When I was a kid we lived in a house that was surrounded by Southern Michigan prison farms. It wasn’t unusual for us to play in the yard just a few yards from inmates baling hay. There was a guard with a shotgun leaning against the fence talking to my dad.
There were no problems till they started trusting the inmates to go out and work with no supervision. Then a man and his wife died at the hands of a man named Harden Bey who took what he wanted, stepped back over the fence, finished his workday and went back to his cell.
Very scary story. And you did a wonderful job of recounting it in one sentence. Great writing.
I don’t know about other places but California still uses prisoners on hot shot crews to fight watershed fires. Year after year hubby had the same prisoners working for him on his crew....and they worked.
They got paid for it (very little) and they got out of the prison for awhile. There were qualifications they had to meet and they knew if they ever screwed up the nice gig was over. Hubby says they jumped through hoops for him.