Group paper

Ron Triggs,Ja’Lexis Williams,Jadah Scott
Group paper
4/2419
Professor FRG
Climate justice

Many communities that are on toxic and hazardous soil are poor and Black or Brown communities.Black people are 75% more likely than other citizens to live in communities that border oil and natural gas refineries. (Calma 2018) The locations of their homes then lead to them facing a disproportionate amount of health issues due to the pollution of their air and other resources.These communities are typically the target of police violence and are criminalized. The criminalization of Black and Brown folk causes social, economic, and political problems that affect families for generations. Some of these effects include people growing up without both parents, which can have many different impacts. Families are also put at an economic disadvantage because they will just have one source of income in most cases. This also causes people to distrust and dehumanizes black and brown people of color. This causes the use of prisons to be acceptable to the majority of the society because the people being imprisoned are seen as less than human.

     Black people are impacted by police violence at a disproportionate rate than any other communities. It is recorded that black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white people (https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/). This is because people of color are seen as criminals before people actually come into contact with one another. As a society, we see criminals as less than human, which allows for us to disregard them causing us to not care about what happens to them. We must remember that we are all humans and care about everyone's health and wellbeing.

          Based on the map by the EPA ( Environmental Protection Agency) if you overlay the hazardous waste sites and prisons you can observe most prisons being located near hazardous waste facilities (https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/). This shows that prisons are having a negative impact on prisoners health and are not helping. Many prisoners experience respiratory and cancer-linked illnesses, which in some cases can be deadly. From the survey of seventy-five prisoners, eighty-one percent reported suffering from respiratory, throat, and sinus conditions (http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/americas_toxic_prisons/). Prisons are killing people in more ways than one and as a nation; we are allowing the criminal industrial complex to harm about 2.3 million people. (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html). According to  an article done by the NRDC (Natural Resource Defense Council), prisoners are often exposed to toxic water and air that become detrimental to their health. Prisons like SCI Fayette prisoners were experiencing health issues such as respiratory illnesses, gastrointestinal tract problems, thyroid disorders, and cancers because of exposure to  ‘‘40 million tons of waste, two coal slurry ponds, and millions of cubic yards of coal combustion waste’’.(https://www.nrdc.org/search?search=The+Connection+Between+Mass+Incarceration+and+Environmental+Justice)

As more prisons are developed inside cities that are impacted by hurricanes and other natural disasters we must consider the impacts they have on the prisoners and the facilities that they are imprisoned within. We must accept the fact that these “natural” disasters will become more frequent and states need to develop a plan for prisoners during natural disasters. When the media make people in prisons seem less that human people are able to allow states to leave prisoners “locked in their cells, some in chest-high water contaminated by sewage” (https://hazards.colorado.edu/article/inmates-our-defenders-in-disaster).  This is because when people who are crafted to look less than a human by media and other sources it is ok to take away their dignity and human rights. The prison system overall needs a plan to improve the quality of life for prisoners. It’s a real problem for everybody not just the prisoners who are left out. The concept of a program to incorporate safety of prisoners ; and a better plan to make the lives of everyone in the community is highly needed.  An organization known as the Prison Ecology project teamed up with environmental and social justice movements to add prisoner to the Environmental Justice 2020 agenda. This agenda would advocate “federal policies and programs to prevent environmental pollution from disproportionately affecting communities of color and the poor.” (www.citylab.com/equity/2015/07/how-mass-incarceration-takes-a-toll-on-the-environment/399950/.)

The functionality of the prison system and the planning around It need more developing. In the time a weather misfortune happens prisoners are basically left to die. The issue is that it’s morally wrong; prisoners are still human. The safety of prisoners aren’t really thought about and that’s a major concern for everyone. Correction centers don’t have to option open for prisoners to save themselves in the threat of a natural disaster. “Although meteorologists usually warn of hurricanes days or even weeks before they make landfall, prisoners cannot move themselves to higher ground and storms sometimes develop in unanticipated ways”(https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/may/17/eye-storm-when-hurricanes-impact-prisons-and-jails/). The risks are inevitable so why not put in a little extra work to insure security. An almost universal complication with prisoners being left behind to weather, a storm , is lack of access to necessary materials. All U.S. jails and prison systems  need to have an evacuation plan in place in case of a natural disaster. The initial problem is that prisoners die in national disasters because there no evacuation plan in place or the people in charge won’t evacuate. Which is a major issue for both the states and the federal government. A South Florida prison experienced an effect of  climate change when Hurricane Irma targeted that area. Despite knowing about the impending threat, most of the inmates were not evacuated.(www.blackyouthproject.com/global-warming-and-the-prison-industrial-complex-people-are-dying-from-heat/.)    This prison demonstrated its lack of care for imprisoned populations who experienced harm due to climate change related problems.

    Along with inadequate evacuation plans for inmates during natural disasters, prisoners have suffered due to another climate change caused issues. Prisons have a history of providing inhumane living conditions. They do not make accommodations for the extreme temperatures caused by climate change, which very frequently results in inmates facing heat related deaths. “Many serve their sentences in prisons where temperatures exceed 100 degrees, and sympathy for their conditions is hard to find.”(www.blackyouthproject.com/global-warming-and-the-prison-industrial-complex-people-are-dying-from-heat/. There are instances such as the Webb family’s situation, where inmates have had  deaths connected with sustained heat and confinement in spaces without sufficient ventilation.

Prisons or the law has a legal obligation to protect prisoners. Evacuation plans help keep that obligation to both the families of prisoners and the prisoners themselves. Minorities have always been seen as less than human which makes it difficult for officials to make the right decisions. People of color make up a huge amount of the inmate population and unsurprisingly experience most of the tragedy and lack of care.

Above all many prisons throughout the nation house thousands of prisoners, which can make the emergency response and recovery process much more difficult. Some ways prisons and jails can conduct emergency preparedness: Creating and updating threat and hazard incident response assessments,  Providing emergency preparedness and response training,Conducting fire, evacuation, and emergency medical response drills regularly etc. Things like these need to be thought about but in the end there need to be planning and preparation.

“Mapping Police Violence.” Mapping Police Violence, mappingpoliceviolence.org/.