Prisons are failing to keep people safe from climate hazards
A new study on Colorado prisons adds to growing evidence that inadequate infrastructure and policies put incarcerated people at risk during extreme climate events
By: Sarah Hopkins
In May of 2011, Robert Allen Web was found dead in his cell in a rural Texas prison during a severe heatwave, his body hot to the touch. In October of 2017, reports surfaced that Texas prisons had been inundated with flooding from Hurricane Harvey, and that incarcerated people were wading through sewage contaminated water, without access to food or medicine. In September of 2020, over 1,300 people were evacuated from four Oregon prisons due to spreading wildfires. Reports called the evacuation “extremely haphazard and ad hoc.” In July of 2023, an Arizona outlet reported that cooling systems had failed in a local women’s prison during triple-digit heat, and that officials were charging incarcerated people for ice.
Now, a new study from the University of Colorado that examined environmental hazards in the state’s prisons, jails, immigration detention centers, and youth detention centers, adds to decades of evidence showing that people in US incarceration facilities are increasingly vulnerable to extreme environmental hazards they cannot escape.
Published last September in the journal National Hazards Review, the study is one of the first analyses to quantify incarcerated peoples’ exposure to climate disasters, and found that the vast majority of the state’s incarcerated population are at risk of exposure to environmental hazards, like wildfires or extreme heat. It also shows that as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of these hazards, facility infrastructure and policies in Colorado can’t protect incarcerated people.
Shideh Dashti, a geotechnical engineer who led the study, said that Colorado is a strong representative case study that likely points to broader trends across the country. When compared to other states, Colorado’s incarceration facilities aren’t on the extreme “good or bad” end of the scale in terms of their safety or exposure to environmental hazards, she said. Colorado is also in the middle range of incarcerated populations, when compared to other states.
“I can imagine that the results from our state would be applicable to the rest of the country and potentially worse in certain states,” Dashti said.
Using census data from 110 facilities, the researchers applied GIS mapping software and climate modeling data to calculate whether each facility was at low, medium, or high risk of four types of hazards exacerbated by global warming: wildfires, floods, landslides, or extreme heat.
They found that three-quarters of all facilities, which house 83% of the state’s incarcerated population, have either moderate or high risk of exposure to at least one hazard. One out of every three facilities, housing about 12,700 people, are at moderate to high risk of wildfire, and half are at risk of extreme heat. Fifteen facilities are at risk of flooding, though they could not assess several facilities because no flood risk data was available from the federal government.
The researchers also detected racial disparities. They found that Black people were significantly more likely than white people to be jailed in a facility at risk of extreme heat, while Latino people were at greater risk of experiencing a flood while incarcerated.
Engineers, geographers, climatologists, architects, planners, and scientists all have a role to play to reduce how vulnerable incarcerated people are to climate change, Dashti says, but ultimately, she believes that the data supports decarceration as the most effective policy response for keeping people safe.
“We should mitigate from an engineering perspective to do whatever we can to make facilities more humane and more safe for these highly vulnerably communities,” she said. “We should generally design spaces that are safe and an environment that is healing as opposed to creating more trauma for the incarcerated and their families, but everything that we see points to decarceration.”
Dashti’s study arrives alongside a growing body of research that rigorously analyzes the risk that climate hazards pose to incarcerated populations.
Julie Skarha, an epidemiologist with Brown University, led a study published last year showing that the Texas prisoner death rate is 30 times the national average, likely due to heat-related deaths and lack of air conditioning. She says that ensuring air conditioning is available in prisons is key to protecting the people inside.
“People’s risk for dying or suffering from a heat-related illness should not be dependent on which prison they get sent to,” she said. She also believes that policymakers should consider retrofitting prisons to make them climate resilient, alongside “other ways that we can move people back into communities.”
Both incarceration and environmental hazards hit communities of color disproportionately hard. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 664 of every 100,000 people held in a carceral facility. Black, Native, and Latino Americans are incarcerated at a rate of 2,306, 1,291, and 931 respectively, per 100,000 people. By comparison, white Americans are incarcerated at a rate of 450 per 100,000 people.
Legal scholars and incarcerated people also report having few effective means through the legal system for raising safety concerns around climate change impact.
In an article published last May in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, Vaughn Ford-Plotkin, an attorney with the public defender’s office of Maricopa County, Ariz., said that the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), legislation enacted in the 1990s, prevents incarcerated people from defending themselves against climate disaster. This is because the law requires incarcerated people to file complaints with administrative officials before defending their rights in court. Yet administrative officials may be the very people who are violating their rights in the first place.
Ford-Plotkin says this interferes with their ability to bring lawsuits defending their right not to suffer from cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of carceral systems. He and other legal scholars believe that extreme weather conditions will lead to increasing violations of that right.
In addition to repealing the PLRA, Ford-Plotkin says that there must be “band-aids first”: “Making sure every prison has adequate infrastructure and has the heating, cooling, and structure needed, and emergency plans formed.”
Jennifer Toon served over 20 years in the Texas prison system, where she spent time in units that did not have air conditioning — an experience she described as “unbearable,” and “cruel and unusual punishment.” She said that she and other incarcerated people would wet their clothes and pour water on their cell floors during the summer months, and then try to sleep in the puddles of water. In 2017, she worked as a clerk in an administrative office at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, where she says she regularly saw officers log temperatures of 120 to 130 degrees in the cells.
“If you want to know what it feels like to be in a non-temperature-controlled, non-air-conditioned prison in Texas in the South, then try to sleep and live and breathe and do your schoolwork inside of your car in the middle of a Walmart parking lot in a Texas summer,” Toon said. “And that’s your life inside of that car. With maybe an inch of the window cracked. Survive it.”
Toon described the grievance system as a “joke,” and said that people in the prisons “rarely ever saw anything happen because of a grievance.”
Toon now works at the Lionness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, a nonprofit that is supporting the family members of three women who died in the Texas prison system last summer for what they believe to be heat-related reasons, though the state will not confirm their cause of death.
“It’s not just the incarcerated person” that’s at risk, she said. “It affects their kids and their families. And you know, they didn’t do anything. We may have made mistakes, but please don’t punish our families and our kids.”
