Compounding the economic impact of siting prisons is the environmental issues at these locations. Almost one-third of state and federal prisons are incredibly close to hazardous waste sites. Specifically, 589 federal and state prisons exist within three miles of a Superfund site, or contaminated land zones identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as toxic to human and environmental health; exposure to toxins near these locations can lead to long-term chronic illness and cancer.

This is seen across the nation. Prisons in Oklahoma, for instance, are more likely to exist in towns with higher reported toxic emissions compared to non-prison towns. A study investigating water in correctional facilities in the Southwest demonstrated that the average six-year arsenic concentrations were twice as high in carceral water systems as compared to other community water systems.

The construction of prisons itself also creates environmental concerns by contributing to the climate crisis. Prison construction skyrocketed in the 1990s during the war on drugs and the “tough on crime” era. Between 1984 and 2005, a new jail or prison was built every 8.5 days. This dramatic pace suggests that prisons were constructed with haste or used cheap materials that posed risks to inhabitants. 

A study led by Professor Julius Alexander McGee, Professor Patrick Trent Greiner, and researcher Carl Appleton found that the development of prisons leads to significant increases in industrial fossil fuel emissions in three notable ways: “(1) Mass incarceration incentivizes further industrial [emissions and use of toxic chemicals] through the construction of new prisons and the continued maintenance of existing prisons to house prisoners. (2) The needs of the millions of individuals currently incarcerated in the United States incentivize industrial expansion by producing goods and materials used inside prisons. (3) Incarcerated individuals are being used to reduce the cost of labor, which expands economic growth.”

After facilities are built, these prison towns often do not adapt the prison’s physical conditions or policies to account for environmental pollutants or increasingly erratic weather patterns caused by climate change. For one thing, incarceration infrastructure’s sustainability and resilience in the face of climate disasters are impacted by its location. In rural communities, carceral facilities are more likely to be distant from emergency support systems. These infrastructures can also lead to overcrowding, which can facilitate the spread of disease. 

Operational tactics to increase profiteering, such as inadequate indoor temperature regulation, have also led to health issues, especially in the face of climate change. Given the structures of prisons, the use of solitary confinement — placing incarcerated people in rooms with no windows for 23 hours a day — exacerbates already dire heat conditions as cells reach as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Coupled with the hazardous industrial wastes and airborne toxins on prison grounds, reports have linked these conditions with numerous diseases and health issues, including extreme heat exposure, “valley fever, Legionnaires’ disease, inadequate health care, poor quality food, and rat, insect, and mold infestation, and sewage system malfunctions [which] are widespread and routine.” At the same time, incarcerated populations are increasingly being used to combat wildfires, prepare sandbags for hurricanes, and clear debris after storms, making them vulnerable from yet another administrative axis.

Perhaps most insidiously, these harms are acutely felt by some of the most vulnerable members of society. The communities around prison towns are disproportionately Black and Brown low-income people. Moreover, Black and Hispanic people make up 56 percent of the incarcerated population. 

According to researchers at the environmental studies department and the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor David N. Pellow, and Jasmine Vazin, this amounts to environmental racism, which “is a particular form of environmental injustice and frequently includes the implementation of policies, regulations, or institutional practices that target communities of color for undesirable waste sites, zoning, and industry.”

All of these factors — the socioeconomic conditions of prison towns, the construction of prisons, and the way prisons are run — contribute to environmental harms suffered by incarcerated people.

“If a factory pollutes the surrounding communities and we realize that’s an injustice, then what does that say when your factory is full of people who can’t leave?” said Panagioti Tsolkas, lead researcher of the Prison Ecology Project of the Human Rights Defense Center, in conversation with Bloomberg News. “That’s a lot of what prisons are: industrial warehouses that operate factories directly on the property, [including] sewage management and power plants.”

Tracking the Corporate Prison Profiteers

Thinking of the harms of incarceration in conversation with Worth Rises, Johnny Perez reflected on who was responsible for constructing these institutions: “I questioned how such a space could even exist? Who conceived of it? Who designed it? Who built it? Who condemned me to it?”

Corporate capture has laid the groundwork for much of the environmental and climate-caused harms people like Perez encountered while incarcerated. By creating a web of motives to make prisons cheaply and on cheap land, and by encouraging profiteering, corporate actors and public agencies guided by their incentives have forced incarcerated people into these sacrifice zones.

“[Contractors] extract all the good stuff from the land, then they sell it to waste companies that contaminate the land, and then they sell it to prisons. Then they start shipping inmates there, and people start getting sick,” said Richard Mosley, a formerly incarcerated person, in conversation with Worth Rises.

Facilities run by private prison corporations are emblematic of these concerns. Private prison operators such as CoreCivic (formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America) and GeoGroup — the two largest private prison companies in the country — create or purchase facilities and contract with federal or local governments to fill those facilities under the guise of providing the same level of care and services for less per capita than what those governments were previously paying. 

“[Contractors] extract all the good stuff from the land, then they sell it to waste companies that contaminate the land, and then they sell it to prisons. Then they start shipping inmates there, and people start getting sick.”

But to meet those promises, CoreCivic and GeoGroup cut expenses by lowering the standard of living, overcrowding, decreasing facility maintenance, and taking advantage of other cost-saving measures. CoreCivic even offered bonuses to personnel that decreased the most expenses — and increased dangerous conditions. All of these practices have furthered environmental injustices.

Private companies, however, aren’t the only corporate actors perpetuating these conditions. In fact, only 7 percent of all incarcerated people are housed in private prisons. Nevertheless, a range of private industries work with governments and public agencies to increase profiteering from public carceral facilities. 

These private influences start with the motivations of government agencies and officials to cut costs. As summarized by former North Dakota legislator Duane DeKrey: “For every dollar that you’re spending on corrections, you’re not spending that on primary and secondary education, you’re not spending it on the colleges or tourism. It’s just money down a rat hole, basically.”

Profiteering motives are first able to influence public prisons through the site selection process. Oftentimes this process begins with the appointment of a site selection committee, which is comprised of local government officials, construction company representatives, architects, community members, and representatives from the jail such as staff. 

The private organizations that occupy seats on this committee have incredible power in this position to push for cost-cutting locations and construction during the site selection process. Unions for correctional officers, such as the Council of Prison Locals C-33, have strong lobbying arms that can sway site selection and building construction in ways that cut administrative costs, maximize payouts for prison and jail staff, and endanger environmental conditions for incarcerated people.

After picking a location, government officials then connect with corporate financial planning firms to sketch out construction logistics. This opens up another opportunity for corporate influence over public prison development. During the relocation of the Draper prison site in Utah, for example, government officials connected with Northwest Quadrant LLC, a local wealth management company, to sketch out costs for building infrastructure for the new prison.

From there, architecture and construction companies play a large role in prison development, revealing another opportunity for corporate influence. HOK and HDR are some of the largest architecture firms designing prisons in the market. HOK has designed over 100,000 beds; HDR has designed over 275 correctional facilities. 

While the architecture firms guise their participation in the prison industrial complex as “Justice” initiatives, their work has demonstrated a clear incentive to put profits over incarcerated people’s safety. Namely, HDR surveils prison advocacy groups to quiet discontent around prison construction.

Construction company contracts are often split between national and regional firms. The largest national construction corporations include Turner Construction Company, Gilbane Building Company, and Hensel Phelps, which comprise 30 percent of the correctional construction market. 

Two other companies play notable roles in prison developments: Clark Construction Group, which has worked on $4.5 billion worth of correctional and judicial projects, and McCarthy Building Companies, which had contracted with Los Angeles County in 2019 to build a $2.2 billion jail until advocates forced the project’s cancellation. 

More corporate influence suggests more profiteering and cost-cutting — creating conditions ripe for environmental and climate injustices in prisons and jails.

Altogether, these corporate actors have an opportunity to wield incredible influence over a sizable amount of taxpayer dollars. Federal, state, and local government spending on correctional construction ballooned in 2008 to $8.6 billion; 2018 data suggests that today’s correctional construction spending is closer to $4.6 billion. Individual projects can blow past these figures; the plan to close Riker’s Island — which was built on a former landfill — and construct four new community-based jails is ballparked to cost at least $8 billion. 

More corporate influence suggests more profiteering and cost-cutting — creating conditions ripe for environmental and climate injustices in prisons and jails.

Examples of these conditions abound. Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution–Fayette (SCI-Fayette) is located across the street from “about 40 million tons of waste, two coal slurry ponds, and millions of cubic yards of coal combustion waste.” The coal ash dump across the street was owned by Matt Canestrale Contracting; previous owners of the coal dump used to use the land SCI-Fayette was built on as “a dumping ground for coal waste from one of the world’s largest coal processing plants.” 

This dump had existed for decades, meaning that incarcerated people were subjected to hazardous pollutants through toxic dust filled with mercury, lead, and arsenic, which then ran off into the water for a long time. Incarcerated people were subjected to “chronic sore throats, vision problems, sores, cysts, and tumors in their mouths, noses, throats, and skin,” as well as other health issues.

Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, the largest facility in the most populated county jail system, is similarly inundated with pollutants and hazardous waste. Surrounded by toxins — including the 101 Freeway generating air pollution, the L.A. River filled with toxic PCBs and wastewater, and SP Railyard and Union Pacific Transportation Center emitting 40 tons of particulate matter into the air every year — Men’s Central is closer to hazardous waste than 96 percent of the nation. By inhaling these toxic materials, these incarcerated people’s lifetime cancer risk is in the 100th percentile — higher than nearly any other area in the country.

Toxic environmental conditions also plague immigration detention centers. A study prepared by the Global Environmental Justice Project uncovered a trend of numerous immigration detention centers located in toxic spaces, with extremely hazardous chemicals in the ambient air, land, and water tables. These included chemicals that are known to be associated with certain developmental disorders, neurological damage, respiratory illnesses, and cancer.  

FCC Victorville, a federal prison that also houses immigrants, is located on a former Air Force base filled with 23 EPA-listed contaminants including “asbestos, benzene, lead, mercury, pesticides, volatile organic compounds, and military chemicals” such as trichloroethylene, “used to degrease metal parts such as planes and munitions for military operations.” Thousands of people who have passed through this facility have been subjected to potential health risks as a result of this exposure. 

The country’s largest immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, for example, is situated in a 30-county region with 20 saltwater disposal wells pumping fracked wastewater back into the ground, earning the facility the nickname “the waste epicenter” of the Eagle Ford Shale area.

So too for prison conditions caused by climate change. The Tornillo Detention Center, for example, constructed in the summer of 2018 with 3800 beds, detained immigrant children near the Texas/Mexico border. These children were exposed to extreme heat conditions, furthered by the administrative policies of the detention center that encouraged overdetention. 

“The beds and cubicle wall are metal. [During summer] they are hot and can’t be laid on or touched, like touching the hood of a car that has sit (sic) in the sun on a 130-degree day,” says John Wesley Ford, a person incarcerated at Wallace Pack Unit, a Type I geriatric prison which houses a largely elderly and disabled population, in a letter acquired by Truthout Magazine that discusses the impact of climate change on prison conditions. “Most of us try to wet our sheets and the cement floor. We lay in the water, put the sheet over us while blowing the fan under the sheet, to keep the body temps down.”

Hurricanes also expose other vulnerable prison conditions in the face of climate change. Notably, Hurricane Katrina caused immense flooding in New Orleans. Incarcerated people at Orleans Parish Prison were forced to stay in the jail as flood levels rose to their chests and remained there for days without potable water, food, or ventilation. People at Galveston County Jail during Hurricane Ike in Texas were forced to remain in the jail despite an electricity outage, sewage failure, damaged roofing, and sweltering heat, even after city officials suggested that anyone who stayed in Galveston would face “certain death.” 

Kenneth Hartmann, who was formerly incarcerated in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, sees a solution to these environmental injustices. “Prisons found to be a serious health risk need to be closed,” Hartman writes in a letter acquired by Truthout Magazine. “The changes made [to address health risks caused by environmental harms] are about managing risk and trying to avoid lawsuits, not about fixing the problems of a massively dysfunctional prison system.”

The Fight Against Toxic Prisons

Across the country, groups are mobilizing to raise awareness of environmental injustices in prisons and fight against the corporate incentives that have facilitated these worsening conditions.  

For incarcerated people like Bryant Arroyo, the call to action is an economic no-brainer: “Is there any economic feasibility to waste the taxpayers’ [money] on a federal prison that will eventually promote sickness and cancer, causing diseases to both the federal prisoners and civilian staff members alike?”

Others are called to action because of the inextricable ties this fight has to environmental justice at large: “[Incarcerated people’s] fate is linked to ours, from the water systems that we are all drinking, to the air that we all breathe, to the land that we all live on,” Professor Pellow said in a conversation with Grist Magazine. “A jail wall is nothing but a wall — not much more.”

Many community groups have formed to advocate for incarcerated people’s environmental concerns and motivate those in power to take action. Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP), for example, is a national collective of abolitionists, environmental justice organizers, formerly and currently incarcerated folks and their loved ones. FTP works with incarcerated people to conduct grassroots organizing, advocacy, and direct action at the intersection of incarceration, health, and ecology. 

In Massachusetts, a coalition of organizations formed #DeeperThanWater, which advocates for human rights in prisons using water justice as a starting point. The coalition began with a focus on MCI-Norfolk, a Massachusetts facility “whose coffee-colored water has made national headlines for dangerous levels of sediment including neurotoxic levels of manganese and outrageous levels of rust that leave prisoners with skin lesions and gastrointestinal distress.” The water was contaminated by a wastewater treatment plant that had a landfill for residual waste. As a result of advocacy efforts, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has begun efforts to develop a filtration system for the facility.

Legal organizations have also joined the fight against toxic prisons. The nonprofit law firm Abolitionist Law Center launched an investigation in 2013 on the toxic coal waste at SCI Fayette, culminating in a comment to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and a report outlining conditions. A 2020 decision in the Second Circuit in Vega v. Semple  — a lawsuit challenging incarcerated people’s exposure to high radon levels — suggested that Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference claims regarding the risk of future harm by environmental conditions could be a viable path forward for future lawsuits. 

Some existing advocacy has shown promise. In 2016, federal prison officials planned to build a $444 million prison atop an old mine, next to a coal processing plant and sludge pond, in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Federal officials soon withdrew their plan for the facility after advocacy groups and incarcerated people, represented by Abolitionist Law Center, sued. Unfortunately, as of late 2022, Kentucky officials seemed poised to revisit the prison’s construction, now with an environmental impact statement.

Nevertheless, advocacy has led to more environmentally conscious reforms. While the development of new carceral facilities is never ideal, some local governments committed to doing intensive environmental studies before moving forward with construction. In Utah, for instance, local government officials teamed up with the National Audobon Society to assess the environmental impact of prison construction on species native to the wetlands the prison was being built on. 

Targeting corporate prison profiteers poses a new opportunity to build on previous advocacy efforts and expand liability for environmentally unjust prison conditions. Worth Rises, a nonprofit advocacy organization aiming to dismantle the prison industry, has compiled the Prison Industry Corporate Database. This massive resource lists many corporations complicit in the construction of these facilities cheaply and on toxic land. Future advocacy could consider exploring claims against these entities.

Targeting corporate prison profiteers poses a new opportunity to build on previous advocacy efforts and expand liability for environmentally unjust prison conditions.

While advocates continue to explore new pathways to challenge environmental conditions in carceral spaces, incarcerated people are leading the charge in increasing education on this issue. Jonathan Jones-Thomas, for instance, left Monroe Correctional Complex in 2014 and became a wastewater management professional. He now frequents prisons to teach classes about water justice to other incarcerated people and connects them with employment opportunities. Despite Jones-Thomas’s experiences at Monroe being reported to local media outlets and local government, the environmental problems at the facility persist. Yet through these educational outlets, incarcerated people are increasingly aware of environmental injustices in their facilities and can spread this knowledge to the public. 

Ultimately, preventing prisons from being treated as sacrifice zones requires solidarity among organizers, incarcerated people, and legal advocates in trying out new legal strategies to challenge environmentally unjust conditions. “Mutual allegiance is our support system,” Arroyo writes. “That is our contract.”