Given The Choice Between Prison Life And Fighting Wildfires, These Women Chose Fire
NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with writer Jaime Lowe about her new book, Breathing Fire, which tells the stories of the incarcerated women who comprise about a third of California's wildfire crews.
As climate change makes fire seasons hotter and longer in the U.S., about 20,000 firefighters are currently working to contain blazes across the country. For decades now, some of California's incarcerated population have been among those doing this life-saving work, at great risk to their own.
One of those people was Shawna Lynn Jones. In 2016, she was working in one of the state's fire camps and fighting the Mulholland Fire in Malibu when a boulder the size of a basketball struck her in the head. She died a day later, becoming the first incarcerated woman in the
