Tag Archives: climate injustice

Rectifying the Intersection of the Prison Industrial Complex and Climate Change

by Christopher Hongach

Often neglected from the discourse of climate change environmentalism are prisons and prison inmates. By exposing the embedded social injustices that have structured the prison industrial complex in the United States, the overlapping and intertwined effects of racism, capitalism, and imperialism reveal how certain bodies, particularly Black bodies, are targeted, exploited, and made disposable, at the sanction of state and neoliberal powers. 

U.S. Prisons have significantly increased since the 1970's. This is the central feature of the prison industrial complex. 

Photo from https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-prisons-building-catalogs-of-inmates-voices-report/1380458

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-prisons-building-catalogs-of-inmates-voices-report/1380458

One of the most challenging components of climate change discourse is the establishment of inclusivity. With a society structured on differences and divisions, it seems collectivizing politically for climate change initiatives is nearly impossible. Even emphasizing democratic principles has its short-comings in the establishment of inclusivity, specifically as they operate within state power, both ideologically and institutionally. In order to uphold the essential democratic principles, a policing and a “securitizing” system must exist within state power over society. Understanding this means understanding that there is inherent “otherness” to a society. Upon conviction of certain violations, “others” become “the incarcerated,” who, then, endure the oppression enforced upon them by state power and its supported agencies.  

Once convicted, persons are completely dehumanized; closed off from society and open social and political participation, prisoners are cut off the world.  

Prisoners line up to vote at the D.C. Jail in Washington, DC.Jacquelyn Martin/AP. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/the-race-gap-in-u-s-prisons-is-glaring-and-poverty-is-making-it-worse/

Due to the war on drugs and the war on crime, from the 1970’s onward, America saw the rise of prisons and, with that, an increase in incarceration in the population. These changes, occurring after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, most effectively targeted Black communities. Today, while there are between 1.7 – 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. (or 1/200 people), Black men make up the largest percentage of the incarcerated population in the U.S. (about 1/100 Black people are incarcerated; with 1/3 Black men being incarcerated).  

The increase of prisons and prisoners are part of the prison industrial complex, which seeks to address social issues with incarceration, rather than with sophisticated investments in true rehabilitative resources or social equity. 

https://www.ted.com/playlists/651/truths_about_the_us_prison_system

Other features of the prison industrial complex reveal neoliberal agendas that further imprison the incarcerated and violate their human rights, such as the cost-cutting effects on prisoner’s essential needs or through the violating practices of prison labor. 

In circumstances of climate change, prisons have especially experienced exploitation and disposability by state and neoliberal forces. 

Prisons like SCI Fayette in Pennsylvania, built near a coal dumping grounds, seemingly geographically out of reach of social centers, endure the toxicity of coal ash contamination of water and air, leaving prisoners with serious complications to their health. 

Other prison issues pertaining to climate change, like in California, where global warming has significantly contributed to the damages caused by forest fires, exposes the issues of prison labor.  Inmate firefighters, who make up 30-40% of California’s fire fighters, receive barely any training and close to nothing in compensation to be on the frontlines of service.  

An inmate firefighter pauses during a firing operation as the Carr fire continues to burn in Redding, California on July 27, 2018. 

An inmate firefighter pauses during a firing operation as the Carr fire continues to burn in Redding, California on July 27, 2018. Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-inmates-1-an-hour-to-fight-wildfires.html

Understanding how the incarcerated are exploited, abused, and discarded is only the first step to rectifying the faults in our “liberal democracy.”  

The racial aspect of prisons, as it relates specifically to climate change environmentalism, is a particular point of focus which highlights the layers of racism, capitalism, and the unconstitutional practices of imperialism that are embedded in the greater issues of climate injustice for the prison population of the United States.  

Arguing for the remembrance of “the disposable” mass of the incarcerated, who, in various locations across the U.S., are left out of the discourses on climate change injustice, helps reveal the hypocrisies of our American liberal democracy, by exposing the deeply embedded social injustices that have structured the prison industrial system and by exposing the cruel and unusual punishments put upon them from the unconstitutional practices by biopolitical power forces. 

We must not only remember the incarcerated in the discussions of climate justice, but we must critically address the embedded social injustices that structure the prison industrial complex and allow climate injustice to persist.  

We must put aside structural racism and clauses of biopolitical eugenics written in our legal codes; rectify the symbolics of our certain harmful social understandings; and end the infrastructures of oppression, by legitimate democratization of social and climate participation. 

By outlining community efforts inside, between, and outside prisons in the U.S., such as by the involvement of advocacy groups and media enhancement, we make achievable the possibilities of social and climate solidarity.  

 Main Sources

Barroca v. Bureau of Prisons. District of Colombia, Case 1:18-cv-02740-JEB, Document 12. 23 April 2019.  

http://abolitionistlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/amended-complaint-Barroca.pdf

Bernd, CandiceZoe Loftus-Farren; and Maureen Nandini Mitra. “America’s Toxic Prisons: The Environmental Injustices of Mass Incarceration,” Earth Island Journal and Truthout. 2018. 

https://earthisland.org/journal/americas-toxic-prisons/

Borunda, Alejandra. “Climate change is contributing to California’s fires,” National Geographic. 25 October 2019.  

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/climate-change-california-power-outage/

The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons. “No Escape: Exposure to Toxic Coal Waste at State Correctional Institution Fayette.” Abolitionist Law Center and Human Rights Coalition. 

https://abolitionistlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/no-escape-bw-1-4mb.pdf

Carson, E. Ann. “Prisoners in 2018.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, NCJ 253516. April 2020. 

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p18.pdf 

Democracy Now. “$1 an Hour to Fight Largest Fire in CA History: Are Prison Firefighting Programs Slave Labor?” Democracy Now. 9 August 2018. 

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/9/1_an_hour_to_fight_largest

DuncanSophie. “Prison Labor in a Warming World: When floods and fires strike, who has to clean up the mess?” The Free Radicals. 14 August 2018. 

Equal Justice Initiative, “News: Investigation Reveals Environmental Dangers in America’s Toxic Prisons.” 16 June 2017. 

https://eji.org/news/investigation-reveals-environmental-dangers-in-toxic-prisons/

Evans, Brad and Henry A. Giroux. Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle. City Lights Books. 2015. 

Flood the System. “Infographic: Prisons and Climate Change,” Flood the System. 

 
Gotsch, Kara and Vinay Basti. “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons,” The Sentencing Project. 2 August 2018.  

Greenfield, Nicole. “The Connection Between Mass Incarceration and Environmental Justice,” NRDC. 19 January 2018.  

https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/connection-between-mass-incarceration-and-environmental-justice

LeRoy, Carri J; Kelli Bush, Joslyn Trive, and Briana Gallagher. “Suitability in Prisons ProjectL An Overview (2004–12),” Washington State Department of Corrections & The Evergreen State College. 2013. 

http://sustainabilityinprisons.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Overview-cover-text-reduced-size.pdf

Lorie, Julia. “30 Percent of California’s Forest Firefighters Are Prisoners,” Mother Jones. 14 August 2015. 

RakiaRaven. “A sinking jail: The environmental disaster that is Rikers Island,” Grist. 15 March 2016. 

https://grist.org/justice/a-sinking-jail-the-environmental-disaster-that-is-rikers-island/

Sabalow, Ryan. “These California inmates risked death to fight wildfires. After prison, they’re left behind,” The Sacramento Bee. 23 July 2020. 

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article244286777.html

The Sentencing Project, “Issues: Felony Disenfranchisement,” 

https://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/felony-disenfranchisement/

Taiwo, Olufemi O. “Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis,” Dissent Magazine. 12 August 2020.  

Tsolkas, Panagioti. “Prisoners File Unprecedented Environmental Lawsuit against Proposed Federal Prison in Kentucky,” Nation Inside. 7 December 2018. 

https://nationinside.org/campaign/prison-ecology/posts/prisoners-file-unprecedented- environmental-lawsuit-against-proposed-federal-prison-in-kentucky/ 

Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, 21. 2018. 

Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geology, Race, and Matter,” A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None. University of Minnesota Press. 2018. 

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b

Further Questions:

  1. How does the prison industrial complex affect other communities–such as Latin-x communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and women? What can we say about intersectionality and the prison industrial complex?
  2. If prisons are abolished, what about social safety? Is investing in the community and social welfare programs really a more dignified, effective solution?
  3. What does a “Marshall Plan”-like economic aid look like for social inequalities, or for climate change initiatives? How would this money get handled?
  4. Even if prisons are reformed, to the extent that living and working conditions are improved, and prisoners are not recruited into the front lines of climate change clean up, what is there to say about neoliberal privatized police and prisons, as climate change continues to increasingly effect the way we live?
  5. Is climate change the next big shift in policing and incarceration? How does this tie directly into capitalism and, even, racism?
  6. Is an universal, all-inclusive climate change discourse possible?

“Geology, Race, and Matter” by Kathryn Yusoff

Core Text:

Yussoff, Kathryn. “Geology, Race, and Matter,” A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None2018. 

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b#ch01

Summary:

The discourses of the Anthropocene and of geology have embedded within them language and histories of racism that complicate legitimate understandings of climate justice. In her chapter “Geology, Race, and Matter,” Kathryn Yussoff describes the issues with using these words in the movement against climate change. Yussoff presents an archeological reveal of the relationship between mineralogy and racism (corporealism), showing how colonial deterritorialization, dehumanization and slave labor all extended from the interest in property. Based in the root preoccupation with property, cultivation and destruction of the world go hand-in-hand with racial injustice.  

Yussoff’s main objective is to expose this relationship, so that there can be a narrative that refuses to overlook the embedded injustices in climate change discourse and to assist in the establishment of a clear praxis of climate justice. Essential to this project is the determination of “the human” and “the inhuman” social legacies that fuse the historical anthropos of the Anthropocene. Failure to recognize the legacies of dehumanization based on racial social categorization and injustice is an automatic failure to see how climate change became an issue in the first place, as well as to recognize the issues preventing climate change solutions. Failure to recognize these issues maintains racial and social injustice by erasing the subjectivity and the struggle for recognition by Black people. 

While unveiling Blackness from the historical categorizations of inhuman-ness, Yussoff asks readers to understand Blackness as a presence, as a counteraesthetic to white supremacy, and, as such, as an insurgence to erasure, which, altogether, break through the embedded injustices of history and language. 

Questions: 

1) Does recognizing the human/ inhuman dichotomy of history help keep a reminder for social justice or does it maintain an aspect of otherness? Is a postracial “we” ever possible? 

2) If geology and subjectivity are relational, as Yussof demonstrates, does climate change justice entail a push for a reformation of “selfhood”? Does this ultimately change our economic and political organizations? 

3) What does solidarity look like for Yussof in the face of climate change? How does language affect the chances of solidarity? 

Additional Sources:  

McKibben, Bill. “Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues,” The  

New Yorker. June 4, 2020. 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/racism-police-violence-and-the-climate-are-not-separate-issues

Climate change specialist Bill McKibben compares climate change with police brutality and determines that they lead to similar effects on black bodies. As black bodies are more susceptible to stress brought on by social injustices, such as financial inequality and police surveillance, increased allostatic loads for black bodies often leave them more susceptible to biological disorders. McKibben analogizes having a violent police force in your neighborhood to having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood: they destroy the body and toxify everything. McKibben continues to say that organized crime, partisan profit-oriented politics, support for oil companies, and climate denial, all still fueling during the COVID-19 pandemic, are all conditions that uphold the structures of social and racial injustice. Through these details and comparisons, McKibben allows readers to understand the biopolitics of black bodies in the U.S. that leaves them more prone to the troubles of climate change and less protected by governments.  

Godfrey, Phoebe C.. Introduction: Race, Gender & Class and Climate Change,” Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (2012), pp. 3-11 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43496857?seq=1

Pheobe Godfrey encourages analytical frameworks that help in understanding the interrelations between social inequalities and environmental problems. Modeling analysis on frameworks that are bigger than the limited scope of traditional individualist subjectivities, Godfrey’s work incorporates a true interdisciplinary approach that includes critical social theory, Buddhist spirituality, and ancient cosmology, to name a few, to address social injustices embedded within climate change discourse. The big issue for Godfrey is determining the “we” in climate change solutions. For Godrey, the “we” cannot be achieved for climate change solutions, until social inequalities of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability, and other differences are sorted out first. 

Nieves, Evelyn and Ilana Cohen, et al. “There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice,” 12 June 2020; 

Given the current convergence of COVID-19 and the BLM protests, there has been a significant rise in the concerns of climate justice and racial justice and how they are related. This article brings together the interrelated structures of racial injustice and climate injustice. Gathering the individual and collective support of climate change organizations, such as the Sierra Club, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunset Movement, this article highlights that climate change activism cannot begin without correcting racial injustice first.