THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Rehabilitation is still the alleged goal of the public not for profit penal system. This report from Al Jazeera shows one program that almost works the way it should.

Daron Ehling fought 19 wildfires this year — long hours of cutting firebreaks and felling trees in the sweltering heat of eastern Washington. In 2012 he went out on 16 fires. And the year before that?

"The only thing I knew about a chain saw was how much they'd give me at a pawn shop," he says.

Ehling is serving time at the Airway Heights Corrections Center, a prison near Spokane; he ended up there after getting caught breaking into houses in order to support a heroin addiction. He says the adrenaline rush of heading out to a fire reminds him a little of breaking into houses, but it's far more fulfilling: "I can still get that same kind of excitement doing something good, knowing there's a purpose behind it."

Ehling works on a 10-person crew, one of four run out of Airway Heights in collaboration with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR). They work alongside the DNR's civilian engine crews on both initial attack (getting control of wildfires) and mop-up (the long and laborious process of making sure they're entirely out). Andrew Stenbeck, district manager for the DNR, says the inmates involvement is essential to keeping on top of all the fires.

That's become a common story in Western states. Inmates fight fires in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana; in Oregon more than 800 inmates worked on fires this summer. "We couldn’t afford to have paid firefighters doing the same work the inmate firefighters are doing," says Julie Hutchinson, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire. At least two crews of inmates are dispatched to every fire in California — nearly 6,000 this year. Six hundred inmates battled this fall's Rim fire in the Yosemite and Stanislaus national forests.

Climate change is fueling longer, more-intense fire seasons, according to the National Climate Assessment; climate models indicate there will be more devastating fires to come. That means the cost of fighting fires is spiraling upward even as budgets are cut. (The federal spending cuts known as the sequester, for example, eliminated some 500 wildland firefighting jobs and money for 50 engines this year). The upshot is that the West may find itself depending even more on inmate labor to keep fires in check. It's a reality that raises complicated questions. With so much reliance on prisoners, how do you walk the line between rehabilitation and exploitation?

Ideally those who get out of prison could then be employed as firefighters. Thanks to Republican/Teabagger budget cuts, firefighting may become a task performed mainly by convicts. Another chain gang with greater potentially deadly results.