The Humboldt County Sheriff's Office posted on Facebook March 29 that their "inmate work crew," specifically a division that does work for the California Department of Transportation, cleaned up a "large homeless encampment located on Indian Island under the Christensen Memorial Bridge."
"I think that when you look at counties and how they use the work of people who are jailed or imprisoned or undocumented immigrants that are held in immigration detention centers, all this labor involves often encountering hazardous waste, bodily fluids and you know, things people would generally rather not deal with," Ware told Sputnik.
"And when they do, they're paid a somewhat decent wage — not prisoners, people who work within the ‘free market' — they get paid a somewhat decent wage for that because it's not the type of labor people typically want to be paid minimum wage to deal with," Ware explained.
California has long used prison labor to deal with a wide variety of issues. Last year's devastating wildfires in the Sonoma Valley, California's wine country, were pushed back by inmates working as firefighters. They made $1 an hour and were sometimes forced to work for three days straight, Mashable reported. Inmates have been forced to work on the front lines in California's battle against wildfires since the 1940s.
The inmates' assignment to the homeless encampment in Eureka "definitely relates both the degree to which our society doesn't value incarcerated people but also doesn't value homeless people," Ware said. "And often, homeless people are formerly incarcerated people themselves, or when people are released, often they become homeless."
The encampment was located on Indian Island, famous for being the site of a massacre of about one hundred Wiyot men during a ceremony in 1860 by European settlers looking for gold. The three-day World Renewal Ceremony was performed again for the first time in 150 years in March 2014 on the Island.