Deep Green Abolition: Penal Abolition at the Intersection of Environmental and Racial Justice

• In Event: Revolutionary Criminology: Shifting Toward a 21st Century Radical Paradigm

Abstract

The environmental victimization of prisoners and ecological degradation caused by racialized mass incarceration remains a subject largely underexplored in both the penal abolition and environmental justice literature. Resonating with Jewkes and Moran’s (2015) critique that “green criminologists have sidestepped prisons and imprisonment as subjects worth investigating”, this paper seeks to use green criminology to explicitly situate penal abolition, environmental racism, and ecological degradation within the same analytic frame in order to better inform the work of activists and scholars fighting against mass incarceration. On the one hand this paper draws on a socio-historical analysis detailing the parallel and intersecting growth of environmental racism and prison construction over the past several decades. And on the other it draws from contemporary case studies of the work of the Prison Ecology Project, the Abolitionist Law Center, and my own efforts as a scholar-activist and organizer with these organizations in our collective attempt to shut down a proposed Federal Prison in Appalachia. The prison in question is slated to be built on an old Mountain Top Removal site, less than two miles from both an active surface mine and toxic coal-slurry impoundment, as well as one of only three old-growth forests left in Kentucky.

Author

• Jordan Mazurek, Eastern Kentucky University