,” she wrote.
The Anti-Recidivism Coalition, an L.A.-based nonprofit dedicated to ending mass incarceration, started a fundraiser on Friday to support the fire crews from California’s prisons. The coalition’s executive director, Sam Lewis, said that by Saturday morning they had already raised more than $40,000.
Meanwhile, private firefighters hired by homeowners have drawn criticism for widening class divisions during disasters. This week, a Pacific Palisades homeowner faced a digital firestorm for asking X users to help him find private firefighters who could save his home. Incidentally, Kardashian and then-husband Kanye West credited private firefighters in 2018 with saving their $60-million home in the Santa Monica Mountains during a wildfire. Kardashian’s critics were also quick to point out that, despite her advocacy, she also faced criticism in 2022 for drought violations by surpassing her home’s allotted water budget by 232,000 gallons. (That issue resurfaced this week and was further underscored in complaints about her sister Khloé Kardashian when she blasted L.A. Mayor Karen Bass over budget cuts that the city fire chief blamed for a lack of preparedness.)
The Marshall Project and other prison reform organizations have highlighted the plight of incarcerated firefighters over the past week as their working conditions shocked some on social media and restarted debates about forced labor and involuntary servitude allowed under California’s Constitution and upheld with a ballot measure in the November election.
Last week, Jeff Macomber, the CDCR secretary, called the incarcerated workers an “essential” part of the state’s fire response. The firefighters often work on hand crews, using hand tools to clear vegetation and create firebreaks that slow the spread of wildfires, The Times reported, while such tasks as operating fire hoses or spreading flame retardant are left to professional firefighters. However, it is common for professional and incarcerated firefighters to do grueling manual labor and work 24-hour shifts during emergencies.
Private firefighters hired by the government, insurance companies or individuals are among the thousands of responders battling flames across Los Angeles County.
Matthew Hahn, a former incarcerated firefighter, posted a viral series of Threads about his previous working conditions to, he said, combat misinformation about the state’s firefighter program.
His remarks on pay largely aligned with those of Kardashian, but he noted that incarcerated firefighters earn additional time-served credits and are paroled earlier. Like Kardashian, he noted that they are eligible to have their criminal records expunged.
“[W]ildland firefighting is one of the few voluntary job assignments in the California prison system, voluntary in the sense that a person isn’t sent to fire camp unless they ask and / or agree to it,” he wrote.
“[I]ncarcerated wildland firefighters who have lived in fire camp for some time typically parole with sizable amounts of money, relative to other prisoners in CA,” he wrote. “[T]hey eat good and plentiful food for standard meals ... [and] they get a sense of purpose in doing something valuable.”
Times staff writers Keri Blakinger and Ruben Vives contributed to this report.
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