How do carceral systems intersect with and influence environmental justice and public health? And how might an abolitionist perspective address environmental justice and public health? Drawing on a broad range of literature and a case study from Southern California, we argue that mass incarceration is anathema to the pursuit of public health and environmental justice because carceral systems are inherently anti-ecological and produce illness and disease within and beyond the walls of confinement. Further-more, we consider the myriad ways that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons and their allies are mobilizing to articulate these linkages in an effort to promote abolition, robust public health, and environmental and climate justice for all.
Incarceration, Environmental Justice, and Public Health
Prisons and Environmental Justice
Indigenous, people of color, queer, Global South and low-wealth communities face greater risks associated with environmental and climate threats, stemming from oppressive state and corporate policies and practices in particular, and racial capitalism and settler colonialism more broadly. Scholars and community activists refer to this fact with the language of environmental injustice and climate injustice, noting that the very same populations bearing the burden of environmental and climate risks contribute the least to producing those problems. These populations are more likely to live, work, recreate, learn, and pray in spaces where the air, water, and land is polluted, and are less likely to enjoy the social capital networks that might facilitate leverage and influence in the boardrooms and government agencies where these life-alter-ing decisions are made. Thus, socioecological violence abounds within vulnerable communities around the globe, and the environmental and climate justice movements have emerged to respond to these threats, building on and allying with longstanding movements for Indigenous, racial, gender, LGBTQ, immigrant, and disability justice, civil and human rights, and more.
Much of the literature on environmental and climate justice focuses on how marginalized populations are impacted by these risks in their residential communities, which assumes the inhabitants enjoy some basic freedoms of mobility. However, more recent scholarship has extended the environmental justice framework into carceral spaces, where the residents of such facilities enjoy few liberties and rights, and where immobility is imposed by design. Researchers have revealed that prisons, jails, and detention centers (for immigrants and juveniles) are also spaces of environmental justice struggles, including concerns over contaminated water and air, poor nutrition and inadequate medical care, and the presence of hazardous waste produced and/or stored inside, adjacent to, or beneath such facilities. Carceral systems are also sites where incarcerated persons are routinely exposed to the ravages of climate disruption, including flooding and extreme heat and wildfire exposure, while mass incarceration itself has been associated with increased global greenhouse gas emissions. Scholars and advocates have also documented how environmental justice and abolitionist movements have formed coalitions to articulate the above linkages and to build more powerful, intersectional grassroots political formations to address them). Finally, a number of scholars examine the importance of activism by incarcerated people – including political prisoners – and formerly incarcerated persons who play key roles in the evolution of prisoner rights, and environmental, Indigenous, racial, climate, and food justice movements.
In the next section, we consider key writings on struggles for basic health-care and wellbeing in carceral facilities because the quality of one’s bodily and mental health is as much an environmental justice issue as any other concern, as human health is intimately interwoven with the health of our ecosystems.
Prisons and Health
“Gaol fever” is the term given to epidemic typhus (not typhoid), which has historically spread like wildfire in jails, prisons, and among soldiers on the battlefield. Symptoms include delirium, muscle pain, severe headaches, and a rash. The disease is usually transmitted by body lice and tends to spread quickly among populations in overcrowded spaces with poor sani-tation. During the 1700s, gaol fever was so common in English prisons that being detained and incarcerated before a trial could be the equivalent of a death sentence. The 18th century English prison reformer, John Howard wrote in a groundbreaking report to the House of Commons:
I am ready to think, that none who give credit to what is contained in the fore-going pages, will wonder at the havock made by the gaol-fever. From my own observation in 1773 and 1774, I was fully convinced that many more were destroyed by it, than were put to death by all the public executions in the kingdom.
A few generations later, the convict leasing system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the U.S. was a form of incarceration that reflected the deadly health consequences of racial capitalism for those ensnared in its machinery. For example, in the early 1870s, the Selma, Marion, and Memphis Railroad project was made possible by the leasing of incarcerated men to work on this venture. S.V.D. Taylor was assigned as a physician monitoring this effort and wrote:
On the first day of June 1872, I took charge as Physician, of the Mississippi convicts, who were employed as laborers on the Selma, Marion, and Memphis Railroad, and found forty men in the Hospital, most of them danger-ously ill.’ Of that number, twenty men died of pneumonia or malaria in the six month period between June and the end of November that year.
J.K.P. Campbell was a government inspector who visited a convict leasing operation on the Lake Jackson Plantation in Texas in 1875 and reported that “convicts were expected to labor through every daylight hour despite illness, hunger, and ‘inhuman treatment.[…] I found convicts whose backs were cut to pieces in the most shocking manner,” Campbell complained. Although 65 out of 185 prisoners were ill, many of them seriously, the inspector noted, none were given medical care”.
In his book, A Plague of Prisons, Ernest Drucker argues that contemporary mass incarceration exhibits all of the hallmarks of an epidemic, including its rapid growth rate, large scale, and self-sustaining properties (Drucker 2013, 42). And since incarceration negatively impacts entire families and communities (for example, children with incarcerated parents are six to seven times more likely to be incarcerated later in life and have lower life expectancies), Drucker contends that prisons behave like an infectious disease, “spreading most rapidly by proximity and exposure to prior cases. This new epidemic is mass incarceration – a plague of prisons” (Drucker 2013; see also Wildeman 2009).
Like John Howard’s observations two and a half centuries earlier, the evi-dence is clear that today, a prison sentence can be, to put it mildly, bad for one’s health:
Even for those who enter prison young and healthy, a prison sentence is tan-tamount to being afflicted with a chronic illness or long-term disability. The deplorable state of prison health care is one of the prime reasons a prison term leads to a lifetime of full or partial incapacitation, transforming a finite sentence of incarceration into a lifelong disabling condition (Drucker 2013, 119).
Drucker and numerous other scholars have concluded that inadequate health care for the incarcerated is the norm (Drucker 2013, 116; Greifinger 2007; Shabazz 2012). And while people of color and low-wealth persons form the majority of imprisoned persons, medical care for incarcerated folks who inhabit further marginalized categories – such as people with HIV/AIDS and undocumented immigrants – has historically been substan-dard as well (Feltz and Baksh 2012, 148; Shabazz 2012).
The U.S. federal immigration apparatus (e.g., ICE) routinely incarcerates people who are undocumented (or believed to be so) and routinely denies them medical care, particularly when they need psychiatric attention (Dow 2004). Persons with mental illness (PMI) constitute a very high percentage of people who are incarcerated, and the experience of incarceration tends to produce and/or exacerbate mental illness. With the closure of many state mental hospitals in the mid-twentieth century, there was a correspond-ing rise in the number of PMI who were being caught up in the criminal legal system: “The largest inpatient psychiatric facilities in the United States are the LA County Jail, New York’s Rikers Island Jail, and Chicago’s Cook County Jail; the PMI in jails and prisons outnumber those in state hospitals ten to one” (Vitale 2018, 80). These trends reveal an amplified criminalization of mental illness in recent decades.
During his decades in Angola prison, former Black liberation political prisoner Albert Woodfox wrote:
I never went to the hospital unless it was absolutely necessary. Medical treat-ment at Angola was – as it is at all prisons – deplorable. There are long delays, bad doctors, and a lot of misdiagnoses in prison hospitals. At Angola, aspirin was given for everything. To be put in restraints, then driven in a patrol car to the hospital, then have to sit for hours in a small individual pen the size of a mop closet that smelled like urine and vomit for two aspirin wasn’t worth it to me. I could get aspirin out of the canteen. Also, in order to see a doctor, versus a nurse, you had to declare yourself an emergency. I never felt that any sickness or injury I had was an emergency. A lot of times for cuts and bruises I used an old remedy my grandmother taught me: my own saliva. It worked well to speed healing (Woodfox 2019, 185).
Healthcare quality and access have long been flashpoints for the incarcerated, who frequently include demands for improvements related to this subject matter in lawsuits and prison strikes (Saed 2012). For example, a week-and-a-half prior to the historic uprising at the Attica prison in New York state in 1971, the incarcerated men in A Block “decided then to engage in a mass ‘sick-in’[…] to call attention to the dire state of the prison’s medical facilities” (Thompson 2016, 36). When the uprising was in full force, the incarcerated wrote a list of demands to the authorities for improv-ing the prison environment, which included: “Provide a healthy diet; reduce the number of pork dishes; serve fresh fruit daily” and “provide adequate medical treatment for every inmate, engage either a Spanish-speaking doctor or interpreters will accompany Spanish-speaking inmates to medical interviews” (Thompson 2016, 123–124) and [permit] “Access to facility for outside dentists and doctors at inmates’ expense” (Thompson 2016, 126).
Woodfox noted that “If a prisoner had a life-or-death problem usually the whole tier had to take action. We’d shake the bars and holler until someone came” (Woodfox 2019, 187). During his time at Angola, incarcerated persons were rarely allowed to see doctors, only nurses or emergency medical technicians (EMTs). This continually produced tensions and led to incarcerated folks pushing for change:
We all knew an EMT or a nurse wasn’t qualified to do a proper examination through the bars of a cell. Prisoners starting filing lawsuits. The claim was ‘deliberate indifference’ to serious medical needs, a violation of the 8th Amend-ment. A judge wouldn’t take that claim seriously unless the prisoner could demonstrate three things: that failure to treat his condition would inflict further significant injury or unnecessary pain; that there was deliberate indifference on the part of the prison, meaning that the failure to respond to a prisoner’s pain or medical need was purposeful; and that there was harm caused to the prisoner by that indifference. For prisoners at Angola that was no problem. After being flooded with lawsuits the federal courts got involved and came down on the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Angola was forced to come up with a process that would allow prisoners to see doctors (Woodfox 2019, 186).
A number of scholars have documented how the state routinely criminalizes disabled persons, LGBTQ folx and gender nonconforming persons, and people with mental illness, and the fact that PMIs are among the most likely to be killed by police (Ritchie 2017, 92; see also Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey 2014; Sears 2014, 42–43). There are numerous cases where the state has sought to increase the medicalization and criminalization of incarcerated women, queer and gender nonconforming folx by construct-ing additional facilities in carceral institutions to control those bodies. For-tunately, grassroots movements have fought back, winning battles to prevent the construction of such facilities. For example, in Boston, during the 1970s, there were long struggles over this attempted expansion and intensification of the PIC. On October 1, 1977, nearly a thousand demonstrators protested plans to open a center for “violent women” at a state mental hospital in Wor-cester, Massachusetts. The Boston-based Coalition to Stop Institutional Vio-lence led this action, which was made possible by the creation of a broad, multi-issue, intersectional activist network:
At its center was a coordinating body of feminist women who crossed lines of race, class, sexuality, and direct experience with institutionalization. The metropolitan area was a hub of several widespread, translocal movements that challenged custodial, medical, and intimate violence and emphasized strategies of self-help and mutual aid, including movements for battered women, mental patients’ liberation, radical feminist health care, and prison reform and abolition, making it a particularly good place to forge an alliance to confront what CSIV activists called the ‘prison/psychiatric state’ (Thuma 2019, 56).
It might surprise readers to know that, in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that incarcerated persons have a constitutional right to adequate medical care. The court concluded in that case (Estelle v. Gamble) that not providing incarcerated persons with sufficient medical care constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Unsurprisingly, this ruling has been all but ignored across the carceral system (Herivel and Wright 2003), but is important because it reveals that, for many U.S. residents, the only place they might receive health care outside of an emergency room could be in a prison or jail (Sufrin 2017, 7). It must also be acknowledged that many of the indicators of poor health among incarcerated populations were already present amongst these groups prior to being locked up, largely because of the stressors associated with living under conditions of societal racism, impoverishment, high occu-pational health risks, low quality health care, and environmental injustice. Drug addiction, mental illnesses, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and heart disease are all examples of such conditions, but they tend to get worse once people end up behind bars.
Health Disparities and Social Determinants of Health
Over the past few decades, scholars have paid close attention to critical con-cerns over health disparities and the social determinants of health across various populations (WHO 2008) with an understanding that when we observe significant differences in health along the categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, education, income, geography etc., we acknowledge that they are “avoidable, unnecessary, and unjust” (Whitehead 1991). Researchers have determined that, for example, racism is considered a fun-damental cause of adverse health outcomes for people of color, contributing to cardiovascular disease, increased body mass index, hypertension, poor sleep, and a range of psychosocial stressors (Williams, Lawrence, and Davis 2019). The concept of health equity is meant to signal the aim of embracing social justice with respect to health. In other words, “Pursuing health equity means pursuing the elimination of such health disparities/inequalities” (Braveman 2006, 180) and a goal wherein “no one is denied the possibility to be healthy for belonging to a group that has historically been economically/socially disadvantaged” (Braveman 2014, 7). Research has also revealed how environmental factors play a major role in contributing to
health disparities in communities of color, such as heightened rates of cancer, asthma, and chemical poisoning (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004; Institute of Medicine 1999; Lee 2002; Morello-Frosch, Pastor, and Sadd 2001; Sexton 2000).
For anyone who had thought that health disparities might be waning in an age of 21st century medical advances, the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has put such hopes to rest, unfortunately. Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latinx communities in the U.S. have been hit especially and dispropor-tionately hard by the pandemic, with transmission, hospitalization, and death rates that exceed their proportion of the overall population (Chowkwa-nyun and Reed 2020; Lopez, Hart III, and Katz 2021). One study explains how structural racism produces these disparities:
The drivers of these sobering statistics are multifactorial. Structural racism laid the foundation for increased risk of Covid-19 in racial and ethnic minority communities. The impact of this racism has resulted in increased infectious spread among disenfranchised individuals due to long-standing limitations on the upward social and economic mobility of racial and ethnic minorities, disproportionate conscription to jobs that are considered essential that cannot be done from home, and limited protections for themselves and their families. Structural inequities have contributed to increased morbidity and mortality from coronavirus infection due to limited access to care, inade-quacies in public policy, and a disproportionate burden of comorbidities car-rying increased risk, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and lung diseases. These factors all intersect to define increased risk of both infection and resultant poor outcomes (Nana-Sinkam et al. 2021
In their book Inflamed, Marya and Patel (2021) articulate a framework that reveals the deeply interconnected nature of health, linking the human body, our societies, and the planet. They demonstrate how illness within our bodies is directly linked to and reflects the harms facing our global ecosystems that are perpetrated and sustained by our political and economic systems. Western medicine was forged in the cauldron of colonial capitalism, a system that sought to disavow Indigenous cosmologies and produced a nar-rative and practice that views human societies as separate from nature, creat-ing divisions and imbalances that have produced mass illness and disease. The ecological havoc that colonial capitalism has wrought on our soil, water, air, food and ecosystems has yielded parallel violence against human-kind. One way to address these multiple, interlinked harms is by reconstruct-ing relationships of care and connections among humans and between humans and the natural world. Linking Marya and Patel’s work with Ernest Drucker’s approach and the literatures on environmental justice and health suggests that mass incarceration contributes to a public health epidemic, and therefore any healthy society must be an abolitionist society. Mass incarceration is a “cause of ill health in Black communities, and not only for those imprisoned and subjected to the gross inadequacies of prison health care” (Hammonds and Reverby 2019, 1349), but for the greater society, including human and more-than-human. Prisons, jails, and detention centers are incompatible with environmental justice and robust public health. In other words, freedom and democracy are precondi-tions for the realization of environmental justice and sustainable public health. This all raises questions such as: how do carceral systems intersect with and influence environmental justice and public health? And how might an abolitionist perspective address environmental justice and public health? We address these questions through an exploration of the ways that the core functions of the carceral system produce ill health and environ-mental injustice, as well as a consideration of how incarcerated persons and their allies have fought mightily to improve medical care and health more broadly for the incarcerated, and to promote environmental justice inside and outside prisons, jails, and detention centers.
Facing Down the Covid-19 Pandemic in a West Coast Prison
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the many ways in which health disparities across demographic groups are further amplified within carceral contexts. Prisons in the U.S. have been some of the most intense hot spots of the pandemic, as these facilities are sites where already vulner-able populations are concentrated. Carceral spaces are also characterized by poor health care and medical services, and tend to be overcrowded, which means that “physical distancing” for safety from aerosol transmission of Covid-19 is impossible unless one is placed into solitary confinement, which is itself inherently damaging to one’s mental and physical wellbeing. Nowhere has this struggle been more apparent than at Lompoc, a federal prison located in northern Santa Barbara County, California.
At the time of the Covid epidemic, Lompoc Federal prison housed approximately 2200 medium, low and minimum security incarcerated perso-nas at four separate facilities, two of which are minimum security camps. As a Care Level 2 facility, a significant number of chronically ill incarcerated men are housed at Lompoc. Even prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, patients with chronic illnesses including hypertension, diabetes and asthma found it extremely difficult, if not impossible to access medical care. Incarcerated men with chronic illness would often wait for over 6 months for medical care (Venters 2020). Basic tests such as checking blood pressure for those with hypertension or assessing peak flow for those with asthma are often not available at all despite calls for medical attention.
Within the first few months of the Covid pandemic alone, the vast majority – more than 75% – of the persons incarcerated at the federal prison in Lompoc had contracted the disease, which made the prison a pan-demic hotspot and one of the largest known Covid clusters in the U.S. and the 6th largest known cluster in a U.S. prison (Department of Justice 2020). The Department of Justice ordered its Inspector General to conduct an investigation into the conditions at Lompoc, which found that staffing shortages, inadequate screenings, a scarcity of protective equipment, poor communication, and a lack of leadership lead to the deadly outbreak at the prison. Additionally, the failure to follow the directives of the CARES Act, which ordered the BOP to prioritize home confinement for those at serious health risk increased the death rate and rate of severe illness at Lompoc (ibid). Incarcerated persons at Lompoc endured considerable trauma throughout this period. Those believed to have Covid were isolated in an older, mothballed unit that was previously used for solitary confine-ment – a place of despair and suffering known as the Security Housing Unit or “the hole.” One incarcerated person recounted that he could hear other prisoners coughing in the unit and once heard guards rush to a cell where they pronounced a prisoner as “gone.”“I can’t even believe this is hap-pening in the United States,” he said. “It was like watching a horror movie” (Blakinger and Hamilton 2020). Eventually, 93 percent of the incarcerated persons at Lompoc contracted the virus (ibid). The prospect of ending up in the hole also acted as a deterrent for incarcerated men to reveal symptoms of Covid-19, as they feared seeking medical attention would lead to a horrific stay in solitary confinement (Venters 2020).
During April and May of 2020, Lompoc prison authorities dramatically restricted phone and email access for the incarcerated, which sowed panic among their families who were concerned about the health of their loved ones. This action, combined with the extremely high number of Covid cases, prompted a protest outside the prison gates by an estimated one hundred relatives and supporters who decried the failure on the part of officials to provide basic sanitary supplies and health protections for inmates. “They’re sick, and they’re not getting the resources they need to get better,” said organizer Chrissie Rogers from San Bernardino. “You can’t get well in a cell.” Local community leader Rev. Julia Hamilton addressed the gathered demonstrators and stated,
This is a crisis of national proportions … These are loved ones and human beings who are treated like they’re disposable. Their basic rights are being denied … We’re not asking for the impossible … We’re asking for soap and hot water. We’re asking for a phone call. We’re asking for respect for the families who care about their loved ones, who deserve to know whether they are living or dying. This is not hard … .It just requires a will to make it happen, and the people running this prison have not demonstrated basic human decency to make sure that during this pandemic every single human soul is treated with care (Hayden 2020b).
These complaints align with the claims made in a lawsuit the ACLU filed in May of 2020 against the federal Bureau of Prisons and the Lompoc facility for “mismanaging one of the worst public health catastrophes related to Covid-19 anywhere in the country” (Hayden 2020a). The suit was brought on behalf of five incarcerated plaintiffs, including Yonnedil Torres, who suffers from chronic asthma. During the pandemic he developed body aches, diarrhea and a fever, but his requests for medical assistance were met with inaction for five days, when he collapsed with acute respiratory shock. When his fellow prisoners started banging on the cages and yelling, prison employees finally arrived and Torres was put into a medically induced coma on a ven-tilator, and now has a paralyzed left arm, an injured heart, and severe lung damage. His sister reported that, during a phone call afterwards, she could not recognize his voice (Hayden 2020a). The pain and suffering continued, however. Prisoner Daniel Lee Vadnais tested positive for Covid on May 2, 2020, according to the Bureau of Prisons. He died a month later (Minsky 2020). Another heartbreaking case was that of Efrem Stutson, who was released on April 1, 2020, after serving 27 years of an overturned life sen-tence. During his last days at Lompoc he
grew weak and came down with a bad cough. He was barely able to talk. Prison officials, nevertheless, put him on a Greyhound bus to his hometown of San Bernardino. When his family met him at the station, they said he couldn’t hold his head up. Stutson, 60, died four days later (Hayden 2020c).
A number of persons incarcerated at Lompoc wrote letters of protest to various authorities, detailing the conditions of the facility and the mistreat-ment they experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of which included claims of withholding critically needed medicine, physical and verbal assaults by corrections officers and case managers, and the refusal by prison staff to wear protective masks. Omid Souresrafil is serving time at Lompoc, where he teaches GED classes. He checked himself into the medical bay when he experienced shortness of breath and heart palpitations. Even though he tested negative for Covid-19, a nurse ordered him to remain in quarantine, where he stayed for 22 days in an 8’x8’ cell. In a letter he stated, “During every one of the 22 days, I could hear the 100 + inmates coughing and calling the guards for help […] Several collapsed and needed resuscitation before being taken by ambulance to Lompoc Medical Center. […] I thought I was going to die, and there were times I felt I wanted to.” He wrote that he was shocked that “[the federal Bureau of Prisons] would use such a primitive and run-down facility to house its sick, vulnerable inmate population. It more resembles a third-world prison than an American one.” Souresrafil made the following observations about his living conditions, which he described as “unsafe,”“unsanitary,” and “medieval”:
- “The toilets and sinks all leaked, and the smell of urine and feces permeated the cell.”
- “Insects crawled around the cell floors and walls, and flies and mosquitos entered from the open corridor windows.”
- “H-unit is very cold. I was provided one insufficient blanket. The mattress was old and torn. The lights were always kept on, and I could not sleep.”
- “I was denied a shower for the first nine days of my stay. (Some inmates that left H-Unit before I did claimed they never had a chance to shower for 17 days.)”
- “The emergency intercom system is inoperative. Guards must rely on the cries for help from inmates to inform them of an emergency.”
- “I have several chronic illnesses. For these conditions, I take BOP-prescribed medications, all of which were confiscated and never returned.”
- “Due to my cardiac arrhythmia, I passed out a total of four times and fell to the floor. Only the cries of other inmates who heard me fall alerted the guards to my situation.”
- “Guards do not always wear personal protective equipment.”
- “I was continuously denied access to a lawyer.”
- “Once you are in this hellhole, you are at the complete mercy of the dys-functional, apathetic, and irresponsible staff.” (Hayden 2020d)
Erasure is another way of handling the pandemic. While right-wing pundits and elected officials have long referred to the Covid-19 pandemic as a “hoax” or downplayed its risks to human health, Santa Barbara County officials took a more innovative but no less harmful approach. When the first surge of the pandemic began to ease a bit, County officials wanted to reopen the economy and get back to “normal.” The problem was that according to public health guidelines and the California Governor, that would only be possible if the spread of the virus was reasonably under control, and the Lompoc prison’s status as a Covid hotspot made that impossible. County officials proposed a solution: don’t count the incarcer-ated population in the official health statistics. Suzanne Grimmesey is a spokesperson for the County and stated, “The individuals in the Lompoc prison are not out in the community, so it’s really a whole separate popu-lation.” Despite protests from activists, in May of 2020 the California Health and Human Services Agency agreed to exclude Covid-19 infections of federal and state prisoners when deciding whether a county government can lift lockdown orders. “It’safiction,” said Kate Chatfield, a senior advisor at the Justice Collaborative, a criminal justice advocacy group. “The virus doesn’t stay within the walls of the prisons, as we know” (VanSickle 2020). She is correct, of course, as the virus has spread within and beyond prisons like Lompoc largely because the corrections officers and other prison staff members freely come and go.
“Shawn” was incarcerated at Lompoc during the pandemic and sent copies of a letter of complaint to the Acting Assistant Director of the Bureau of Prisons, to a law firm that represented him, and to his U.S. senator, in a clear act of defiance. We note that, like other incarcerated persons at FCI Lompoc and carceral facilities around the world, the act of letter writing frequently entails speaking out about injustices in these insti-tutions, which constitutes an act of resistance and extraordinary courage because it puts one at great risk of retaliation by authorities. Shawn commu-nicated to us that he was placed in a segregated medical unit known as “the hole” despite having a negative Covid test, similar to what happened to Omid Souresrafil. This treatment suggests quite strongly that they both may have been targeted by prison authorities for their activism. Anthropologist Ori-sanmi Burton (2021) theorizes that letter writing by imprisoned people is an act of survival and rebellion against the domestic warfare that the PIC constitutes. Extending that idea, we contend that letter writing by formerly or currently incarcerated persons and their loved ones, friends, supporters and allies is a critical act of environmental justice work, which is key to fomenting abolition. The realization of environmental justice and abolition requires their articulation in words, whether written or spoken, which also reflects the importance of knowledge production in grassroots movements for radical change.
The dynamics associated with state neglect, oppression, and repression at Lompoc prison speak to the myriad ways in which the struggle for environ-mental justice, public health and abolition must expose and confront insti-tutional violence. Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons and their loved ones and allies took the authorities at Lompoc and the Bureau of Prisons to task for transforming what was already an inherently dangerous and unhealthy built environment in a “living hell” and used a variety of methods of responding, making more visible the conditions inside the prison and demanding improvements.
Discussion and Conclusion
One evening in October of 2002, one of the authors was present at the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. This conference was the follow up from the First Summit in 1991 – which was a defining moment of the U.S. environmental justice movement’s growth and development. The purpose of Summit II, as it was known, was to “gather to assess the progress made since 1991 and to develop the strategies for the next decade and beyond” (WE ACT 2002). In the lobby of the hotel where the event was being held, I had the honor of sitting down with a renowned movement activist who, in a private conversa-tion, told us “the environmental justice movement isn’t really an environ-mental movement. It’s a public health movement.” It wasn’t clear if this was meant as a critique, but it struck me as a fair point. After all, the Prin-ciples of Environmental Justice – a foundational document penned at the 1991 Summit – contained numerous references to the need to promote “healing” and “health” as part of a transformative vision of an equitable, just, and vibrant global society. That vision is still a work in progress, of course, as the challenges of environmental and climate injustice remain with us, as evidenced by the fact that Indigenous peoples, communities of color, and a range of marginalized groups continue to face unceasing assaults to their health associated with racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and state-craft that have deprioritized democracy and socioecological wellbeing. Since that conversation two decades ago, we have come to the conclusion that in addition to the fact that the environmental justice movement is in large part a public health movement, the concept of public health that it mobilizes around must also be focused on multispecies health. In other words, the “public” in public health extends to all humans and our more-than-human relations, just as justice itself must include an embrace of multispecies com-munities. Such a statement might have sounded overblown prior to the global spread of diseases like Covid-19, Monkeypox, and Langya, but the fact that these diseases are zoonotic – meaning, they spread between humans and nonhumans (in either or both directions, “spillover” denoting nonhuman to human transmission and “spillback” denotes the reverse, see Kelly et al. 2009) – reveals the inherent necessity for analysis and action around multispecies health and justice (see Solis and Nunn 2021). Thus attention to the ways that we can deepen and expand our conception of environmental justice and public health could not be more urgent.
Because Covid-19 is a zoonotic disease, its very existence reflects illness and harm that extends across species, necessitating a multispecies justice approach to public health and environmental justice. During this age of global anthropogenic climate disruption, the unceasing encroachment of human activity (whether via settlements or extractive practices) into already vulnerable habitat and ecosystems has made the health of both humans and nonhumans more precarious. Thus, Covid-19 is a form of environmental injustice because it involves the targeting of marginalized populations through a form of biological warfare that bolsters the existing uneven power relations within and across the human and more-than-human divide. This means that movements for public health, environmental justice, prisoner rights and abolition have an additional task and challenge to consider: how to extend our analyses and politics to a vision of justice and change that truly and effectively integrates the needs of humans and nonhumans in the 21st century. Addressing that challenge will require drawing on longstanding and emerging traditions and practices of care work that activists inside and outside of carceral institutions have honed over the generations. Dan Berger reminds us that “As prison organizing demonstrates, the pursuit of freedom from violence is rooted in care and creativity” (Berger 2014, 275); and as Robert Gottlieb (2022) notes, we can strengthen “care-centered politics” in ways that link our needs across mul-
tiple scales, from the home to the planet. Marya and Patel (2021) issue a clarion call for reconstructing relationships of care and connections among humans and between humans and the natural world. Deepening our attentiveness and commitment to care work within and across species will be crucial to the promotion of environmental justice, public health and abolition.
Health disparities across various demographic groups have been a major concern for scholars and public health advocates for decades. Environmental racism and injustices have contributed to health disparities, reflecting the myriad ways in which the quality of public health and wellbeing is primarily driven by social structural and political forces, including racial inequality, discrimination, and the broader realities of racial capitalism. Carceral spaces are sites where we find troubling and often deadly intersections of environmental injustice and health disparities, which have recently been amplified during the Covid-19 pandemic. And while incarcerated and for-merly incarcerated persons have suffered as a result of these interlinked phenomena, we note that they have also engaged in effective and principled resistance and refusal by speaking out and offering testimonials of their experiences, in hopes of effecting change to the carceral system.
Editors’ Note:
This article appears in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2022).
For references and purposes of citation, please visit the published version of this article.