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John,
In the U.S., polluting facilities are more likely to be built, and less likely to be regulated, in low-income communities and communities of color. These communities are deemed "Sacrifice Zones" (1). And this legacy of environmental injustice also connects to the siting of prisons.
Nearly 600 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund site, and of those, more than 100 are just one mile from the toxic site (2). Water contamination, pesticide and coal ash exposure, and sewage and sanitation violations are just some of the health and environmental hazards reported from prisons.
Washington state is no stranger to these injustices. The Northwest Detention Center is located in the Tacoma Tideflats, a heavily and dangerously polluted area that is deemed unfit for residents. The Detention Center sits adjacent to a federal Superfund site where a coal and gasification plant leaked toxic sludge into the soil for three decades.
Our advocacy and community outreach intern, Brad Blackburn, wrote about the connections between prisons and environmental justice. Read more in Brad’s blog piece here.
In addition to prisons being built near highly toxic Superfund sites, the U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with many for-profit prisons receiving funding based on the number of beds that are filled. In this country, 1 in 3 Black men will be arrested at least once in their lifetime and 1 in 6 Latino men will be arrested in their lifetime, while the statistic for white men is 1 in 17 (3).
The environmental injustices directly harming low-income communities and communities of color are also harming disproportionately-imprisoned Black and Brown people. And the racist and exploitative systems that allow for these injustices in our prisons are the same extractive systems that treat our natural world as resources to plunder.
Read more about the intersection of incarceration and environmental justice in this blog piece.
We know that without racial justice there is no environmental justice, and it is crucial as we continue our environmental work to learn more about, study, and share the intersections of injustices.
Thank you for learning and evolving with us,
Dre Say
Field Organizer
Photo by Brad Blackburn
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