When young men arrive at Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp—California’s first and only remaining rehabilitative prison camp for offenders sentenced as teens—they first notice the trees. Pine Grove sits in a small valley just above the snow line in the western Sierra Nevadas, between a casino and the mountains. The second thing they notice is that there is no barbed wire surrounding the property.

Photographer Brian L. Frank, a 2017 Catchlight Foundation fellow, spent a year working with The Marshall Project to examine alternatives to traditional incarceration. One piece of that work, shown here, focuses on the young men incarcerated at Pine Grove, also known as “fire camp.” Frank documented the men, who range in age from 18 to 24, as they learned to fight fires and perform other wilderness jobs, such as clearing brush and streams. He followed the prisoners as they attended school and, eventually, were released back to their communities.

Published in partnership with California Sunday Magazine and supported by CatchLight , a nonprofit dedicated to visual storytelling and the power of photography to drive social change.

Those young men included Marcus Tapia, Kermit Moore and Kain Castro, who each came to Pine Grove in 2016. Tapia and Moore grew up in Los Angeles and were raised primarily by their grandparents. Tapia was imprisoned for armed robbery and gun possession; Moore for attempted murder. Castro grew up in Salinas, where he lived with his mother, brother and sister. In his teens, Castro was arrested and sent to prison for assault. All three were incarcerated in state prisons for juveniles before earning their places at Pine Grove with good behavior and by taking classes and programs.

“Everything was good about it except the time, you know?” Tapia says of Pine Grove. “Because time kills you.” For Moore, the camp felt like a “neutral zone”—for once, his gang or race didn’t seem to matter.

There are two ways to leave Pine Grove: get paroled or get kicked out and serve the rest of your time back in prison. Tapia and Moore took the latter route—Tapia for getting into a fight with another ward, Moore for talking back to a captain. After more than a year at the camp, they each were transferred to a juvenile prison in Ventura County. Tapia was released in February 2018, two months before his 21st birthday. Moore, now 21, was paroled over the summer.

Castro was considered a model ward at Pine Grove and was released in October 2017 at age 18. Coming home felt like a test, he says, “like everyone’s looking at you.” A few days before he arrived home, his older brother violated parole and was sent back to prison. Eight months later, Castro was arrested for missing a probation appointment. Not long after he went back to jail in Monterey County, he got into a fight and was charged with assault. He’s now waiting to be sentenced.