My friend recently wrote an essay on madness: the estranged mind of unfathomable logic; a mental illness, which often led to people being locked up and treated as far less than human. The segregation and demonisation of the mentally unwell is now seen as archaic. And yet we have similar infrastructures in place today. I was recently asked where my nearest prison was. I did not know. I do not think of prisons much. I imagine them to be places of danger, solitude, and sadness. Are the walls as grey in your mind?
Prisons are a meeting point for all oppressions. Hence their abolition also provides the opportunity for combinatory solutions. Prison abolition and climate justice promote unity, connection and care. Nurturing belonging and community responsibility, abolition provides an opportunity to redefine the meaning of justice.
Prisons, as they hide individuals, bury the social problems those people experience, further exacerbating inequality. This removes many social issues from the forefront of the public’s eye. Removing dangerous criminals from society protects the public. But when we use incarceration as a form of justice, we disregard the humanity of all criminals. Addressing harmful situations with harmful infrastructure is never what we should do. We are only pulling string deeper in the gorge of a cut. Do we really need punishment for justice? Relying on the police and prisons to create a fair world removes ourselves from the responsibility of finding our own forms of equity and estranges us from ourselves and the community. Through this separation, we lose the sense of group responsibility. We limit our imagination of what inclusive solutions can look like. Prison abolition and climate justice foster interconnectedness and belonging. Abolition is about presence and rehabilitation, never based on exclusion.
The government is currently aiming to build an extra 18,000 prison places, at a cost of £500 million. This means that the government is actively looking to imprison people, when the rate of total crime has no statistically significant change (year ending March 2022 compared with the year ending March 2020 (pre-corona virus)). With the highest number of imprisoned people in Western Europe, the UK seems obsessed with promoting this cycle of punishment and pain. Instead of neglecting individuals in cages, we could address some of the social conditions which cause crime.
Imprisoned people often come from disadvantaged minority communities: the same communities which suffer the most from the direct effects of climate change. Prisons are often built on toxic wasteland or industrial plants. This prevents family and friends from visiting the prisons – visitations which might be beneficial to a prisoner’s rehabilitation –and exposes prisoners to pollutants and toxins that have been proven to lower life expectancy. Moving people from environmentally hazardous areas in their communities to environmentally hazardous areas in prison is an inane practice of fiscal and moral costs. We imprison humans in their unfair reality and fail to address underlying concerns for these populations.
Private prisons run by companies such as Mace, Serco and Sodexo (Profiting from their misery Britain’s private prisons) are run as cheaply as possible to achieve the largest return. The same companies that run private prisons for profit are causing extreme ecological damage to the Earth. While they excuse themselves of the moral duty of facilitating the basic human rights of prisoners, they continue to make profit and further plunder the environment. Do not be fooled by the numerous propaganda articles of their claimed environmental care – for they are all self-written. This is not just in the UK. Shell and fossil fuel companies which continue to obliterate the Earth’s atmosphere partially fund the policing system in the US which has caused the discriminatory deaths of many individuals. All oppression is inextricably linked.
Prison construction directly causes habitat loss, especially as prisons are often built on rural land to keep criminals out of sight and out of mind. Many of the prisons being built are carbon neutral which takes a step forward in the name of climate change. We cannot, however, encourage the building of further toxic establishments for a token gesture in the name of the climate. The majority of prisons also have no evacuation plan for the prisoners. In Louisiana, Hurricanes Katrina and Ida exposed shortcomings in disaster planning for confinement facilities, when inmates were trapped in flooded buildings and cut off from communication with loved ones.
Increase in temperature due to global warming also calls for the adaptation of confinement facilities to create safe living conditions. Ironically, climate migrants fleeing from inhabitable land may become ensnared in the ‘crimmigration’ system (refers to an increasing resort to criminalisation to exclude and expel immigrants) which is most alive in the US, but also present in the UK. These individuals, in their attempts to escape climate problems largely caused by the global West, will find themselves physically locked up in the tight embrace of similar issues. Adaptation of prisons to deal with these conditions is not yet a focus.
Liberation via abolition means the air we breathe is not tarnished by exploitation: exploitation of prisoners, exploitation of the Earth and exploitation of the public. To align ourselves with the hardest struggles of our time is to align ourselves with the most vulnerable in whatever form those individuals take. We must learn that injustice is interlinked across borders. Climate justice is not a free standing pillar. In the abolition of prisons, we further environmental distributive justice also. Not only do we no longer give profit to the money-sucking companies that harm the Earth in the name of capitalism, we prevent further damage of the ecosystem through construction, and practise common themes of care.