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 he 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. 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 in 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 with human waste swirling around in it. All the while, wildfires ripped through California, leaving several prisons without power for a month—shutting down ventilation 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 by 2100, and 621 facilities have major-to-extreme flood risk. 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, 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 to 120 degrees in some prisons, trapping thousands of people in inhumanely hot cells.
“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 between 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 in 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. 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, states that prisons produce waste and pollution far beyond local and federal standards, often in under-resourced communities and their environments. A 2020 study on 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, 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 during a climate hazard. Last year, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights released a 166-page report looking 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%. Yet, both crime and recidivism rates have fallen. 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% in 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 from 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.
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. 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 or follow him on X @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.
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