As climate catastrophe worsens in the US, a disturbing policy trend ensues: expanding prisons and police projects that directly harm the environment and the very communities they claim to serve.
Atlanta serves as a prime example, where plans for the controversial “Cop City” training facility involve destroying a crucial watershed – a pattern shadowing lawmakers from New York City to Texas and across the country.
Atlanta’s proposed police training complex, dubbed “Cop City” by opponents, means clearing 381 acres of the Weelaunee Forest, a vital watershed for primarily Black neighborhoods. The decision, made in the wake of 2020′s Black Lives Matter protests, has left residents further prone to climate catastrophe.
“Forests keep us safe because they soak up heavy rainfall, protecting us from floods,” said Mariah Parker, former Athens-Clarke County commissioner. “Cop city isn’t even built but the destruction of the forest and its replacement with impervious concrete is already putting people in danger.”
Recent extreme flooding, which Parker and other organizers link deforestation for Cop City, have cast a grim foreshadow. Like the rest of the country, Atlanta faces increasingly hotter years. The removal of the Weelaunee Forest further jeopardizes the Black residents already abandoned by the green energy movement due to redlining.
As the deadly effects of climate change continue to sweep across the United States, millions of tax dollars are being poured into building new prisons and police facilities, leaving constituents, especially those of color, vulnerable to environmental catastrophe.
A national trend: Prisons vs. the environment
The pattern of pro-police agendas supersede environmental health and community safety, advocates say.
This year, Texas Prison Community Advocates (TPCA) have filed a formal complaint that amends a 2023 lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The document alleges that temperatures inside cells can have reached as high as 149 degrees Fahrenheit, where prisoners are “cooking to death.” Professor Michele Deitch at the University of Texas Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, warns that such conditions will only worsen with climate change.
Alongside noting antiquated piping in prisons, which often lead to water pollution, Deitch noted that several are built on flood plains, those prone to natural disasters.
“Many prisons are built near toxic sites,” said Deitch. “It’s not unique to Texas, but they’re built near places where there’s chemical exposures and other kinds of toxins.”
Toxic soils threaten New York City’s Chinatown, where the city has approved a 40-story mega jail, part of a borough-based jail to close the notorious Rikers’ Island. Of the five boroughs, Staten Island, majority white and Republican, will not receive a new jail. Soil samples revealed unsafe concentrations of chemicals like benzo anthracene and chrysene, which the CDC said are potentially linked to cancers.
[source: Matrix New World Engineering Land Surveying Report, July 2019, on behalf of the New York City Office of Management and Budget and New York City Department of Corrections, page 29]
Chinatown advocates like Jan Lee, member of Neighbors United Below Canal, have alleged with documentation that Gramercy Group, the company contracted by the city, failed to adhere to environmental safety procedures and self-report these and worker injuries, as they are compelled to do so by city ordinance. This has caused buildings like the Chung Pak senior center to crack, threatening the lives of all the low-income elderly residents. Lee also predicts that many buildings will also lean towards destabilized areas.
Lee and others have demanded that the city pay for an independent monitor of Gramercy Group as well as requested environmental reports without success. New York City’s mayor, former police officer Eric Adams, ran during election season on a platform to deny the building of the jail. After winning the race, he reneged on his promise. He has even nearly doubled the jail budget to $16B, but cut funding for and thus ended the thirty-year community composting program.
“Every day that went by for the last five years, this project has increased by four million dollars,” said Lee.
The cost of choosing policing over people
Police and prisons have resulted in not just a climate toll, but also a human cost.
“[The Texas Department of Criminal Justice or TDCJ policy states] that incarcerated individuals can have water whenever they choose to have water and that is not the case,” said Amite Dominick, President of TPCA. “Just because it’s policy doesn’t mean it’s procedure.” In 2023, Texas prisons raised the price of bottled water by 50% from $4.80 to $7.20 per pack. Most incarcerated Texans earn zero dollars for their labor.
Without access to air conditioning or water, Texas imprisoned people were described as literally cooking and have resorted to flooding toilets, laying in the unsanitary water or dunking their clothes in it in order to cool off. The impact on mental health is devastating.
“One recent study found that days with unsafe heat index levels raised daily violent interactions by 20%,” said Deitch. “Suicide rates go up in the summer.”
Atlanta climate advocates also experienced extreme treatment, including the city council’s dismissal of a petition that bolster approximately 116,000 signatures, racketeering and terror charges. Demands have been made for a formal inquiry into the death of Weelaunee Forest advocate Tortuguita, whose legal name is Manuel Paez Terán and who was killed by over 50 bullets after interacting with Georgia state patrol. Police were not wearing body cameras.
Facilities like Cop City are now being planned, have been approved, or are already operating in all 50 states except for Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota. New York City’s mayor recently announced a cop city for the Queens borough to launch in 2030, and has projected that it will cost at least $225M.
Police forces, many collaborating across state lines, have also been deployed against climate activists. Tarah Stangler, an autonomous street medic based in Madison, WI, was one of six hundred arrested during the 2021 Line 3 protests by the Northern Lights Task Force, a police coalition of over sixteen counties that received $750,000 from Canadian oil company Enbridge to secure the pipeline. The oil industry, one of the greatest contributors to the climate crisis, has fueled the prison system, and its predecessor enslavement, in some cases like Louisiana as far back as 1901. Chevron sent a prosecuting climate lawyer to jail after paying $18 billion in damages to Indigenous Ecuador Amazonians. The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, with Canadian tax dollars, holds $5.9 million of stock with private prisons Geo Group and Core Civic and invested $186 million in ExxonMobil. Stangler witnessed brutality, experienced pepper spray, even was battered by low-flying helicopters.
“[Police] are protecting property over people and focusing on us stopping them rather than stopping the climate catastrophe,” said Stangler. “This is very clear what y’all are here for, and it’s not for us.”
Indigenous-led solutions offer a path to decarceration and climate justice
Stangler aligned with Indigenous leadership and political thought to solve the linked crises. Indigenous people are held in state and federal prisons at double the national rate and four times that of white people. The incarceration rate between 2000 and 2019 increased by 89%. Across all demographics, 62% returned to prison between 2016-2019.
Alaskan Native leader Talia Eames, Recovery Manager at The Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, proposed in 2020 recovery facilities built to resemble traditional multi-generational and multi-family long houses for recently released people to assist in their re-entry into the community. Indigenous legal collectives like the Tribal Defense Office of the Salish and Kootenai Tribes collaborated with the Bronx Defender to adapt their holistic defense as a legal practice.
“Providing supportive housing and resources is actually a move for public safety,” Eames to the Juneau Empire in July 2020. “It’s the only way to impact recidivism.”
Alongside Native and preventative solutions, Lee in New York City’s Chinatown has called for adaptive reuse instead of the mega jail.
“It’s a much more green answer because we are not literally taking two enormous steel-reinforced gigantic jails and putting them into landfills,” said Lee. Although the procedure will most likely save the city billions of dollars and reduce its impact on the climate, the city rejected Lee’s idea.
Both Lee and Dominick call for independent monitors in their respective situations. Dominick went even further, believing that the true resolution should come in stages, including setting a legal standard for water, AC units, ensuring that incarcerated people become a protected class, federal standards, until ultimately reducing the number of prisons.
“We have too many prisons,” said Dominick. “We need to look at alternatives.”
A joint report from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and Ella Baker Center for Human Rights corroborated Dominick’s assessment, especially the prisons most susceptible to climate change. It notes that people in prisons, especially the elderly and/or with disability, are most susceptible to the climate crisis because of a failure in policy to protect them or create emergency plans during fires, flooding, or other climate emergencies. The revenue saved, in California State’s context $106,000 per year per person, could then be used to fund climate solutions.
Activists now face the greatest challenge: convincing elected officials to fund climate solutions and not the climate crisis like prisons and cop cities. Whether through the democratic process or direct democracy, disconnecting money between prisons and environmental catastrophe seems the paramount solution.
Winona LaDuke, a Native American climate protector who was also arrested at the Line 3 protests, provides in her book Recovering The Sacred a solution already happening in some Native communities: a shift away from the oil industry and into democratizing the sacred power of wind energy as a means of reclaiming economic power. Such defunding of the oil industry might also catalyze the decline of investment in prisons.
“The power of transformation is growing stronger these days,” she writes in the book. “Native American communities are creating momentum for change [...] providing solutions that all of us will need in order to survive the next millennium.”
Rohan Zhou-Lee (They/Siya/祂(Tā)/Elle) is a queer/nonbinary Black Asian dancer, writer, and organizer. A 2023 Open City Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, they have written for Newsweek, Prism Reports, NextShark, and more. Siya is also the founder of the award-winning Blasian March, a Black-Asian-Blasian grassroots solidarity organization, and for their work has been featured on CNN, NBC Chicago, USA Today, WNYC, and more. Zhou-Lee has spoken on organizing, human rights, and other subjects at New York University, The University of Tokyo, the 2022 Unite and Enough Festivals in Zürich, Switzerland, Harvard University, and more. www.diaryofafirebird.com
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