Building, rehabilitating, instructing, developing, growing, employing. Those are the promises made by the BRIDGE program, which trains incarcerated young men to fight fires, among other skills.
But does it hold true to those promises? For Burt Torrain, the answer is complicated. Torrain participated in BRIDGE in 1991. Locked away on drug charges, he said the program gave him an opportunity to get out of his cell.
“I learned about forest fires, how you can control it and do different things,” Torrain said. “I enjoyed it.”…