According to CalMatters Housing, California's prisons have been relying on a pretty unusual approach to fire detection over the past several years. Rather than upgrading their fire alarm systems, the state has been paying prison employees to manually patrol facilities and watch for smoke or flames. Between 2020 and 2025, this human monitoring cost the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation nearly fifty million dollars, with correctional officers dedicating roughly two hundred seventy thousand hours annually to fire surveillance.
The reason this is happening is straightforward but troubling. Most of California's thirty-one prisons have outdated, broken, or non-functional fire alarm systems. Replacing all of them would cost about one point five billion dollars, which is why the state's fire marshal has ordered the prison department to maintain human vigilance until they can afford proper repairs or upgrades. Prison officials have acknowledged in recent budget requests that this staffing solution represents a significant ongoing expense for the department.
The costs keep climbing in ways that seem hard to justify. The department recently requested over fifteen million dollars just to fund the next year of fire watch coverage, and according to the Legislative Analyst's Office, they actually overspent by about twenty-five million dollars on this same coverage in the previous year. The challenge is complicated by the fact that these surveillance duties are typically performed as overtime by experienced correctional officers, who earn a substantial monthly salary. However, the department is now piloting a lower-cost approach at one facility, where fire watch positions are being classified as administrative assistants at roughly half the officer pay rate.
There's real disagreement about whether this approach is acceptable. A former California prison secretary argues that large-scale fires in prisons are extremely rare given that facilities are built from concrete and steel, and that every prison maintains round-the-clock fire services anyway. He suggests the state is essentially choosing to pay for personnel year after year rather than making the capital investment in modern systems. But fire safety experts and academics who study disaster preparedness in detention facilities say this situation is concerning. They point out that relying on human detection instead of reliable technology could delay fire discovery, putting incarcerated people and staff at serious risk of injury, death, or smoke exposure.
What I am seeing locally in the Bay Area is that deferred maintenance and infrastructure challenges like this eventually ripple through every institution. Whether we're talking about correctional facilities, schools, or public infrastructure, the pattern is always the same: it costs far more to patch problems with personnel than to invest upfront in proper systems. This kind of situation reminds me why understanding the true costs of real estate and facilities management matters, whether you're buying a home, evaluating a commercial property, or overseeing public institutions.
