From Prison Policy Initiative:
No one is spared from reckoning with human-induced environmental change, like pollution from industrial emitters and increasingly severe natural disasters. Yet in correctional facilities, incarcerated people have no agency over almost any aspect of their lives, including their exposure to harmful and even potentially lethal conditions. Prisons fail to provide a basic standard of livability, while climate change and extreme weather test the ability of prison administrations to carry out contingency plans for the hundreds of thousands of people in their care. The ways in which environmental hazard and risk maps onto other unsafe conditions of confinement amounts to a human rights crisis that has persisted for decades.
Prisons are sited on uninhabitable, toxic wastelands
The rural geography of many of our nation’s prisons isn’t just unfortunate for those having to travel far from home to visit; prisons are too often built near (or directly on) abandoned industrial sites, places deemed fit only for dumping toxic materials. One-third (32%) of state and federal prisons are located within 3 miles of federal Superfund sites, the most serious contaminated places requiring extensive cleanup. Research warns against living, working, or going to school near Superfund sites, as this proximity is linked to lower life expectancy and a litany of terrible illnesses.
The ways in which environmental hazard and risk maps onto other unsafe conditions of confinement amounts to a human rights crisis that has persisted for decades.As a result of being on or near wastelands, prisons constantly expose those inside to serious environmental hazards, from tainted water to harmful air pollutants. These conditions manifest in health conditions and deaths that are unmistakably linked to those hazards. Continue reading >>>
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