Measuring Prisons’ Environmental Impacts in the Adirondack Park, 1976-1999

• In Event: Sources of Conflict: Environmental Impact Statements as Methodology and History

Abstract

Environmental politics and mass incarceration—two phenomena whose parallel growth helped characterize life in the late twentieth century United States—intersected wherever state and federal correctional bureaucrats planned to build and operate penitentiaries. A central feature of prison planning in New York’s Adirondack Park—governed by a panoply of state environmental regulations dating to the late nineteenth century—entailed public participation in the preparation and publication of environmental impact statements (EISs). Ostensibly intended to ensure transparent and sustainable development in environments notable for their ecological fragility and social importance, the process of compiling EIS data—involving investigations by an array of government agencies, along with open hearings and debate—became the newest battlefield in a long running war between mainly low-income permanent residents and affluent visitors over the meanings and uses of Adirondack nature. Influenced strongly by the history and demographic profiles of individual towns and villages destined for penal expansion, the EISs—in addition to cataloging in minute detail each new prison’s expected impacts—also provide a snapshot of communities adjusting to a late twentieth century, postindustrial world still defined, in large measure, by late-nineteenth-century questions and values.

Author

• Clarence Jefferson Hall, Queensborough Community College / CUNY