Anna Sussman

The place Amika and the other firefighters call home is actually inside a prison.

It's called Medeir County Station 5 CCWF.

And it's a little brick firehouse with two engines and a handful of rolled hoses, a bunk room with 12 neatly made cots, a little open kitchen and a captain's office.

And there, 12 incarcerated women train and work out, wash fire trucks and go to sleep, all inside the barbed wire fence of one of the largest women's prisons in the world, the Central California Women's Facility, CCWF.

Is there a moment when they kind of lock you in?

From Wondry and Snap Studios at KQED, I'm Anna Sussman, and this is Fire Escape, the story of a woman whose world burned down, and then she learned to fight fire from behind bars.

This is Episode 1, The Crash.

There were nearly 2,000 women locked inside the Central California Women's Facility at the time Amika entered.

Women at all custody levels.

Women serving sentences for crimes ranging from embezzlement to homicide to possession of drugs.

And when I first began interviewing women here, about 20 years ago, they would each always tell me the same thing—

about the shame they endured as women prisoners.

They had let down their families, their parents, their children.

They felt they had failed as women.

It's something corrections officers taunt them about, something their kids, friends, parents make comments about.

I remember interviewing a woman under the shadow of the high prison wall and her saying casually, we're women, we're not supposed to commit crimes.

We're not supposed to be here.

And that comment meant so many things about women who are convicted of crimes and in prison and what everyone thinks of them forever.

When I first met Amika, it was clear she was very aware of this narrative.

When Amika talked about the calls she responded to as an incarcerated first responder, it seemed hers was a story of defying a system intent on burying her under the weight of her worst moment.