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DECARCERATION IS THE BEST WAY PRISONS CAN ADAPT TO CLIMATE CHANGE  
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Christopher Blackwell and Sarah Sax
July 25, 2024
Prism
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_ Most prisons have no real plan for how to deal with the kind of
misery climate change inflicts—and will inflict—on incarcerated
people. _

, (Shutterstock)

 

When smoke from wildfires in Quebec started blanketing New York’s
morning sky last summer, Corey Arthur, an incarcerated person at
Otisville Correctional Facilities west of Newburgh, figured it was
probably a chemical explosion. Despite having heard about the
wildfires for several days on the news, he could barely believe that
something 500 miles away could be responsible for the thick orange
haze
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was looking at outside of his window as he waited for the 7 a.m.
morning count. 

“Collectively, we were confused,” he wrote. “Then we became
worried when we realized that the New York Department of Corrections
didn’t have a plan for what to do.” 

The air quality index from those wildfires broke records; New York
City quickly became the most polluted place on earth on June 7.
Millions of people were subjected to toxic air for a week. The fires
were early for fire season but right in line with what climate experts
have predicted for decades: Climate change will continue to cause
larger, more frequent, and more devastating impacts that will test the
limits of our social and ecological systems. 

Prisons are already at that limit. Even without climate change,
prisons around the country have billions of dollars worth of deferred
maintenance just to stop the walls from crumbling and keep the lights
and the heat on. Now, climate change is turning already miserable
conditions inside of prisons into life-threatening ones
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As wards of the state, incarcerated people are completely dependent on
prison management for their safety. They cannot flee, they have no
control over their environment, and they have limited ability to make
behavioral changes to adapt to extreme heat, floods, or toxic air
quality. 

We have a legal—and moral—imperative to keep incarcerated people
safe. Yet incarcerated people are systematically excluded from most
state climate adaptation plans, and, in the rare cases that
contingency plans for climate hazards exist, they are often unaware of
them. 

Unless we immediately decarbonize and stop extracting fossil fuels,
climate hazards will only become more frequent and severe. When
Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana almost two decades ago, guards in a
New Orleans jail panicked. With no guidance from management or the
state and a rapidly worsening storm building around them, they
abandoned hundreds of incarcerated people
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their cells while floodwaters rose, forcing them to drink the putrid
water that seeped into their cells. Back then, it was an exception. 

Now, such scenarios are happening with increased frequency around the
country. During a record-breaking 2021 heat wave, prisons in the
usually temperate Pacific Northwest were overwhelmed. Incarcerated
people were trapped in cells that reached up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit
with no AC and no fans, covering themselves with cool washcloths and
lying on the concrete floor to avoid heat stroke. That same summer,
floods devastated prisons in Dixie County, Florida, leaving
incarcerated individuals stuck in ankle-deep, fetid water
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human waste swirling around in it. All the while, wildfires ripped
through California, leaving several prisons without power for a
month—shutting down
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systems, access to cooked food, and multiple other necessities. 

Often located in remote, rural communities, frequently on brownfields
or near Superfund sites, prisons are dangerously underprepared for the
increasingly severe impacts of climate change, but they’re uniquely
susceptible. According to The Intercept’s analysis of 6,500 prisons,
jails, and detention facilities across the U.S., half of all prisons
will be in places with more than 10 days annually over 105 degrees
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2100, and 621 facilities have major-to-extreme flood risk
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The same analysis showed that at least 54 jails, prisons, and
detention centers nationwide holding more than 1,000 people are above
the 95th percentile for wildfire risk
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meaning that they will, sooner or later, be forced to evacuate. 

For now, heat waves—already the deadliest climate hazard
worldwide—are also the biggest hazard for prisons. Shortly after the
Texas Senate denied funding that would have seen ACs installed in all
prisons in Texas, the state was hit with another heat wave, and
the heat index soared
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120 degrees in some prisons, trapping thousands of people
in inhumanely hot cells
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“The tablet is malfunctioning due to the heat. Soda pops are
spontaneously exploding,” Kwaneta Harris, who is incarcerated in a
Texas prison, wrote last August. “Two girls had seizures, a guard
fainted, and I have had a dizzying headache. It’s horrible.” At
least 41 people died in Texas prisons
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June and August 2023; experts say most of those deaths were
heat-related.

ACs are one of the best ways to keep people from dying during a heat
wave, but many prisons still lack them. Forty-four states don’t
have ACs
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all of their prisons, including 10 states in the South, where
temperatures in prison have reached as high as 145 degrees. 

Even with AC, many prisons still lack a functioning electrical and
plumbing system. Facilities around the nation, many more than 100
years old, face billions of dollars in deferred maintenance costs
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Our recent investigation into climate change and prison infrastructure
in Washington state showed that because of deferred maintenance and
outdated HVAC systems, both heat and AC don’t actually reach many
cells even when the system is present. Under normal conditions, that
is simply cruel and inhumane—and during a powerful snowstorm or heat
wave, it could be lethal. 

Washington isn’t an exception. Reports from other states around the
country show an epidemic of crumbling prison infrastructure. A DOJ
inspector general report found that every single one of the 123
federal prisons, which collectively house nearly 160,000 incarcerated
people, needed maintenance, requiring at least $2 billion.  

Prisons also perpetuate and exacerbate the very climate hazards they
are woefully unprepared to face. As a result of being built on or near
wastelands, prisons constantly expose those inside and outside to
tainted water, harmful air pollutants, and other environmental
hazards. Panagioti Tsolkas, head of the Prison Ecology Project
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that prisons produce waste and pollution far beyond
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and federal standards, often in under-resourced communities
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their environments. A 2020 study
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how mass incarceration contributes to climate change showed that
increasing incarceration rates between 1997 and 2016 were correlated
with increases in industrial emissions due to expanding industrial
prison supply manufacturing operations.

With a few exceptions, most prison agencies have no climate adaptation
plans and scant plans for dealing with the mass calamities that
climate hazards like floods or wildfires are already bringing. When
plans do exist, they are largely inadequate. For example,
the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation plan
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developed as part of an executive order mandating all state agencies
develop climate adaptation plans, outlines primarily how the state
will improve existing infrastructure to stave off the worst effects of
climate change with almost no information about mitigating impacts to
incarcerated people
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a climate hazard. Last year, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
released a 166-page report
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at the impacts of climate change on incarcerated people in California
prisons, finding that even with the plan in place, the California
carceral system is not prepared to respond to climate hazards in or
near prisons and that aging infrastructure, lack of emergency response
plans, and overcrowding in prison are contributing to the problem.

Decarceration is the humane solution that should be considered on a
national scale to combat climate crises in prisons. Locking fewer
people up and letting more people out is not only a criminal justice
issue, but also our best bet at adapting prisons to climate change. It
also works.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and left hundreds of
incarcerated people trapped for days forced to drink sewage water in
their cells, the city managed to slash its jail population by 67%
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Yet, both crime and recidivism rates have fallen
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Evidence is increasingly showing that decarceration, coupled with
policies that keep people out of prison, is the socially,
economically, and physiologically better option. 

It is also safer. Between 1999 and 2020, when New York more than
halved its prison population, the state’s violent crime rate fell
by 38%
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comparison to the national rate of 24%. Decarceration has proven
repeatedly to be more effective in ensuring citizen security in the
state, reducing recidivism, and lowering costs than mass
incarceration. It is also imminently possible. During the pandemic, we
were able to release 100,000 people
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state and federal prisons, an 8% decrease in the entire prison
population. 

Now, incarceration rates are slowly starting to rise again. We should
seize the chance we have now to enact laws that would reduce the
number of people going into prisons. Stopping juvenile adjudications,
focusing on reentry and restorative justice, and investing in
evidence-based policies that lower sentencing lengths have all shown
to be effective
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Almost every other industrialized country has found humane, dignified
ways of incarcerating vastly fewer people, with recidivism and crime
rates that are far lower than ours. The U.S. prison system in
comparison has been called an “affront to human dignity,” and
represents the “worst version of a racist criminal legal system,”
according to a U.N. report published in September
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We need to follow the science and evidence rather than outdated
“tough-on-crime” narratives and notions of what public safety
is. 

The pandemic unmasked the horrors of what happens when
prisons—crumbling, unprepared, and overcrowded—are hit with a
crisis. Climate change is no different. We are at a fork in the road.
We can continue to turn a blind eye to the harms of mass incarceration
and our crumbling prison infrastructure that will be painfully
amplified as climate change worsens or choose the humane option:
investing now in decarceration and criminal justice reform, with
ultimately lower costs to our economy, our society, and the people who
sooner or later will become full members of our society. We need to
act now, while we still have a choice.

_Christopher Blackwell is a Washington-based award-winning journalist
currently incarcerated. His work has been featured in the New York
Times, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Huff Post, and many more.
You can read more of his work at: www.christopher-blackwell.com
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@chriswblackwell._

_Sarah Sax is an award-winning journalist who covers the climate
crisis, Indigenous affairs, labor, and transnational trade. Her work
has appeared in the Washington post, the Guardian, High Country News,
and Grist among others. Follow her @sarahl_Sax._

_“Prism [[link removed]] is an independent and nonprofit
newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and
at the intersections of injustice.” (www.prismreports.org
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_The Right to Write (R2W) project is an editorial initiative where
Prism works with incarcerated writers to share their reporting and
perspectives across our verticals and coverage areas. Learn more about
R2W and how to pitch here
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* Mass Incarceration
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* Climate Change
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* Prison Abolition
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