Our Voices

Behind the Headlines: The Urgency of Decarceration in the Fight for Climate Justice 

In October, Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida, just weeks after Hurricane Helene, which killed over 200 people across six states. Scientists believe that the intensity and frequency of severe hurricanes in recent years is in large part due to climate change.

In one of the largest and most urgent evacuation efforts in Florida history, thousands of people living in Milton’s path fled their homes under mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders. But over 28,000 people currently incarcerated in Florida’s mandatory evacuation zones had no ability to flee the storm’s path. In fact, officials at jails and prisons in some of the most flood-prone areas ignored evacuation orders, exposing incarcerated people to risk of serious harm, including death.

Climate as Punishment, Prisons as Polluters

Increasingly extreme weather patterns caused by climate change expose incarcerated people to deadly conditions and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. When natural disasters hit, incarcerated people are left without medical care, food and water supplies, and the ability to communicate with their loved ones for weeks. Earlier this month, people incarcerated at the Mountain View Correctional Institution in North Carolina were unable to escape Hurricane Helene, locked in their cells with their own feces and without electricity or running water for nearly a week. Meanwhile, in Texas prisons, people held without air conditioning during summer heat waves are exposed to deadly triple-degree temperatures, killing an average of 14 people per year.

The devastating impact of climate change on prison populations is not happenstance. It is the foreseeable result of America’s mass incarceration crisis, propelled by a prison industrial complex wherein governments incentivize prison construction to prop up flagging local economies where land has been degraded from natural resource extraction and industrial pollution. Prisons are built on environmentally unsound lands like riverland plots, historic sites of slave-labor plantations that are especially prone to flooding, and “undesirable” lands like landfills and toxic waste sites. One-third of all state and federal prisons (nearly 600 facilities) are currently located within three miles of federal Superfund sites, dangerously contaminated regions that pose serious health risks and require long-term cleanup. Many jails and prisons are also in extremely poor condition, exposing people to further danger during floods and natural disasters.

Mass incarceration also exacerbates the catastrophic effects of climate change. Increases in state prison populations are associated with increases in industrial emissions, a key driver of climate change. Prisons across the country are also huge polluters, with prisons in Pennsylvania, Alabama, California, and Washington, among others, dumping thousands of gallons of sewage into nearby rivers and waterways. New prison construction further fuels the cycle of environmental destruction. The proposed construction of the Letcher County prison in eastern Kentucky, for example, located at the site of a former coal mine, would emit an additional thousands of pounds of greenhouse gas.

Decarceration as Climate Change Mitigation

Almost 20 years ago, Hurricane Katrina left thousands in prison trapped without food, water, and medical care during and after the storm. Yet governments across the United States have still failed to address the need for emergency preparedness in prisons and the role that prisons play in exacerbating climate change. Passing legislation such as the Correctional Facility Disaster Preparedness Act, which requires federal facilities to create adequate emergency preparedness plans, is a critical first step. 

But preparing for disaster falls short of addressing mass incarceration’s role in propagating it in the first place. The maintenance and construction of prisons and jails exacerbates pollutants that worsen the disastrous effects of climate change, affecting not just incarcerated people but the entire population. The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world and must move to decarcerate and drastically reduce the number of people held in jails and prisons. The increasing risk of torturous, even deadly, prison conditions caused by climate change, alongside the increased risk of natural disasters caused by prison maintenance and construction, make reducing the U.S. incarcerated population an urgent human rights issue.