3 minute read
Environment
Mass Incarceration in the United States and its Effects on the Environment
By Enas Ali
With 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 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
Protection Agency has reported that federal and state agencies have brought approximately 1,373 informal actions and 157 formal actions against regulated prisons and jails under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act between 2012 and 2017. It is evident that prison facilities are constantly violating environmental regulations by dumping their waste in the nearby bodies of water (including rivers, creeks, and lakes), endangering wildlife and the health of those who rely on these bodies for their drinking water.
As we are having more discussions on climate change and environmental consciousness, it is necessary to include the effects of mass incarceration in these conversations. With more prisons being built, this means more land being destroyed and— with the way prison facilities produce and dispose of their toxic waste—more water being contaminated. Thus, the environment is yet another argument in favour of overturning the current system of incarceration that the United States has pursued. Mass incarceration has direct negative consequences on the American ecosystems and with the growing prison population and increase in prison facilities, these impacts are not going to decrease without both prison reform and stricter enforcement of environmental regulations. Alongside the community and individual effects, the conversation needs to make room for environmental causes as well.
