“Hell On Earth:” Extreme Heat In Mississippi Prisons

• In Event: Place, Political Economy, & Environmental Injustice: Studies in Green Criminology

Abstract

Expanding on existing literature which understands incarcerated people as victims of environmental injustice (Pellow 2017) and states as complicit in the production or tacit allowance of environmental harm (Long et al. 2013; Lynch et al. 2020), I explore how incarcerated people in Mississippi experience extreme heat and how the state has failed to manage these conditions. This project, while increasingly relevant throughout the United States, is particularly significant in Mississippi. Despite being a historically hot and humid state, one made increasingly so by global climate change, many people who are incarcerated in Mississippi 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 between 2023-2024 and conducted critical policy analysis on relevant state laws and MDOC documents. My findings show that extreme heat amplifies the experience of “social death” already endemic to incarceration, and that the state has failed to manage these impacts, which I characterize as a state-green crime of omission. I argue that these data have profound implications for green criminologists, particularly those interested in the project of abolition.

Author

• Austin Luzbetak, University of Minnesota