Tag: CCOLA

Prisoners fighting California fires denied licenses after release

Nick Sibilla, a legislative analyst at the Institute for Justice, has published this fine op ed piece in today’s USA Today, describing how the 2,000 state prisoners currently engaged in fighting the largest fire in California history, are barred from obtaining the necessary EMT license that would enable them to continue this work after their release.  It contains, inter alia, a description of the two bills currently pending in the California legislature that would end what Nick describes as a “bitterly ironic” situation, where prisoners gain valuable training in certain vocations that they cannot use after their release.  The piece seems particularly relevant, in light of the amazing work being done on occupational licensing reform across the country, much of it inspired by the Institute for Justice’s Model Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act.   See, e.g. New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Kansas, Indiana, Arizona, and Tennessee.  We hope California will soon join this group of enlightened jurisdictions, and that other states will follow in the coming year.

Despite fighting California’s largest fires, inmates are denied licenses they need to become firefighters after they get out.

by Nick Sibilla, USA Today, August 20, 2018

As California struggles to contain the largest fire in state history, more than 2,000 inmates have volunteered to fight the flames. Offering just $1 an hour, the state has long  encouraged low-level prisoners to risk their lives and serve alongside professional firefighters, who earn nearly $74,000 a year on average. Firefighting, along with less life-threatening trades like plumbing, welding, and cosmetology, is one of several vocational training programs offered to prisoners by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

But in a bitterly ironic twist, once inmates leave prison, they often can’t work as firefighters, despite their frontline experience. In California, nearly all counties require firefighters to become licensed emergency medical technician (EMTs) — a credential that can be denied to almost anyone with a criminal record.

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Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act

We’ve noted in recent posts the numerous states that, just in the past three or four months, have enacted broad occupational licensing reforms affecting people with a criminal record.  Many of these new laws have been influenced by a model developed by the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm that has been litigating and lobbying to reduce barriers to work for more than two decades.  In turn, states like Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Wisconsin have built upon IJ’s model to enact even more progressive schemes intended to ensure that people with the requisite professional qualifications will not be unfairly excluded based on a record of arrest or conviction.

Now IJ has incorporated many of these progressive refinements into its original model licensing law, the Occupational Licensing Review Act (OLRA), and broken out the provisions relating to criminal records into a free-standing model act specifically directed at managing collateral consequences in the occupational licensing context, the new Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act (CCOLA).

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