THE PROBLEM: CLIMATE CHANGE AND INCARCERATION
The convergence of mass incarceration and climate change in the United States presents a national crisis to basic human rights, racial justice, and collective climate resilience. This crisis is impacting individuals inside the carceral system, prison workers, the families of those incarcerated, and to American society at large.
With nearly 1.9 million adults in nearly 6,300 incarceration facilities, the U.S. incarcerates more people than anywhere else in the world (Gribble & Pellow, 2022). Black individuals and communities, and other racial and ethnic minorities, are disproportionately targeted and impacted. These vulnerable populations already bear the disproportionate weight of climate effects.
Through increased frequency and intensity of climatic extremes including extreme temperatures, flooding, disease, and wildfire, climate change is converging with the existing vulnerabilities of incarcerated persons and wholly inadequate carceral infrastructure to radically exacerbate harm. These harms include threats to mental and physical health, inhumane systems of solitary confinement and psychological mistreatment, deprivation of healthy social relationships necessary for resilience, trauma from racism, sexism, and sexual assault, high rates of suicide, unsafe prison labor conditions, and daily conditions of violence (Glade, et al., 2022; Glade et al., under review; Purdum et al., 2021).
A U.S. Department of Justice report described these scenarios as not hypothetical, but already impacting “lawsuits, staff recruitment and retention, and infrastructure built for past climates” (NIC, 2014). Violence is also increasing, and expected to increase further (NIC, 2014). Other effects of climate change on carceral infrastructure include damage to facility and transport infrastructure, higher and unstable fuel prices, inadequate access to potable water and food, and unstable electrical power grids.
The harms of incarceration extend beyond the prison walls. Most people who are incarcerated return to historically disenfranchised communities shaped by generations of segregation policies with limited resources to reintegrate while bearing the burden of physical, emotional, and financial costs of their incarceration (Clear, 2007; Pellow, 2021). Prisons make society less safe by heightening racial inequalities and tensions; impairing the development of children and functioning of families; increasing unemployment, homelessness, and hopelessness; straining public physical and mental health infrastructure; stymying labor markets; and reducing public safety (Clear, 2020).
As a result, mass incarceration has shortened the overall U.S. life expectancy by 5 years (Prison Policy Initiative) and costs society well over $80 billion a year (deVuono-Powell et al., 2015). These costs compound these communities’ already disproportionate vulnerability to climate change. In addition, prison staff experience harm to their health and safety, high rates of trauma and PTSD, and increasingly pressurized prison environments, all of which are exacerbated by climate extremes (NIC, 2014).
The U.S. incarceration system is completely ill-equipped to deal with climate extremes, with indoor summer temperatures that reach 150oF in some prisons (Skarha et al., 2020). Prisons are dated, dilapidated, unsafe, and overcrowded infrastructure, sit on or are near toxic and geographically exposed lands, and often lack emergency plans (Robbins, 2008). Under “normal” conditions, these facilities fail to provide basic protections to those incarcerated such as available drinking water, quality health care, and proper ventilation and air conditioning. In Texas, members of our team have shown a lack of access to cold showers, air conditioning and cool, safe drinking water, even for those with health conditions worsened by extreme temperatures. Those who request access to these infrastructures receive punitive treatment. This has significant effects on physical and mental health (Purdum et al., 2022).
Despite these far-reaching and inhumane consequences, the nexus of climate change, incarceration, and infrastructure has remained largely overlooked by scientific, professional, and policy communities. As a result, there is inadequate information to inform policy about changes to the social and physical infrastructure of prisons that could reduce these injustices, including through decarceration or alternative climate-sensitive development models.