I agree that it looks like a rehabilitation program. It just seems like a bad one, because:
1) you shouldn’t have to risk your life to see your family or get time knocked off your sentence. It’s simply not normal that prisoners have to make this choice in a situation where their agency and access to alternatives are so limited; but this program contributes to normalizing it.
2) as others have pointed out, prisoners receive “training” for a trade that they won’t be allowed to practice after they serve their sentence. This tells me that rehabilitation wasn’t the primary motivation, or if it was, it was poorly thought out.
Overall this feels like a very slippery slope... even if this particular program is the best possible implementation of the idea, with proper training, and rules in place to avoid treating prisoners as relatively more expendable, putting them in more danger than other firemen, etc. My question is: what if it weren’t a perfect implementation, and abuse did occur? Are there any incentives and checks to prevent such abuse? Or would we all collectively shrug and say “seems like rehabilitation, nothing to see here”.
Given the general state of the carceral system in the US, I think the burden should be on the people responsible for this program to acknowledge these risks, and go out of their way to reassure the concerns of citizens like myself. It definitely is not reasonable to dismiss my criticism unless I prove a track record of helping prisoners first-hand as you have done. My opinion on the issue is just as legitimate as yours, and I wish you hadn’t dismissed it in the way you did (I also wish I hadn’t overreacted to it, we could have had a more constructive debate).