CLIMATE CHANGE AND INCARCERATED POPULATIONS: CONFRONTING ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE INJUSTICES BEHIND BARS.

• Author: Gribble, Emily C.

Introduction 341 I. Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, and Carceral Institutions 342 II. Flooding and Fossil Fuels 346 III. Increased Morbidity and Mortality Related to Extreme Temperatures 352 A. Texas's Wallace Pack Unit Prison 352 B. Maricopa County Jail 354 C. Perryville Prison 355 D. Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola 356 IV. Incarcerated Workforces 358 A. California's Inmate Firefighters 359 B. Vienna Correctional Center 362 C. BP Oil Spill 364 D. Hurricane Cleanup in Florida 365 V. Prison Litigation and Legal Obstacles 366 Conclusion 369 INTRODUCTION

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. (1) In fact, the population of the United States accounts for less than 5% of the global population but holds 20% of the world's prisoners. (2) As of 2020, more than 2.3 million people were incarcerated in the United States and of that number, more than 555,000 people have not been convicted of any crime. (3) While serving time in U.S. carceral facilities comes with a host of inherent risks and challenges, new research reveals that the threat of anthropogenic climate change presents an additional set of hazards.

Recent reports from legal advocates, journalists, and scholars underscore previously unexamined relationships between climate change and the U.S. carceral system. This Essay explores a number of these intersections. The next Part considers the body of research on environmental justice, climate justice, and their relationship to carceral institutions, followed by a consideration of the ways in which climate impacts harm incarcerated persons directly. The Essay specifically examines how climate change-influenced weather events produce flooding and extreme temperatures in jails and prisons, placing the health and wellbeing of prisoners at great risk. The health-impairing effects of fossil fuel extraction are considered, followed by a focus on the brutal conditions incarcerated firefighters and natural disaster workers face while confronting year-round wildfire season as well as in the aftermath of climate-linked industrial accidents and weather events. This Essay centers the experiences, voices, and resistance efforts by incarcerated persons and their allies across these cases with careful consideration of how legal remedies are both deployed and foreclosed. Finally, this Essay also explores the limitations and challenges that prisoners face with respect to seeking litigation and offers recommendations for how prisoners can achieve improvements in their conditions of confinement with an eye toward building support for environmental and climate justice. Climate change's deleterious impacts on incarcerated populations reveal productive points of intersection between movements for environmental justice, climate justice, and prisoner rights.

1. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, CLIMATE JUSTICE, AND CARCERAL INSTITUTIONS

   Since the early 1970s, scholars have demonstrated that communities of color, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and low wealth or income populations are disproportionately impacted by a spectrum of environmental risks and threats. (4) These hazards include air pollution associated with power plants and highways, garbage and hazardous waste dumps, oil pipelines, and other locally unwanted land uses that are more likely to be concentrated in these communities. (5) The recognition of these uneven risks gave rise to the multidisciplinary field of environmental justice studies and the grassroots environmental justice movement. (6) The exceedingly common phenomenon of disproportionate risk under which people of color live in the United States and over the world is referred to as environmental racism, while the goal of the myriad grassroots movements that have arisen to document and combat this scourge has been termed environmental justice--a vision of a society in which ecological sustainability and social justice prevail. (7) Advocates have enjoyed traction in the public sphere by recasting environmental threats like civil rights, human rights, and racial justice concerns, revealing how activists have extended, deepened, and created intersections among the frameworks associated with earlier movements. This movement has successfully prevented polluting industrial facilities from being built and also shut down existing ones, while activists have pushed elected officials to integrate environmental justice concerns into policymaking at the highest levels of the federal government. (8) However, the environmental justice movement has yet to achieve lasting and significant legal victories in the United States largely because the courts have been resistant to arguments and claims concerning disparate impact--a similar dynamic can be seen in pay equity and death penalty suits, among others. And yet, as argued below, there are emerging pathways for continuing this effort via prisoner-led efforts.

   Climate injustice is the term we use to describe the uneven and unjust impacts of human-caused climate change on many of the world's

   vulnerable populations. Specifically, low-income, BIPOC, (9) and global South communities are hit hardest by the effects of climate change, and yet, they contribute the least to creating the problem since these communities produce far lower levels of carbon emissions. (10) In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of the climate justice movement, which might best be described as a hybrid or convergence of the mainstream environmental and environmental justice movements that are bringing a particularly intense focus to the global climate crisis. (11) Many communities from which climate justice movement leaders hail are inundated with a host of environmental and climate threats. One example is coal-fired power plants--one of the leading contributors to global anthropogenic climate change. (12) While climate change may be an abstraction for some, many activists make the case that it is anything but abstract by publicly articulating their experiences of living with and suffering from climate disruption--what climate change scholar Michael Mendez calls climate embodiment. (13) They are also increasingly narrating discourses of a post-capitalist future with a vision of society marked by more transformative and radical politics by comparison with the traditional or mainstream environmentalism of the previous generation. (14) As with the field of environmental justice studies, scholars of climate justice have documented the widespread and starkly disproportionate impact of climate disruption on marginalized communities--BIPOC, low wealth, and global South, to name a few--and have chronicled the evolution of the climate justice movement across multiple geographic and political scales, from local neighborhood mobilizations to the global coordination of movement actors at United Nations conferences. (15)

   In the last several years, a small number of scholars have begun to study the relationship of environmental and climate risks on carceral institutions in the United States. This research has found, for example, that prisons, jails, juvenile detention facilities, and immigrant detention centers are often sites where water contamination, hazardous waste exposure, and food insecurity are commonplace and that these carceral institutions are themselves sources of environmental risk. (16) This body of scholarship has also begun to uncover trends that suggest that the effects of climate change are being disproportionately visited upon prisoners and other incarcerated persons via extreme heat and cold, flooding, wildfire exposure, and the fact that mass incarceration is significantly associated with greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. (17) As with the literature on environmental justice and climate justice, the scholarship on prison ecology is unfolding alongside--and, in some cases, through close collaboration with--the development of grassroots movements. (18) For example, activist groups like Mothers of East L.A., Critical Resistance, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, and the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons first documented the relationship between prisons, jails, and environmental conditions--in some cases, as early as the 1990s--and scholars are now catching up to this realization. (19)

   There are several significant reasons for a focus on environmental and climate justice in prisons. First, the enduring environmental justice refraining of "the environment" as those spaces where we "live, work, play, learn, and pray" is particularly true in the prison system since, unlike 'free persons,' prisoners do all of those things in a single place where they have little choice to do otherwise. As such, we might revise and expand that definition of the environment so that it reads, where we "live, work, play, learn, pray... and do time." (20) The question of space, race, and environment is much starker given the immobilizing effects of prison--insofar as inmates' mobility is almost entirely determined by prison authorities. (21) This is particularly relevant considering the longstanding debate in environmental justice (EJ) studies about the relative freedom of choice that people of color have to move in and out of contaminated neighborhoods. Scholars like Professor Paul Mohai and Professor Robin Saha (two leading EJ researchers) have presented strong evidence that the "minority move-in" hypothesis (the claim that environmental racism is largely the result of people of color moving into already polluted neighborhoods in order to access cheap housing) is misguided since the vast majority of cases of environmental racism occur when polluting facilities follow residents of color, not the other way around. (22) In the case of the prison system, this is essentially a moot point since prisoners have virtually no say in where they serve time and are, therefore, entirely at the mercy of the courts and prison authorities. Finally, it should be noted that...