Carceral Toxic Exposure and Environmental Risk: The Slow Violence of Carceral Landscapes

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Environmental Inequality & Toxic Exposure

Abstract

Prisons have been understudied as sites of environmental inquiry. This article is an interdisciplinary qualitative study of environmental risk in California state and federal prisons. I ask the following research questions: 1) How do inmates experience extreme climate events, environmental degradation, and environmental pollution in a correctional institution? 2) To what extent have prison facilities and the institutions accountable for inmates attended to or ignored the current and future impact of environmental pollution and climate change in their design of facilities, everyday operations and plans for emergency response?
Drawing on archival sources and in-depth interviews with 50 previously incarcerated people and members of prisoner support groups, thematically analyzed, I build on the concept of slow violence to understand carceral experiences of pollution and extreme climate events and institutional logics of environmental risk. Environmental scholars have drawn attention to the experience of slow violence in urban areas and rural communities, yet carceral geographies have been bracketed out of such explorations. This study explores the hidden nature of slow violence in California prisons and fundamentally reconsiders how environmental degradation affects vulnerable populations, particularly incarcerated people.

Author

• Anthony Agustin Landers Michel, Rutgers University-New Brunswick