Kim Kardashian wants higher pay rate for inmate firefighters: ‘I see them as heroes’

Reality star-turned-prison-reform advocate Kim Kardashian is calling on California’s government to raise the pay rate for the state’s incarcerated firefighters. Kim Kardashian, who has increasingly used her celebrity to advocate for criminal justice reform, is calling for higher pay for California’s incarcerated firefighters who are battling L.A.’s deadly blazes. It’s never been raised when fires got worse and many died,” Kardashian lamented, noting that one proposal for a pay hike “got shot down last minute.” “I am urging @cagovernor to do what no Governor has done in 4 decades and raise the incarcerated firefighter pay to a rate honors a human being risking their life to save our lives and homes,” she wrote. The Marshall Project and other prison reform organizations have highlighted the plight of incarcerated firefighters over the past week as their working conditions shocked some on social media and restarted debates about forced labor and involuntary servitude allowed under California’s Constitution and upheld with a ballot measure in the November election.