In February 2016, Shawna Lynn Jones was 45 days shy of completing her three-year sentence in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) system. Along with other incarcerated women, she was part of a ground crew fighting a wildfire.

At any California wildfire, up to 30% of those battling the flames are inmate firefighters, who risk their lives for a base pay of $2.56 per day plus $1 an hour when out on the fire lines.

On Feb. 26, Shawna and her crew were fighting a Malibu wildfire that threatened multimillion-dollar homes. Shifting earth above them loosened rocks in the drought-dry soil. Shawna was struck by a boulder and died. She was 22 years old.

In her remarkable "Breathing Fire," journalist Jaime Lowe opens the story of the CDCR Conservation Camp firefighting program with the events of Shawna's death on the line, and the details of a short life that ended with a three-year sentence for drug offenses. Shawna was not unusual. The number of women in U.S. prisons has risen more than 750% since 1980. Between 1980 and 2019, arrests for drug possession tripled for women.

Many of these women are held in low-security prisons, and in California, those women are eligible to train for firefighting.

But what first appears as a golden opportunity to leave the walls of prison and live in the wilderness is weighted not only by the requirements, but also by the sense that the choice to join the program is not one made freely. Training for the program is rigorous, not only learning various firefighting techniques, but also enduring punishing hikes on steep trails while carrying heavy equipment. And prisoner crews are given some of the most physically demanding tasks — clearing trees and brush in order to create fire break lines — all while earning one-40th of what a civilian crew member would make.

Lowe's compassionate and deeply empathetic book ranges over a variety of subjects and offers a steady stream of data combined with anecdotes to show how a significant portion of California's response to the ravages of climate change has been built upon the backs of incarcerated labor.

She details the conditions in the prisons where the women are kept; in contrast to the relatively better conditions in the conservation camps, she demonstrates that volunteering to join the dangerous work of fighting fires is not as much of a free choice as it appears.

While the women are given specialized job skills that should be transferable to the outside firefighting workforce, in California, felons are rarely considered for such jobs. And the mental health and addiction issues that put women in prison in the first place make them vulnerable upon their release.

Lowe writes with an affection for the women with whom she spent four years while writing "Breathing Fire." As readers get to know Carla, Selena, Sonya, Marquet, Whitney and Alisha and the families who love and worry over them, she brings into sharp relief how an entire class of people are performing labor under conditions approaching complete enslavement. Her important book also points to the uncomfortable truth that the front lines of the fight against climate change are peopled with those society has forgotten.

Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Oregon.

Breathing Fire
By: Jaime Lowe.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 320 pages, $27.