“Breathing Fire” Profiles the Incarcerated Women on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires

KQED's Forum

On the front lines of California’s raging wildfires, teams of incarcerated men and women work alongside free-world crews to stop our state’s increasingly dangerous forest fires. They make a fraction of the pay to confront the same dangers and show the same bravery. In a new book, Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe paints a deep portrait of one group of incarcerated women firefighters, delving into how they got to prison, the dangerous work they do to get themselves out, and what happens when the fires end, and they’re back out in the world. We’ll talk with Lowe and two of the firefighters she chronicles in the book about life, inside and out.