Mass Incarceration in the United States and its Effects on the Environment
W
By Enas Ali
ith the United States holding 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners and just five per cent of its population, mass incarceration has become an issue reaching epidemic proportions. This is not only due to the large number of people that are being affected daily—whether they themselves are incarcerated or are dealing with the pain and trauma of having a loved one who is—but also because of the environmental effects that mass incarceration has produced. At its current rate, the system of mass incarceration is not environmentally sustainable. In the United States, there are currently over 2 million people who are incarcerated and being held in 1 of nearly 7000 prison facilities throughout the country—this includes publicly funded federal, state, local, and private detention centers. As the number of people being incarcerated rapidly rises each year, there are not enough facilities to hold all of them, and overcrowding in prisons has very quickly become a big issue. As a result, new facilities need to be built in order to contain the United States’ insatiable desire to imprison masses of its population. This means that more land has to be destroyed to make room for new prisons, directly harming, and often completely destroying, the local ecosystems.
“The environment is yet another argument in favour of overturning the current system of incarceration that the United States has pursued.” The Prison Ecology Project is one group that has been concerned with the negative impacts of mass incarceration on the environment and how it affects the health of those who live near detention centres. A major case they took on was against the building of a new federal prison in Kentucky. One section of the complaint claims that building the prison would clear over 100 acres of forestry and three acres of wetlands, effectively destroying entire populations living within these ecosystems, including the habitats of already endangered species in the Appalachian mountain region of the state. Along with the environmental destruction that comes with building prisons, the facilities themselves also produce a lot of waste and pollution. According to a report produced by Prison Legal News, dozens of prisons across 17 states were guilty of sewage and sanitation violations. In addition to that, the Environmental 12 | THE MUSLIM VOICE | NOVEMBER 2020
