Mississippi Burning: Environmental Injustice and Social Death in State Prisons

• In Event: 50620 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Environmental Inequalities and Harm 1

Abstract

Expanding on existing literature which understands incarcerated people as victims of environmental injustice (Pellow 2017; Opsal and Malin 2020; Gribble and Pellow 2021) and states as complicit in the production or tacit allowance of environmental harm (Pulido et al. 2016; Pellow 2017; Lynch et al. 2020), I explore how incarcerated people in Mississippi experience extreme heat. This question is particularly relevant in Mississippi: despite the fact that hot, humid summers are typical for the region, and that these summer conditions are being intensified by climate change, many incarcerated people in the state do not have access to comprehensive air conditioning. To conduct this research, I engaged in letter correspondence with people incarcerated in three state-operated prisons in Mississippi from 2023 to 2024. My findings from 68 letters show that extreme heat amplifies the experience of “social death” already endemic to incarceration. More specifically, extreme heat intensifies incarcerated peoples’ experiences of social disconnection and isolation, humiliation, and loss of sense of self, all of which produce social death for many locked up in Mississippi without the reprieve of air conditioning. I argue that these data have profound and complex implications for environmental justice researchers, particularly those interested in the project of prison abolition and alternatives to state-based solutions to environmental harm.

Author

• Austin Luzbetak, University of Minnesota