Climate Change Behind Bars
Illustration by Mellon Snyder CC '21.
Environmental Catastrophes and Incarcerated Labor
When a spark turns into a flame, destined to become a wildfire, crews of fire technicians are deployed to protect communities from disaster. These workers come from many backgrounds, assuming they all possess the proper credentials, such as a license to serve as an emergency medical technician (E.M.T.). Unfortunately for most formerly incarcerated people, even those with a high school diploma or equivalent, you are practically ineligible to become an E.M.T. if you have a criminal background.
As things stand, though, the only difference between previously incarcerated people and 30% of California’s wildfire response labor pool is the word “previously.” After leaving prison, the option of becoming a firefighter is off the table for most; within prison, however, inmates are welcome and encouraged to fight fires. This irony lies at the core of the complex relationship between the state and incarcerated people in the wake of a changing climate and more frequent environmental disasters.
Working for very little compensation each day, inmates fight alongside civilian firefighters to protect communities from disaster. In 2017 there were 400,000 incarcerated volunteer firefighters deployed to fight thousands of wildfires that wreaked havoc throughout the summer. These jobs are grueling and frequently put inmates' lives at risk—six inmates have died since 1983. Programs such as the California Conservation Corps attract inmates for many reasons, including sentence reduction and job training.
The use of incarcerated people is naturally exploitative. In addition to receiving wages well below the minimum wage, incarcerated laborers receive no legal protections afforded to other workers. Without access to workers’ compensation or unionizing power, the A.C.L.U. argues, incarcerated people are a “uniquely vulnerable workforce.” While exempt from legal protections, inmates are paid between just $2.90 and $5.12 per day for their work. While it is true that inmates technically opt into these positions, the A.C.L.U. additionally points out that prison is an “inherently coercive environment; there’s very little that is truly voluntary.”
The state of California’s reliance on the exploitation of incarcerated workers in response to natural disasters is not a unique situation. As a matter of fact, the majority of states across the U.S. have identified incarcerated workers as a source of labor in response to natural and climate disasters. In preparation and response to Hurricane Irma, inmates in Florida were put to work throwing salt bags and participating in debris clean up to repair the destruction left behind. In Chicago and Boston, inmates were paid $2 to $3 a day to shovel snow in sub-freezing temperatures. This exploitation isn’t merely limited to state emergency responses—private industries utilize this labor force just as frequently. B.P. contracted prison labor to assist in clean up after the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, again paying workers far below minimum wage and exposing them to toxic materials.
This excessive use of prison labor in response to climate disasters can only be understood in the context of America’s history of slavery, mass incarceration, and racial violence. Prison labor in America is the legacy of slavery. The early U.S. agro-economy had a deep reliance on the unpaid labor and continuous subjugation of slaves stolen from their homes in Africa. In 1864, however, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution was ratified, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, except when used as a “punishment for a crime.” To compensate for the void in labor left by emancipation, states rapidly expanded incarceration rates and continue to do so to date.
In the tough-on-crime era after 1980, this trend of mass incarceration grew exponentially as the prison population increased from 500,000 to 2.2 million incarcerated people in 2015. As incarceration rates skyrocketed, black people were disproportionately targeted by discriminatory policies and hyper-policing. This targeting has been carried out in many ways, including sentencing disparities in which federal prosecutors are twice as likely to charge a black defendant for an offense with a mandatory minimum sentence than a white defendant. In addition to a racist judicial system, black people have historically been subject to hyper-policing, as they are more frequently stopped by authorities, increasing the likelihood of arrest. This unequal treatment has resulted in a prison system with incarceration rates for black people five times the rate of white people. Although black people compose 13% of America’s population, 38% of people incarcerated within state prisons are black. The racialized nature of the prison-industrial complex ensures that any mechanism which makes an incarcerated population vulnerable to exploitation or natural disaster is necessarily done in a racist manner.
Disposability and Vulnerability
Climate emergency response understood through the lens of mass incarceration in America highlights this problem as a form of environmental racism. Environmental racism refers to the way in which communities of color, often of a lower socioeconomic status, are disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards, including pollution, toxic waste facilities, and extreme weather events. This manifests in various ways: 13.4% of black children have asthma while only 7.8% of white children have the disease; a person of color is twice as likely to live within the fence-line zone of an industrial facility than a white person; and black children are five times more likely to suffer from lead poisoning than white children. The decisions by local municipalities to construct air- and water-polluting industries in low-income communities of color ignore stakeholder input and effectively consider these populations to be disposable.
In addition to the effects of environmental racism, incarcerated populations—which draw disproportionately from marginalized communities—are simultaneously exploited for their labor and left vulnerable due to their state of captivity. While incarcerated people are deployed to protect communities from destruction, they are simultaneously neglected and disproportionately vulnerable to the same climate catastrophes. When the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events hit, incarcerated people are the last group society considers saving. In the wake of superstorm Florence in South Carolina, over 1,500 inmates in evacuation zones were deserted and left to anticipate the impact from behind bars. This negligence is nothing new. During Hurricane Katrina, inmates in the Orleans Parish Prison were left for several days with little to no food, standing in highly-toxic floodwaters, sometimes chest high. The same happened in Texas prisons during Hurricane Harvey, leaving over 8,000 inmates across four prisons to fend for themselves. Inmates are left vulnerable to more climate-related impacts than just hurricanes. As heat has risen in Texas, three in four prisons lack climate control in areas where prisoners reside. Since 1998 at least 23 people have died from heat-related illnesses, including a 13% increase in these illnesses amongst inmates in 2018.
These various environmental-related problems are not isolated scenarios, rather points on a trend of increasingly frequent and intense disasters caused by rising global temperatures. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on the effects of anthropogenic climate change reaching 1.5°C and 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The report argues with high confidence that extreme weather events like wildfires and floods will only become more frequent and intense as carbon emissions continue to trap heat in our atmosphere. Sea level rise from melting ice caps will not only displace millions of people, but has also contributed to higher severity hurricanes. As incarcerated people are left on the front lines during extreme weather events, climate change exacerbates their danger. For example, the vast floods and heavy rainfall during Hurricane Harvey were a direct result of higher global temperatures, trapping inmates in knee-high toxic water. As global temperatures continue to increase, populations around the nation and the world face new threats, and already marginalized communities are disproportionately vulnerable.
Rising rates of incarceration intermix with climate change to create conditions for disposability. The 500% increase in the rate of incarceration over the last forty years has left prisons overpopulated and under-resourced, which exacerbates climate vulnerability. In the case of the previous examples, coordinating safe evacuations in the face of Hurricane Katrina was unthinkable because of overpopulation. Evacuating 6,000 inmates to prepare for the hurricane seemed impossible as it had taken six hours to evacuate 300 from a smaller prison nearby. Second, a recent study from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University determined heat deaths and heat-related illnesses drastically increase in prisons when they become overpopulated. While it is true that incarcerated people become more vulnerable to the effects of climate change through institutionalized and racialized neglect, the expansion of the complex further intensifies these vulnerabilities through overcrowding.
Toxicity
Rising prison populations also correlate to expanded prison infrastructure, resulting in the construction of 110 new prisons during the first ten years of the 21st century. The location of such prisons are disproportionately within rural, low-income communities and communities of color, similar to the placement of polluting industries. Typically these prisons are built on undesirable land like old mining sites or in close proximity to toxic waste facilities. At least 589 prisons in the United States are located within three miles of a Superfund cleanup site, making prisoners more susceptible to health problems. In addition to exposure to toxic waste, prisoners are vulnerable to various localized environmental hazards. For example, prisoners at SCI Fayette, a Pennsylvania prison located adjacent to a coal ash dump site, suffer disproportionately from respiratory disorders, thyroid disorders, and cancer—all symptoms which result from prolonged exposure to coal ash. It is in precisely this way that environmental discrimination and mass incarceration combine to render incarcerated populations some of the most vulnerable populations to environmental hazards within the US.
Not only are prisons located in places with excess pollution, they also frequently become a source of pollution themselves. Over the last five years, federal and state environmental protection agencies issued 160 formal and informal citations for violations of the Clean Water Act. One of the more egregious violations occurred in 2004 when a California prison discharged 220,000 gallons of raw sewage into a pristine creek nearby. Similarly, over the last five years, at least 141 formal and informal violations of the Clean Air Act have occurred. For example, prisons using coal-fire boilers in Pennsylvania were recently charged $300,000 for exceeding various emissions standards. As the prison-industrial complex spans both private and public sectors, it is important to note that the only agency with sweeping oversight over the entire complex is the Environmental Protection Agency. The continued use of this oversight is necessary to hold prisons accountable.
The rise of the prison-industrial complex and rapid, widespread environmental degradation have combined to become particularly insidious for low-income communities, communities of color, and especially incarcerated populations. Mass incarceration, a phenomenon that relies on a historically constituted and racialized desire for cheap labor, constructs a class of vulnerable and disposable individuals in the face of rising environmental disasters. As states prepare for catastrophe, emergency response procedures are fundamentally reliant on the existence of an incarcerated labor pool. There is an attitude that prisoners are disposable: they are paid extremely low wages, and their health and safety is routinely abandoned in the face of both slow-acting environmental hazards and sudden climate-related disasters.
The Green New Deal’s Omission
As progressive environmentalist movements across the U.S. demand federal and state-based policy within the inclusionary values of environmental justice, conversations of criminal justice and prison reform are detrimentally excluded. Environmental justice is a practice that prioritizes the input of marginalized communities and recognizes the pervasive effects of environmental racism within the policymaking process. The Green New Deal, championed by progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, seeks to actualize this vision at a federal level. The Green New Deal combines the demands of labor movements, identity groups, environmental activists, and others to create the conditions for a just transition away from fossil fuels to avoid the devastating effects of climate change. The resolution, however, fails to consider questions of criminal justice and prison reform within its multidimensional approach. The existence and continued expansion of the prison-industrial complex leaves a large population especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Any policy change that fails to reconcile this intersection cannot sufficiently meet the demands of an environmental justice approach. This negligence already exists within environmental justice initiatives today, seeing as the E.P.A.’s environmental justice guidelines are not applied to incarcerated people.
Seth Prins and Brett Story, associate professors at Columbia University and Ryerson University respectively, make the case for a Green New Deal for Decarceration. It's not a coincidence, they point out, that the largest carbon emitter in history also incarcerates the highest number of its citizens. The domination and inequity at the root of the carceral system is merely reflective of our economic structures, which rely on endless environmental exploitation. A Green New Deal for Decarceration is a community vision in which mass incarceration and prison building as a form of development is replaced with investments in “living wage jobs, social infrastructure for healthy living, just solutions to ecological and social problems, from rampant inequality to the climate emergency.”
As mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change becomes the nexus of policy creation in the next decade, it is necessary that environmental policymakers and activists continue to work alongside anti-prison and prison abolitionist groups. The Prison Ecology Project has successfully merged these interests, recently resulting in a movement that successfully opposed the creation of a new prison in Kentucky which would have had an adverse ecological impact. As federal and state-based policy is constructed, these coalitions must be bolstered to ensure that any progressive climate action includes demands to address mass incarceration and dismantle the prison-industrial complex.
Morgan Margulies is a staff writer at CPR and a sophomore studying political science and sustainable development at Columbia University. He is from a small town located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California and loves his older brother.