Abstract
This article draws on the stories of formerly incarcerated people to examine the ways in which the physical and social infrastructures of carceral facilities increase incarcerated people's vulnerability to environmental hazards exacerbated by climate change. We present qualitative data from interviews and focus groups with people who have been incarcerated in prisons and/or jails in Colorado regarding their experiences with incarceration infrastructure, amplifying the voices of formerly incarcerated people to identify vulnerabilities which have been deliberately hidden by carceral social and institutional processes, and adding them to the academic dialogue around incarceration and climate change. By providing testimony on the ways in which incarceration infrastructure—how they are designed, built, and maintained—amplify environmental harm, we identify how incarceration infrastructures create environmental vulnerability along axes of temperature, air quality, and water supply even before incarcerated people are exposed to climate hazards. Then, we illustrate ways incarcerated people encounter limits to their agency to mitigate this vulnerability, suggesting the need for structural change. Finally, we provide evidence that climate-related extreme temperatures, wildfires, and flood events experienced by our participants exploited the axes of vulnerability laid out above, affecting the majority (65%) of our 35 study participants. Overall, we argue current carceral infrastructure creates material realities that regularly cross the threshold of cruel and unusual punishment, and our argument supports decarceration as a necessary public policy intervention for robust, just, and humane climate resilience.
Keywords
Introduction
Climate change disproportionately burdens the most vulnerable populations, putting those with the fewest resources and agency at greatest risk (EPA, 2021). Mass incarceration in the US does the same—people who are incarcerated are far more likely than not to come from under-resourced and marginalized communities (Goodman et al., 2017; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010; Western and Pettit, 2010; Western and Wildeman, 2009), and their incarceration further destabilizes those communities (Gilmore, 2007; Shabazz, 2015). By studying the risks and impacts of climate-related hazards that are becoming more extreme and more frequent with climate change (e.g., Kodra et al., 2011; Robinson et al., 2021; Schoennagel et al., 2017; Whitfield, 2012), we can gain insight into the everyday lives of people who have been incarcerated, as well as consider broader implications for environmental justice.
We present qualitative data representing first-hand accounts of carceral infrastructure and encounters with climate impacts from people who have been incarcerated in prisons and jails in the state of Colorado, US. They describe conditions ranging from “brutally, brutally hot” to “literally […] ice cold,” air quality so poor that many experience chronic respiratory issues, and water infrastructure that conveys disease and seems constantly in need of repair. They explain the barriers keeping them from exerting their agency to ameliorate these conditions. When coupled with the extreme temperatures, 1 wildfire smoke, and floods that climate change brings, these conditions and lack of agency render incarcerated people profoundly vulnerable. At the time of writing, two Colorado prisons have gone through full evacuations due to climate events—Territorial Correctional Facility in 2013, in response to the Royal Gorge wildfire, and Delta Correctional Center in 2023, due to risks of flooding.
We first situate our study in conversation with existing literature from carceral geographers, sociologists, and others investigating environmental injustices within the US carceral system, as well as the small but burgeoning literature focusing directly on the interplay between incarceration and climate change. After a brief discussion of our methodology, we turn to our data, which is organized into three sections: first, how Colorado's physical and social carceral infrastructure creates vulnerability 2 along three axes—temperature, air, and water; second, how incarcerated people exert their agency to mitigate those axes of vulnerability, and the limits imposed on that agency; and third, accounts from actual encounters with climate events, demonstrating how exposure to climate hazards will increasingly create stress that aligns precisely with the axes of vulnerability identified above. 3 The first two sections deal primarily with vulnerability; the third explains how exposure to climate hazards will continue to exploit that vulnerability to create risks and disaster events, unless systemic change is made to incarceration and incarceration infrastructure. In our writing and data collection, we have chosen to center the words of our participants as often as possible, using these first-hand authoritative accounts to define and describe axes of vulnerability that cannot be illuminated through other approaches due to the deliberate secrecy and isolation of the carceral apparatus (Massaro and Boyce, 2021). Our key contributions, then, are to use this evidence to show how the combination of escalating climate hazards, and vulnerability amplified by incarceration infrastructure, creates injustice and risk—on top of the other injustices and hazardous conditions faced by incarcerated people, documented elsewhere. The conditions represented in these accounts demonstrate the injustice and inhumanity of the US criminal system, as well as those collaborating with it, including design and engineering professionals.
We contend that the findings presented here should also inform broader conversations about spatiality, agency, and vulnerability, beyond incarceration facilities. Encounters with hazards are always contingent on spatial conditions. When those conditions exacerbate risk, and when the population exposed to that risk does not have the agency to control or significantly mitigate those conditions, vulnerability to climate hazards will increase. We ground this contention in theoretical debates within carceral geography around how “the carceral” should be defined. Moran et al. (2018) argue that three conditions define the carceral: detriment, the lived experience of harm; intent, an external agent actively imposing that detriment; and spatiality, through which “the carceral is achieved” (p. 679). In response, Hamlin and Speer (2018) critique the strictness of Moran et al.'s typological categorization, pointing out for example that the fact that detriment is imposed by an external actor may sometimes be more salient than whether or not that imposition is intentional. They contend that a more useful definition of the carceral is Foucault's (1975) concept of the “carceral continuum,” in which a long gradation connects full imprisonment to social conditions characterized by more diffuse and slight limitations. In applying our findings beyond the prison walls, we argue that these two definitions can be held in productive tension with each other. Scholars engaged in spatial queries into situations of disadvantage and disproportionate vulnerability in the context of climate change should attend to points along the carceral continuum where Moran et al.'s three conditions manifest and interact: when specific spatial conditions impose risks, limitations, and ultimately detriments on a population, and when the agency to control, mitigate, or intervene in those detriments is primarily external to that population. We urge scholars to center the lived experience of those who suffer those detriments in their analyses, following the example of carceral geographers (e.g., Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo, 2023a, 2023b; Crewe et al., 2020; Miyake, 2021).
Our research team considers incarceration facilities broadly, including jails, prisons, immigration detention centers, youth detention centers, and community correction facilities; this study notes specific affiliations as they arise. 4 We define “incarceration infrastructure” as the social and physical constructs that create “the design, installation, and maintenance of buildings that imprison people, as well as the lifeline systems needed for such institutions to operate, e.g., water, cooling, ventilation” (Glade et al., 2022).
Reviewing environmental injustices of incarceration
Our team and collaborators conducted a systematic review of existing academic literature on the intersections of incarceration and climate change (Glade et al., 2022). This review revealed a dearth of scholarly attention to, and knowledge about, this topic in architectural and engineering journals—that is, those who are largely responsible for designing and building incarceration facilities. Since we conducted our initial review, more scholarship has been published in this space, including within the pages of this journal when Colucci et al. (2023) identified thermal inequity inside incarceration facilities and called for future studies to focus on the built environment of prisons. 5 The incarceration-climate change nexus remains understudied, in part due to a lack of data and transparency in carceral systems, and qualitative research that engages people with actual incarceration experience continues to be particularly lacking.
The academic consideration of prisons and jails as loci of environmental injustice owes much to the work of the Prison Environmental Justice Project (PEJP, Pellow et al., 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020). Their reports raised a number of concerns including high degrees of toxic exposure within prisons and jails; the fatal disastrous effects of environmental events (heat, hurricanes, and floods) in prisons; and the throughline of free market capitalism as incarcerated people labor in toxic jobs without occupational safety and health oversight (see also Nowakowski, 2013) and are deployed to help non-incarcerated members of society mitigate and recover from hazard events (e.g., hurricanes and wildfires) (see also Purdum and Meyer, 2020). While previous research on the “pains of imprisonment” is well established in carceral studies and sociology, that research was founded in a moment prior to today's understanding of the climate crisis and related disasters and focused less on hazards and vulnerability, as detailed by our participants (Haggerty and Bucerius, 2020). Environmental harms become part and parcel of the systematic disinvestment in, and the subsequent criminalization of, resource-poor communities and communities of color—an injustice documented by geographers McKittrick and Woods (2007) in their analysis of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which left thousands of incarcerated people locked inside the Orleans Parish Prison submerged in chest deep, sewage-tainted water for days (ACLU, 2006).
Parallel to the work of the PEJP and research post-Katrina, attention to the intersection of carceral facilities and climate risks has emerged. 6 An early study came from geographers Gaillard and Navizet (2012), who noted that “both prisons and prisoners are particularly affected by disastrous events associated with external natural and other hazards” (p. 33). Sociologists Purdum and Meyer (2020) focused on labor performed by incarcerated people before, during, and after disasters. They find that in their state-level Emergency Operations Plans (EOPs), at least 30 US states explicitly identify incarcerated people as a surplus labor force to be tapped for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Through this labor, incarcerated people are exposed to amplified hazards, often without sufficient protective equipment and receiving little to no compensation. Standing programs in at least 11 U.S. states 7 train and deploy incarcerated people to fight wildland fires (Feldman, 2017, 2018, 2019; Goodman, 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014; Smith, 2019; VanderPyl, 2021). An additional six states 8 deploy incarcerated people to fight structural fires (McGonigle, 2019), and two states explicitly list incarcerated people as potential firefighters in their EOP. 9 States that are more likely to incarcerate people of color are also more likely to include incarcerated people as disaster labor in their EOP.
A growing number of scholars are taking the intersection of incarceration and disasters one step further, to account for climate change. With two exceptions (Motanya and Valera, 2016; Veit, 2018), this interdisciplinary literature has emerged in the past few years, as more scholars pay attention to how climate change stands to exacerbate existing environmental injustices in prisons and jails by causing more frequent, more intense, and more destructive hazard events (Colucci et al., 2023; Cowan et al., 2022; Glade et al., 2022; Golembeski et al., 2021; Gribble and Pellow, 2022; Levenson, 2022; McGee et al., 2021; Prins and Story, 2022; Purdum et al., 2021; Skarha et al., 2020; Skarha et al., 2022). We join these scholars in understanding incarcerated people to be among the most vulnerable and ignored populations in the US in the context of climate change. Uniting these studies is a resounding call for more research into the interplay between climate change and incarceration. Most of them do not present empirical data, with a few exceptions (Glade et al., 2022; McGee et al., 2021; Skarha et al., 2022). McGee et al. (2021) argue that mass incarceration contributes to climate change by demonstrating that “increases in incarceration are associated with increases in industrial emissions” (p. 326). Skarha et al. (2022)’s results suggest that 13% of mortality within Texas prisons without air conditioning is likely to be heat-related.
In a previous article (Glade et al., 2024), our team contributed to these empirical studies by exploring spatial relations of four specific climate disasters (extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and landslides) to quantify the exposure level of Colorado's prisons, jails, and detention centers to those hazards. We found that 74.5% of facilities, housing 83% of Colorado's incarcerated population, had either moderate or high relative exposure to one or more of the studied hazards. Furthermore, we found correlating evidence of disproportionate racial disparities in which facilities and incarcerated people were likely to be impacted: individuals who identify as Black or African American were more likely to be incarcerated in facilities with high exposure to extreme heat, and those identifying as Hispanic or Latino/a/x were more likely to be incarcerated in facilities with high exposure to flooding.
Missing from these studies—including our own—are the voices of people who have actually experienced incarceration. These voices are critical to validate our previous estimates of exposure and the severity of infrastructural vulnerability, in view of limited access to quantitative and facility-specific data. This limited data access is systematic and structural, and an inherent outcome of the “isolation, fragmentation and control” of the carceral system (Massaro and Boyce, 2021). This article attempts to begin filling that gap, contributing qualitative data, and painting a fuller and more nuanced picture of how Colorado's incarceration infrastructure interacts with climate hazards through the accounts of those most impacted.
Methods
This study involved 35 individuals who were formerly incarcerated in Colorado prisons and jails. Participants were recruited for interviews and focus groups via an announcement distributed through the communication network of “Remerg,” a reentry-focused nonprofit in Denver, Colorado, US, and via direct contact of Denver Metro area halfway houses. This recruitment strategy employed convenience sampling to compensate for the difficulty of contacting prospective participants with relevant experience.
Participants were invited but not required to share their gender, age, race/ethnicity, the amount of time they had spent incarcerated, and the facilities in which they were incarcerated. 23 participants identified as male, 12 as female. 13 participants chose to withhold their age, 4 their race/ethnicity, and 2 the amount of time they spent incarcerated. 10 The group ranged in age from 24 to 63 at the time of this study, with a median age of 48. Time spent incarcerated ranged from 1.5 weeks to 35 years, with a median time of 11 years. Cumulatively, our participants spent more than 420 years within Colorado prisons and jails. Time spent in facilities outside of Colorado was excluded from this study to contain the conclusions drawn from the interviews to the state of Colorado. Participants claimed the following racial and ethnic identifiers: White (16), Hispanic/Latino (6), African American/Black (4), Native American (1), Native American and Black (1), and Indigenous and Hispanic (1). We include demographic information on our participants to demonstrate that these issues cut across race, gender, age, and time imprisoned. (Future studies should examine how impacts differ along those categories.)
Our sample represents experiences from 23 prisons and 15 jails (Table 1), which are federal, state, and county facilities. 35% of the jails in the state are represented in our sample, and the only active prisons missing are the San Carlos Correctional Facility and Trinidad Correctional Facility. Our average participant served time in three prisons and one jail, reflecting a broader pattern of recidivism.
Colorado prisons and jails where study participants were incarcerated. The number in parentheses is the number of participants who spent time in each facility.
*No longer operating †Private Prison.
We employed two qualitative methods: semi-structured interviews and focus groups. We chose these methods because of their capacity to draw out the richness and nuance of lived experience. We added focus groups to our research design after conducting our first interviews with the goal of involving a larger sample in our study, and to examine the degree of thematic resonance between interviews and focus groups. Both interviews and focus groups included questions on the following themes: the buildings and rooms where participants were incarcerated; how those spaces interacted with climate hazards (e.g., heat waves, wildfires, floods) to create vulnerability (e.g., indoor temperature, compromised water infrastructure, poor air quality); the impact of these hazards on the health and finances of our participants; and whether our participants ever modified the spaces in which they were incarcerated to make them more livable (Table 2). We conducted a total of nine interviews, which ranged in length from approximately 1 to 1.5 h and took place in coffeeshops, restaurants, and participants’ office spaces. We conducted a total of four focus groups. Our focus groups had four, six, twelve, and eleven participants, respectively. Focus Groups 1 and 2 took place at Remerg. Group 3 was held at the Ananeo Sober Living men's halfway house, and Group 4 at the Ananeo women's residence. 11 Informed consent was obtained using an Institutional Review Board-approved protocol.
Themes and sample prompts for interviews and focus groups.
Interviews and focus group discussions were audio recorded and transcribed using HyperResearch software. Transcripts were qualitatively coded to identify major themes and patterns within and across participant responses. A total of 380 statements were coded as relevant to this study.
This study has a limited scope. We are not seeking to present generalizable knowledge of the US prison system within or beyond Colorado. Our data is qualitative and from a relatively small subset of Colorado's formerly incarcerated population. However, the accounts gathered here should be treated as robust and actionable knowledge about Colorado prisons and jails at the time of this writing. Our reasoning underpinning this claim is informed by three tenets: First, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people should participate—and indeed be centered—in academic and political dialogues about their lived realities, particularly in dialogues that espouse the goal of informing changes to the carceral system. This stance aligns with work within carceral geography that establishes the importance of centering the lived experiences of incarcerated people in empirical work (Baer, 2005; Cope, 2003; Crewe, 2014; Crewe et al., 2014; Crewe et al., 2020; de Dardel, 2013; de Viggiani, 2012; Jenness and Fenstermaker, 2014; Jewkes, 2005; Medlicott, 1999; Moran, 2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2014; Rowe, 2011; Sibley and van Hoven, 2009). Second, informed by scholarship from feminist geography (Haraway, 1988) and environmental justice studies (Bullard and Alston, 1990), we understand our participants as experts and authorities of their own situated experiences. While their accounts may not be generalizable or necessarily representative, that does not mean they are devoid of meaning or useful insight. Third, the carceral system in the US—from the federal Bureau of Prisons to state Departments of Correction to individual wardens—actively resists attempts to study it, and regularly restricts access to those under its purview if it seems that the resulting scholarship will cast the system in a negative light (Reiter, 2014). We encourage our readers to consider seriously the possibility that the experiences and observations detailed here may indeed be representative of the general experience of incarcerated people in Colorado, and perhaps even in the US more broadly. Indeed, our own unpublished interviews with design and construction professionals working across the country identify the same kinds of issues with extreme air, water, and temperature conditions, and inadequate maintenance that worsens these situations. We argue that scholars should couple the understandable desire for evidence that is more demonstrably robust and quantitative with the knowledge that a carceral apparatus does everything in its power to block such evidence from coming to light (Massaro and Boyce, 2021). If what our participants relate is in fact descriptive of the general reality within Colorado prisons, then action is urgently required, and time is of the essence.
Axes of vulnerability
In the following pages, we identify three axes of vulnerability created by the social and physical infrastructures of carceral facilities: temperature, air, and water. These axes were inductively identified through the research process as vulnerabilities created by incarceration infrastructure even before climate change impacts are taken into account. While not “new” findings, necessarily, in the broader literature on carceral conditions, they are critical to revisit from the perspective of our participants.
Axis of vulnerability I: Temperature
All nine interviewees and 59% of focus group participants made statements implicating the consistency, comfort, and controllability of temperature in the facilities where they were incarcerated. Two primary themes emerged from the 102 individual responses coded as temperature-related vulnerabilities: the physical construction and engineering of the facilities (17.7% of the temperature-related responses); and the operation and maintenance of temperature control systems (25.7%).
Three interviewees and two participants in Focus Group 2 made comments about the materials used to build prisons and jails—concrete, steel, and concrete blocks—with regard to impacted temperature insulation and the exposure of incarcerated people to cold. A 53-year-old white man who spent 18 years incarcerated described the fully welded steel cells in Denver Reception & Diagnostic Center (DRDC), 12 as being “surrounded by steel walls like a tuna can, right? And super cold all the time. That's where I really froze.” A 49-year-old White woman who was inside for 18 years also commented on the impact of steel: “You’re on a metal bunk, top and bottom. And your wall is right there, so if it's cold outside you are straight out cold cold.” A Black man who served 10 years noted that “somebody could probably go into shock because you’re in a room full of steel […] and concrete. You’re not in there with any kind of blanket or any kind of real… Nothing. Two sheets.” 13
Facility age was frequently cited as a factor for temperature control. One interviewee, a 54-year-old Asian-American man who served 10.5 years, for example, stated: “The building that I was at had a swamp cooler, and it just seemed like it didn't work very well.” This inefficient system had an impact, he explained, when coupled with the lack of insulating material used in facility construction: “There would be many times where I would walk from outside to inside on a ninety-degree day and go, ‘Oh my gosh, it's hotter in here than it is outside’ […] I would say anywhere from 8–10 degrees.”
A facility being equipped with air conditioning systems did not guarantee against comments that the temperature control systems were insufficient. A participant in Focus Group 4 put it this way about Denver Women's Correctional Facility, which is air conditioned: “[T]heir system was so archaic that […] if it was warm on the first level, then the third level would still be freezing. […] There was never any consistency throughout the building.” Another participant in the same group who worked on the maintenance crew explained that the temperature control system at Denver Women's was too powerful to be finely calibrated: “[T]he forced air system is just really, really strong. I mean, whether it's cold air or heat. […] And it's not a temperature really regulated thing[…] [I]t would just get cold […] And then it's too hot.”
Three interviewees and one focus group participant spoke about the degrading integrity of facility structures. As one interviewee put it: “There's a lot of prisons [that] are cold. They're old, some of the buildings is not structured properly, cracks in windows and things like that. […] All these cracks in the building.” A participant in Focus Group 2 described Denver Women's similarly: “There was just all these leaks in the walls, uneven foundations […] There was lots of cracks. Leaks. Like, from other floors. Like the wall, you could see where the paint was damaged from the inside, where it would leak.” One interviewee, in a follow-up email, identified the seal between the window and the wall as the biggest problem in the Buena Vista Correctional Complex, saying, “it was just around the edges of the window where it would open and close that had no rubber so the wind would blow right through them sometimes.” Many participants noted facility age as a determinant factor: “Buena Vista's been around since the 1800s,” one participant explained. These cracks and gaps were identified as the main vulnerability in terms of temperature exposure. Incarcerated people would resort to creative solutions to try to reinforce these weaknesses, which we will discuss more in the next section on the agency.
Temperature issues were not confined to older facilities. Sterling Correctional Facility, the largest facility currently active in the Colorado system, opened in 1999. Incarcerated people were used as labor to construct the facility, and as one interviewee told us, [W]hen they built them, they built them very quickly, and I think the pads that they built them on started to sink, and so you would get gaps. We would get gaps in walls where bugs would just crawl right in from the outside, right? And so we used to have problems with heat in that situation, where, like, you know, it's 105 outside. - Male, 53, White, 18 years
Multiple participants shared rumors that Fremont Correctional Facility, and in particular Units 7 and 8, had been condemned by the state but continue to operate. “This is the rumor,” an interviewee told us. “The rumor is that they are condemned, and instead of tearing them down, they'd rather pay the fine for having condemned buildings.” While we have been unable to corroborate this rumor, we take it seriously as a possibility.
How the Correctional Officers (COs) chose to operate systems and procedural practices within prisons and jails was the most frequently cited source of temperature vulnerability. Two practices in particular were mentioned multiple times across interviews and focus groups: a significant mismatch between the change in the seasons and when the COs would shift the temperature system from cooling to heating; and procedures that forced incarcerated people to spend time outside in the yard for extended periods, exposed to the elements, in a changing climate with more extremes than ever before.
Six interviewees and six focus group participants all made statements about the disconnect between external temperature and whether the COs were heating or cooling the facility. A representative statement was: [I]t wasn't running at the time that you needed it the most. […] So, you're there for three or four weeks, sometimes longer, and it's just incredibly hot. And then it would be true in the wintertime as well, right? Where it's still running, and it's incredibly cold. - Male, 54, Asian American, 10.5 years
A few participants speculated about the reasoning behind this disconnect—perhaps it was a signal of incompetence, penny-pinching, or overly rigid or outdated bureaucracy. Perhaps it was arbitrary. Three participants put forward a more sinister theory: that it was done as a tactic of disciplinary control and punishment, what one of them, a focus group member, called “mental games.” This theory of weaponizing temperature was reiterated: I never thought you could be overly air conditioned, but yeah […] it was extremely uncomfortable. […] That kind of discomfort, over long periods of time, I suppose, is a very small form of torture. […] You're just you're at the - you're at the hands of your masters, so to speak, the ones that control everything. - Male, 58, African American, 34 years 9 months [T]hey'll punish you sometimes. Like - like they'll make it freezing cold. Like, they'll go lock you down, ‘We'll make it freezing cold,’ one day, and then all of a sudden in the afternoon it's fucking blazing hot again, they turn the heat on, because they're cold. […] So you got to run off of what the cop thinks, but you're living there. - Male, 32, White, 2 years
In contrast to the fluctuation of temperatures, few participants stated that jails and solitary confinement (also called administrative segregation or “ad seg”) were perpetually kept frigid, which several participants believed would ostensibly prevent bacteria and viruses from growing. Ironically, the effect of perpetual cold exposure was somewhat different, as one interviewee put it, “they make it so cold […] it causes you to get sick.” One focus group participant who had spent several years in solitary confinement gave a different reason for why those cells were kept cold: “It always seems to be colder in the seg units than it is in general population. Like, they keep it freezing. On purpose, so you're under your blankets and you're just docile.” Another member of his focus group added, “That way you have no energy.”
A participant described one factor that would disrupt practices of temperature negligence: the dog training program at Denver Women's. “I thank god for the dogs,” she told us, “because the dogs are what we counted on to adjust our heat or our cold. […] Had we not had them, we would have been still freezing, or burning.” She harbored no illusions that the concern for the animals’ well being came from a place of compassion, explaining, “if the dogs started getting sick, then that would be cutting into their money, and that would be our life saving right there.”
Two operational practices forced incarcerated people to spend time outside, exposed to the elements: “med line,” the process of waiting in line to receive daily medication (for some, up to three times a day); and shakedowns, when COs would go through every cell in the facility and everyone would have to wait in the yard for up to 7 hours, according to one interviewee. This topic arose in Focus Group 3. In the words of one participant, [T]he med lines being outside, those are horrendous. Because everyone's on meds, and those lines - you're out there freezing your fucking ass off. I mean, it's cold. And if you've got meds twice a day, spending four hours, five hours every day outside in the elements, man, and it's fucking freezing cold. - Male, 15 years
14
As he notes, the proportion of incarcerated people who are taking medication is significant, with a large incidence of medical and physical ailments,
15
even though incarcerated people are undersupplied with access to pharmaceutical medicine in comparison to the non-incarcerated population (Curran et al., 2023). Adding to the above statement, another participant noted the behavioral ramifications of the policy of conducting med line outside: But there's guys that need medication at the facilities I was at, that won't take that medication because it's so fucking cold out. […] that can play a part in behavior and everything else, too. […] Like, people aren't being stable […] just because you're freezing your fucking ass off, you know what I mean? And frostbite is a real fucking thing. - Male, Hispanic, 5 years
Shakedowns could similarly expose incarcerated people to harmful conditions. As one interviewee recounted, I remember it being summer, and there's no way to get away from the sun. And I remember people just burning. My celly at the time, […] he was out there all day. And he was so purple, and he had edema on his head so bad you could put your thumb in his forehead and it would just stay. - Male, 46, White, 30 years
Related to temperature (feelings of extreme hot and cold) were observations about air quality and the ability to breathe, which we turn to next.
Axes of vulnerability Ii: Air
Four themes made up the majority of the 47 comments coded as vulnerabilities related to compromised air quality: the ventilation system—ducts, vents, and chases (small gaps between cells through which pipes and vents are directed)—not being sufficiently cleaned (30%); the health impacts of breathing the air in prisons and jails (17%); the presence of mold (13%), and air filters, particularly regarding their role in facility attempts to manipulate routine inspection (13%). Breathing was a commonly cited concern—for example, 7 out of the 10 participants in Focus Group 3 reported having respiratory problems while incarcerated.
Four interviewees and participants in three out of four focus groups raised concerns about the ventilation system seeming like it was rarely if ever cleaned, including observations such as: [T]he ventilation was just awful. There's like - So I was super clean, and cleaned everything. Walls, ceilings, like everything. And the fan, like the vents, you know, were really nasty. […] Probably had never been cleaned the whole time we had been there, or it had been built I should say. […] I felt like [the vents] were never clean. Like, it would blow the dust out. You could tell by the way that the walls were dusty. It was just ugly. […] Like I said, we couldn't take the heater vents off. I'd be in there with Q-tips. And I mean you could just see how thick it was in there. - Female, 41, Hispanic, 3 years I can guarantee you that the air systems in there, they have never been cleaned. […] In twelve years, they - I know, and I talked to many people who were there a lot longer than I was, and they did not ever clean the air ducts, ever. - Female, 63, White, 12 years [T]hat whole chase area is typically very, very, very dirty. It doesn't get necessarily cleaned. […] That chase area is an area that could be definitely better maintained. Especially if it's our breathing, if it's our air. - Male, 54, Asian American, 10 years 6 months
These statements speak to the poor air quality as a result of lax cleaning or maintenance.
A few participants described even more severe air quality factors, often noting that the facilities housing them had inoperable windows and little to no air circulation. Therefore, they argued, any contaminants that entered the facility air did not have the benefit of air circulation or replacement, thus amplifying vulnerability for inhabitants. Two participants, for example, described the practice of spraying down the facility with bleach whenever there was fear of a disease outbreak, including early in the COVID-19 pandemic. 16 This caused issues, one member of Focus Group 1 told us, because of the tendency of incarcerated people to work out in their cells. Sweat, he correctly noted, contains amino acids which can chemically react with bleach to create toxic airborne chemicals (Finewax et al., 2021). Members of three focus groups mentioned facilities with exposed asbestos. A member of Focus Group 2 was disturbed when he learned that asbestos had been found in the day room of his Unit: “I mean, we sat there for days on end, you know what I mean? Morning, noon, and night playing poker.” In perhaps the most egregious example of insufficient sanitation practices, one interviewee told us that “one year they found like eighteen dead pigeons up in the cooling unit.” They only opened up the HVAC system to find the dead birds, he said, because practically the entire two-hundred-person pod began to complain about the smell.
Multiple participants described the health impacts of inadequate ventilation, including being frequently congested as a result of the air quality. As a member of Focus Group 3 put it, “I was hacking up phlegm like I was still smoking on the streets. […] [E]verybody always [has] runny noses.” Another member of the group added, “A lot of wheezing.” The focus group participant who described cleaning out her vents with Q-tips described a similar experience: “I was always sick. I'm – I'm not – I don't get sick easily, and I was always congested, always felt like I had a cough or something.” This issue wasn’t confined to the incarcerated population, as one interviewee made clear to us—it also impacted the COs. “I remember the guards,” he told us, “they would come in, and immediately when they'd come in they'd feel it, and they're like ‘Man, anytime I'm in this unit, I just get congested.” The interviewee was quick to add, “But we'd live in it.”
A few participants described more severe health impacts. As a member of Focus Group 3 put it: [S]ome people, they get sores on their face or their mouth because it's all just dry circulated air. […] sometimes they're bleeding, or whatever, because - because of the circulated air in there. ‘Cause there's no ventilation, you know? Especially obviously no windows. - Male, Hispanic, 11 years
A participant from Focus Group 4 told us, “Probably the entire time I was incarcerated, I always had scabs on the inside of my nose.” Another participant interjected, “Dry, dry, dry, dry.” “And,” the first participant continued, “just the air being so filthy.” Another participant, who had spent 6 years in Denver Women's, described the impact of the air on her health succinctly: “When I first started there, I was on one inhaler. When I got out, I was on three.”
In a revealing statement, a member of the dog training program described the impact of the air on the dog's health: I was on the dog team for like five or six years. And so the dogs would come in, and they would be fine for the first couple days. And then after we would have them for three or four days they would start waking up with, like, really bad green eye boogers. And they would get progressively worse, and start having really bad, like, breathing or nasal problems […] And it wasn't with like one or two dogs. It was with every dog. - Female, 41, Hispanic, 11 years 6 months
In addition, five participants mentioned the presence of mold in facilities, including black mold. Although mold often results from water damage (see the following section on water vulnerabilities), its primary health impact is on air quality. Mold exposure is associated with respiratory conditions including asthma and COPD (Annesi-Maesano et al., 2013). When mold was discovered, participants described a range of responses by COs: spraying bleach, covering it with caulk, and—in multiple cases—simply painting over it.
An interviewee who had spent over 10 years in Fremont Correctional Facility told us, “I don't recall anybody ever changing out a filter. I don't recall. I - I knew the guys who worked for the HVAC team. They didn't walk around with filters.” The member of Focus Group 4 who had herself worked maintenance at Denver Women's said that she had in fact changed the filters once during her 1.75 years inside—well shy of the recommended six month replacement rate.
The participant who worked as a dog trainer shared a rumor of the central role air filters played in routine inspections intended to hold facilities to American Correctional Association (ACA) standards: “I was told that they put clean filters in before they do that, and then once they leave, they put the old filters back in. […] so it's just like a, ‘Oh look how new these filters are,’ and then they pop the old filters back in.” One of our participants who had worked on the HVAC team in Buena Vista Correctional facility confirmed that this type of inspection manipulation was routine practice: [M]ost things would be out of code most of the year until the state came and did inspections. They would tell the prison administration when they were coming so they had time to prepare and get everything up to code. Every year. No one ever did a surprise inspection and so with months in advance warning they had time to put the inmates to work and make sure everything looked good for when they were inspected. - Male, 46, White, 30 years
A participant in Focus Group 2 described the self-dealing aspect of this particular type of corruption: “I helped them prepare an ACA audit. The craziest part about that? Guess who does the ACA audit? Other DOC employees. […]And, here's what they do. […] ‘Ok, you got this wrong, this wrong, this wrong. Fix it before we come back.'” Shaking his head in disbelief, the participant added, “I used to call them criminals, because I was like, ‘They bustin’ moves.’ […] Getting it over on the system.”
Likewise, as we summarize next, water infrastructure creates an axis of vulnerability due to physical conditions and social practices.
Axes of vulnerability III: Water
Of the 33 comments coded as corresponding to vulnerabilities within facilities’ potable and sewer water infrastructure, a majority (52%) were about the water quality per se. Other notable themes included damage and failure in the water system (36%) and sanitation issues (30%), which were often revealed by intentional flooding as an act of protest.
Three interviewees and members of Focus Groups 2, 3, and 4 listed water quality among their primary environmental concerns within carceral facilities. Their descriptions made it readily apparent why it was such a prominent concern. “[T]here were times when the water was brown for weeks,” one interviewee told us. Interviews described how the poor water quality impacted them, for example, sharing: I knew the water wasn't good that we shower with and it's just the same water we're drinking. Then it can't be good unless you boil it, right? […] [I]t would just char your skin up so bad that you couldn't shower every day, you know what I mean? And so, yeah. And then the water puts film on your cup. - Male, African American, 5 years Your hair falls out from the water, your skin - I have really sensitive skin, like, my skin was bad. I mean, I would lose so much hair from that water. Like, ‘cause the water is just so bad. - Female, 41, Hispanic, 3 years
A few participants made statements that went beyond describing the water as hard or harmful to their hair and skin, claiming that it was in fact toxic. One interviewee, who was incarcerated at Crowley County Correctional Facility, described a sign in his unit that described the process for drinking the water: [I]n order to drink the water out of the tap, you had to let it sit for a couple of minutes. You - you take the water into the tumbler, and you let it sit for like, two to three minutes so that whatever's in it will sink to the bottom, the heavy metals, right? And then you can drink it. And you just don't drink all of it. Like there was an actual sign that explained how – what the process is for drinking the water. - Male, 53, White, 18 years
These statements are consistent with recent reports of water contamination in incarceration facilities. For example, Poirier et al. (2024) reported that approximately 47% of all facilities and 56% of juvenile facilities in the US are in a watershed likely contaminated with forever chemicals known as PFAS, putting 990,000 people and at least 12,800 juveniles at risk of water toxicity. There are also numerous reports of rat fur, arsenic, and copper (as well as other dangerous chemicals) in US prisons (see for example Nargi, 2024), which corroborate the severity of water contamination and toxicity in carceral facilities.
In addition to water contamination, twelve participants shared stories of maintenance and operation of these systems creating additional vulnerabilities—rusted and corroded pipes bursting, sewage backing up, water shutoffs in the showers failing, and the water boiler breaking during the winter. Describing the sink in a closet for cleaning supplies, one participant noted “you could see how rusty those pipes were. It was terrible.” Broken pipes could shut down facility water for days on end and often expose inhabitants to internal flooding. “One pipe busted and it was coming down the wall, and it flooded the whole bottom tier? And we had to sleep like that. […] And it just kept coming, and coming, coming, coming,” said a member of Focus Group 4. One interviewee described how the 12-inch water main in his facility “blew up” in the middle of a norovirus outbreak. “Like, suddenly the water was off and everybody needed the toilet and it was really a not great situation.”
When pipes broke, sewage backed up, or incarcerated people intentionally flooded their cells in protest, tiers (i.e., each floor of the cell block) could fill with sewage water, posing sanitation concerns. Wet cells—cells equipped with combined toilet/sink units which multiple participants described as being mere inches from one's bed—already caused a sanitation exposure concern, particularly since most cells were double bunked even if they had only been built to support one inhabitant. As one interviewee put it, “It's got a very strong flush, you just know those particles are just in the room, because that's where you eat, that's where you sleep, that's where you read, that's where you live. And if you're in a lockdown and your roommate has to take a shit, you're just stuck.” Participants described how internal flooding made this exposure far worse, including the following excerpts: I was in Buena Vista and the water busted. […] [A]ll of the sewage pipes busted, and the water was up to your knees in the whole pod. And we just had to stay there. We didn't have anywhere to go. […] All of our stuff was floating around in the shit water. - Male, 46, White, 30 years [T]hey had to close off some of the units because the sewage was so bad from the showers staying on that it overflowed, so it was coming down everywhere. So, you know, the walls […] was seeping water and everything. You could smell the sewage, ‘cause there's like draining holes in some of the floors, and you could smell it coming through. And you couldn't go to brush your teeth in the sink because all that - Yeah. It was bad. - Female, 49, White, 18 years
These stories of everyday indignities and harms are used to demonstrate the extreme vulnerability of those incarcerated to climatic hazard associated with temperature, air quality, and water quality/quantity. We elaborate below on how the agency of people who are incarcerated attempts to mitigate these conditions even as, in the context of climate disasters/hazards, increases their risks.
The limited agency of incarcerated people
This section details comments that revealed our participant's agency to mitigate and cope with all three axes of vulnerability and the limits imposed on that agency by facilities’ social and physical infrastructure. We noted three primary themes: incarcerated people's attempts to modify their environment; the formal complaint process, including the retaliation it could provoke; and the micro-economy of commissary purchases. These themes are not discrete—together they paint a picture of a social infrastructure that is designed most fundamentally to severely restrict the spatial agency of incarcerated people (Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo, 2023), greatly hampering or eliminating the possibility for them to reduce their own vulnerability.
Modifications
Participants shared many creative tactics they would use to modify their cells into a more livable environment. These tactics—each of which were shared by more than one participant—included: obstructing vents with clear tape, cardboard, or plastic to block excessive cooling or keep wildfire smoke from entering the cell; stuffing cracks in the walls and windows with trash bags or spare clothing or tactfully hanging clotheslines in front of the vent for the same reason; using plastic to shield the splatter from the toilet six inches away from the bed; soaking clothes and sheets in water to try to stay cool; boiling their drinking water in their coffee pots in an attempt to purify it; and, in Denver Women's, propping the cell door open with a trash can to try to create some more airflow during hot days.
One participant, a White male who had spent 34 years inside facilities, shared more extreme modifications he used to cope with heat, cold, and fires, respectively: [Y]ou could actually… put water on the floor. And because of the way the door and everything was built, it actually could hold it almost like almost like a tub. And granted, it was only a quarter inch at the most deep. But […] you would just strip down to your boxers and just lay on the floor in the water. You did have a window that you could open, like probably an inch and a half, two inches, and but it also never sealed shut completely. So I felt like there was always air coming through. And one of the first things they taught me in the winter was that you actually put water on that. You would - you would rub a wet rag around the edges of that to try to put water to work as a seal because it would freeze. It's going to be that cold anyway, but at least it would freeze enough to seal the air from coming in that cell. [W]e do know the smoke rule in prison, which is essentially you just continue to flush your toilet and there's a way that air will circulate backwards into that toilet and actually give you air. And so you actually cover your head with a towel because there's been fires in prisons and things like that. And that's actually how people breathe in fires and those situations.
These stories of attempts to modify conditions show remarkable efforts to reduce vulnerability to mitigate risk.
The problem, as a member of Focus Group 2 told us, is that “[A]ny modification of your cell is against the rules.” CO responses would range depending on the vindictiveness of the officer. Participants reported everything from being forced to reverse their modifications, having their possessions confiscated, or even receiving a Class 2 write-up—a loss of privileges, including yard time and contact with family and friends, and a black mark on an eventual petition for parole.
Complaints
The formal complaint, or grievance, process was described by our participants as bureaucratic and deliberately made difficult to navigate. Complaints would often have no impact, one participant told us, “unless you sue and win.” For a lawsuit to be successful, the complainant must demonstrate that they followed the proper complaint procedure. This requires filing four consecutive steps, under time constraints. The filings can be dismissed under the CO's discretion if, in the officer's opinion, the “remedies” are not “exhausted” by the filing of the final step. Even if something is taken care of without a lawsuit, it often will not be addressed until a complaint has reached stage three or four, meaning a delay of 2–3 months before a situation is remedied. One participant described the stress of trying to write an effective grievance during a heat wave: [W]hen it's that hot, you're filling out that grievance, you're dehydrated because you can't go to the water fountain, […] everybody's mad, angry, pissed off, and you can't fucking think in there. […] I mean, you're dehydrated, you know? […] [Y]ou have symptoms of heat exhaustion, your brain is not firing on all cylinders, and you're sitting there trying to do the right thing, trying to follow their procedures. - Male, 32, White, 2 years
Our participants made clear that if you make a mistake in your formal complaint—e.g., misspelling a word or using the wrong technical terminology for the problem at hand—your grievance could be dismissed. Stories circulated of retaliation for grievances. If you file a lawsuit, according to an interviewee, “They're going to make it the worst that it could possibly be.” Privileges could be redacted, or, as one participant explained, people could be suddenly moved to another facility: “[I]f it's a serious enough complaint, your ass is going to come up missing. You'll be in another facility by Monday.” Even if COs didn’t retaliate, several participants recounted feeling that their complaints were often minimized and met with a mentality that one participant summed up this way: “‘Don't do the crime, you won't have to stay here,’ right? So, like, it's - it's basically our fault that nothing works, and there's nothing that we can do about it other than deal with it and do your time.” Lamenting this mentality, one participant expressed a wish that COs would themselves have to experience incarceration as an empathy-building facet of their training. Such training could help COs “have more understanding, like, ‘Hey, we just want the doors open, because we're dying in here.’” Minimization of complaints and the threat of retaliation take a psychological toll, as a member of Focus Group 3 explained: “It makes you shut down. You can't do nothing about it, it makes you shut down. Why complain when you got to deal with it? […] [Y]ou become this fucking … this zombie.” As a result of these threats and the mental health tolls, complaints do not present a viable alternative for mitigating environmental vulnerabilities.
Micro-economy
Because incarcerated people arrive at a new facility with no personal goods, any equipment to manage fluctuating and uncomfortable conditions has to be purchased. Items that were most often cited in this regard were fans, thermal clothing, and—in the women's prison—skeins of wool to crochet extra hats and blankets. Discussion of these goods centered on their relative expense compared to average income and the long delays involved in acquiring them after purchase.
The amount of money made by an incarcerated person, according to our participants, varied significantly depending on where they were incarcerated and what job they held. At the upper end, members of the dog training program in Denver Women's reported making $150 a month. At the lower end, people without jobs (i.e., on “state pay”) made $6–12 dollars a month. There are many demands on these funds—for example, one participant recounted that 20% of his pay was taken back by the DOC for restitution and child support. One would then have to regularly purchase hygiene materials like soap or laundry detergent, supplementary food, use of the telephone, pharmaceuticals, and medical visits (in Denver Women's Correctional Facility, these cost $3 for a normal visit, $5 for an emergency).
In this context, thermal equipment was expensive and, in many cases, prohibitively so, according to our participants, $20–30 for a fan, $25–45 for a sweatshirt, $12 for thermal underwear, $4 for a skein of wool (and 15–20 skeins to make a blanket). As one participant in Focus Group 3 bluntly put it, for the majority of our participants who reported making less than $15 a month, “the math doesn't fucking work.” Incarcerated people with family and friends who could afford to send them money might be able to make it work—those without have to rely on materials acquired through the black market, which comes with the risk of punishment if caught.
Timing could also cause problems. Fans, thermal clothing, and wool are not kept in the facility ready to be purchased—they must be ordered in the “catalog canteen,” which is only available once a month. Materials ordered at the monthly canteen take another month to deliver. As one interviewee put it, “let's say that you arrive at the prison the second week of October. Now you got to wait til the first week of November to order, and get it at the end of November. […] just ‘cause your timing was terrible—seven weeks to it, you don't have anything.” That wait could be even longer if supply was not maintained. In the words of a member of Focus Group 3, with fans and sweatshirts, “they end up running out of stock. So you won't find out til thirty days later. You won't get it, so you try to re-order it.”
Taken together, the modifications our participants made to their living spaces and the difficulties posed by the formal complaint process and the micro-economy of the commissary underline two important aspects of our study. First, incarcerated people are human beings who exert creativity and spatial agency to respond to flaws in facilities’ physical infrastructure to reduce their vulnerability; while we do not wish to romanticize their ability to mitigate risks, we do not wish to erase their agency. Second, facilities’ social infrastructure imposes stark limits on that agency, restricting incarcerated peoples’ capacity to mitigate the three axes of vulnerability identified in section one.
Exposure to climate events
A majority of our study participants (63% of our sample) reported direct experience with at least one of the four climate hazards—extreme heat, extreme cold, wildfires, and floods. These hazards collide directly with the axes of vulnerability and limited spatial agency described in the previous sections and will continue to do so with increasing ferocity as climate change accelerates. Incarcerated people are already vulnerable in terms of temperature, air, and water—the occurrence of the hazard events, which are increasing in intensity and frequency, pushes their situation from precarious to potentially disastrous.
Heat
Eleven participants (31%) reported experience with extreme heat. Infrastructural factors—particularly air conditioning failing—featured prominently in their accounts. These statements are representative of participant experiences with heat: Weld County jail - so, the AC went out on the low side, and Unit B - that was the summer of 2021. And it was eighty-five plus in there for about a week straight, and we were all sweating our asses off. […] It hit 97 degrees. No ventilation, no running air. Nothing, they shut everything off. Two dudes ended up getting heat stroke one night. And then they finally decided, “Ok, well now all of a sudden we have an entire open pod for you guys.” - Male, 32, White, 2 years. One time it was a hundred and five degrees and we had to sleep out in the front, because we couldn't sleep in our rooms, and they opened the doors. We had to wait for them to open doors in the side, so that you could actually breathe. […] one of the doors that were open registered a hundred and five. And he goes, “Oh, this can't be right, this can't be right.” But we were - we were sweating. - Female, 53, White, 9 years
The effects of this extreme heat is much more than discomfort. For example, one participant described suffering heatstroke, which triggered debilitating migraines. She said she was not alone: “[W]ith the heat wave, everybody was getting sick. Nausea was a big thing.” She paid three dollars for a medical visit and received advice to drink more water. “Drink more water, for three dollars, and your heatstroke is going to get better,” she said, then added, “If they even see you. You have to pass out first, really.” A participant added: “And then it's five dollars if you pass out. I'm not lying!”
In addition to health impacts, participants related how heat would disrupt the social order. Due to the mental stress of heat exposure, violence became more commonplace—as one interviewee put it, “[W]hen it's miserable, hot, that causes real fire to burn inside of people, which can cause horrible violence to break out inside of prisons for no good reasons.” Moreover, One of the most common stress-reduction mechanisms, lifting weights in the yard, became dangerous or impossible: Most guys in prison, they love to be outdoors working out, because it's a stress managing tool for them. And so with that heat, you can kind of lose track […] you trying to get those sets in, and next thing you know, you having issues and you wondering where it came from. - Male, 58, African American, 35 years
Another interviewee put it more succinctly: “I have seen people drop on the yard.” Of course, the opposite extreme also can cause problems.
Cold
Seven participants (20%) reported experience with extreme cold, including temperatures so low that condensation and toilet water would freeze: It felt like because it was so cold at times in the winter that I would have every piece of clothing I had on. […] And also be afraid to go to sleep at night because it felt like it was so cold that I would not wake up. […] [I]n the morning there's steel toilets, and so you would have ice in your toilet. Like, it would be cold enough that there would be an ice layer on the top of […] your toilet water. - Male, White, 34 years It was […] so cold that, like, the condensation on the wall would turn into ice. - Male, 46, White, 30 years
The only thing to do, participants explained, was bundle up—if you had the materials to do so. A participant in Focus Group 4 put it this way: I would put […] my sheet over the blankets, and then I had, like, a crochet blanket. I would wear my socks, my sweats, and a crocheted pair of slippers, and my sweater, and sometimes have to have our hat on, like our snow hat, you know, because it was so cold. It was that cold. And I would still be cold. It was freezing. - Female, 41, Hispanic, 3 years
Wildfire
Thirteen participants (37%) experienced one or several wildfires while incarcerated. While one interviewee described being able to see flames over the wall of his prison, the primary mode of encounter was through smoke and ash impacting the already poor air quality. Their accounts of these climate-related hazard events are harrowing: I did go through some fire - or, some smoke problems. […] It might have been the Hayman Fire? […] But definitely the air quality sucked for that couple weeks. […] [T]here were times when we couldn't go to the yard, because of the smoke. There were times when we tried to plug the windows with trash bags to keep it – keep the particles from [entering]. […] [T]here were times when I was concerned about my health because of the smoke in the room, you know what I mean? […] I could feel it. You could see it outside the window, and then of course you smell it. So, you figure it's just in there, right? There were times when we blocked our vent because we figured the vent was blowing it into the room. You know? Where are they getting the air for the vent? Am I - am I trying to believe that they really have good filters on those things? - Male, 53, White, 18 years A lot of the old dudes, you know, they had a hard time as it was, they had an even harder time when, like, the air is shit. […] And, you know, the ventilation inside sucks. So, this was all during summer time, so it's already hot, but it feels even hotter cause you smell fire, and then the ACs don't work, and yeah it's just this combination of unfortunate factors that really effect everybody negatively. - Male, 32, Asian American, 8 years [Y]ou could kind of smell it. Nose started burning a little bit, and you could smell the smoke. […] And then you seen the ash in the air. […] [P]eople were coughing, and their nose was burning, eyes was burning. Even in my cell. So, the ventilation system is pulling the smoke from outside and blowing it into the unit. And so bro, you're in your cell and it's blowing this stuff, the smoke that it's pulling from outside, into your cell. Most horrible experience ever. […] [T]here was like a little thin layer of ash on everything. On everything. And they kept us in there. They kept us locked down. - Male, 47, African American, 18 years [T]he smoke actually woke me up and it was choking. […] the smoke woke me up and I just couldn't breathe, and I was just coughing, coughing. […] [A]sked if I could go, like, to medical and they were just like, “No, you can't go to medical at this time. There's nothing we can do for you.” - Female, Black/Native American, 6 years
One participant offered the med line as an example of how her prison's social infrastructure increased the vulnerability of an already vulnerable subpopulation: “One of the worst things about the fire for me was watching some of the older inmates that have problems have to leave our guard units to go down to medical and stand in the line outside in all that soot and ash, and cough and hack.”
Beyond the direct impacts of breathing wildfire smoke, participants shared the common experience of COs being secretive, evasive, and slow to inform incarcerated people about the movements of the wildfire. Four participants stated that the only way they were able to get information about fires was from watching the news or calling their family while on lockdown. In a statement representative of comments about CO secretiveness, one participant told us: Well we knew one time there was something going on, because it was in the air. It was thick. And people were coughing and jumping […] And so we're asking, “What's going on? What's going on?” And the CO's are like, “Nothing. Nothing.” We're not stupid, we know there's something going on. So the next morning, they said they were just like a hair's breadth away from loading us up in the buses, but they didn't tell us that. […] [T]hey didn't know what they were going to do. One hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing there. - Female, 53, White, 9 years
In 2013, the Royal Gorge fire forced the evacuation of 900 incarcerated people from Territorial Correctional Facility. They were moved to Centennial South, also called CSP II, a facility that was empty at the time. One of our Focus Group participants was among those evacuated. He described the experience as poorly organized and inefficient: There was so much chaos when I went through it, at Territorial. It was horrible. […] [I]t was a fiasco. First, they wanted all the people on breathing treatments. Anybody is on oxygen, they got all them out. Then, they said for us, guys to go around and get all their hygiene or whatever. They gave us tape, black markers, and trash bags to get their property. And I told the lieutenant - this lady lieutenant who was working with us – “Why are we taking all this time and resources, writing names on bags and tape and grabbing peoples’ stuff when everybody has their name already tagged on their duffel bag?” - Male, 54, White, 33 years
And even this level of evacuation is rare, as generally there is not an available space to which to move people. After Territorial was evacuated, it was unclear what would happen if the next facility in line to evacuate, Fremont, had to clear out. In the words of one interviewee, “[M]oving all of those inmates out of Territorial packed everything else up. We were stuck. And they told us that, ‘You're stuck.’ If the fire gets to us, they were talking about moving us to another state.” In addition to wildfires, flooding has arisen as a climate-related disaster risk in the state.
Flood
While few of our participants (9%) had direct experiences with floods, those that did highlight the potential complications a flood could pose to the already tenuous water infrastructure of Colorado's carceral facilities. Indeed, three days before our final focus group, Delta Correctional Center became the second Colorado prison after Territorial to be fully evacuated—this time because of flood risk.
Two participants experienced a full disruption of water infrastructure due to a flood near the facility where they were incarcerated, Sterling Correctional Facility. To compensate, the facility shipped in portapotties and put them in the yard. A member of Focus Group 1 described the impact: They had to open up the doors, so dudes would just be coming in and out, and cops were getting mad, and they were screaming at people, and they wouldn't let people go to the bathroom, and it was a crazy - most chaotic thing I've ever been in […] It was horrible. It was dehumanizing. […] [Y]ou know, no showers. No nothing. And it was just horrible. I didn't want to go to the bathroom. - Male, 53, White, 25 years
The other participant, in Focus Group 3, explained that “They stored the water in a warehouse which became stagnant water, and we had to go to the warehouse, and bring it back, and a lot of people were getting sick.”
One interviewee described heavy rains that resulted in erosion in the yard and “water that was all over the whole unit floor.” A more serious flood could easily threaten the fragile water and physical infrastructure (e.g., pipelines, foundations, walls) described above, exposing incarcerated people to serious sanitation threats, as has been observed in prisons flooded by hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas (ACLU, 2006; Purdum and Meyer, 2020).
Conclusion
We have argued that the conditions created by the incarceration infrastructure of Colorado create disproportionate vulnerability for harm to incarcerated people from climate hazards. To understand how people who have been incarcerated experience these impacts in their everyday lives, we conducted a series of interviews and focus groups to gather and amplify these underheard voices on climate planning. The way that carceral facilities are built, maintained, and operated creates axes of vulnerability in terms of temperature, air, and water. Incarcerated people have limited spatial agency to mitigate those axes of vulnerability—axes that align precisely with the hazardous components of heat waves, periods of intense cold, wildfires, and floods. The exposure created by this alignment is not hypothetical—incarcerated people are already experiencing its consequences, to the detriment of their physical and mental health and potential life span. We hope this study provokes more researchers working on climate change adaptation, mitigation, and prevention to consider the voices of people who are or have been incarcerated as a vital vulnerable population during these times. While we find hope in the creativity of agency expressed by our participants, we also found the overall limitations of their capacity to do more a key reason those of us on the outside need to amplify the voices of those on the inside.
If our participants’ accounts are taken to be representative of even a segment of the incarcerated population's experience, and the experiences documented do extend across the carceral system in Colorado, then Colorado's carceral system falls far short of providing the people under its purview with spaces capable of the robust environmental resilience that climate change will require. We contend that incarcerated people's environmental exposure and limited spatial agency render them one of the most vulnerable populations to the negative consequences of climate hazards in the US, with severe social and environmental justice implications. When coupled with an understanding that non-White populations are grossly overrepresented in the US prison system, we might see this vulnerability as an extension of how carceral geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002, 2007, 2017) has defined racism, as state-sanctioned exposure to premature death. For incarcerated people, climate hazards endured in prisons and jails amount to exactly that. We recognize the limitations of our study. Restricted research access to incarcerated populations and incarceration infrastructure requires that we rely on smaller sample sizes and a qualitative methodology based on recollections of the formerly incarcerated. However, the high degree of thematic resonance we measured between interviews and focus groups implies that our sample is unlikely to be unrepresentative. We recommend that future studies on this topic further examine the differentiation of hazard, vulnerability, and impacts among subpopulations of incarcerated people. How do these impacts vary by age, by race, by health condition? We further recommend scholarly investigation into the presence or absence of comprehensive emergency response plans, protocols, and training within state DOCs, county jails, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as well as a more capacious understanding that might include internment camps and military detention centers in a time of war or even spatial power relations in an age of climate-related disasters more broadly. More research on how these stories compare to the lived experiences of formerly or currently incarcerated people in other states would be compelling in the future.
We contend that Colorado's current incarceration infrastructure creates what we refer to as vulnerabilities, which are material realities that regularly cross the threshold of cruel and unusual punishment. By all our participants’ accounts, those realities might be more accurately described as cruel and usual—exposure to extreme temperatures, compromised air quality, and faulty water infrastructure seem to be the norm within Colorado's carceral facilities.
We join others (e.g., Purdum et al., 2021) in advocating for decarceration—beginning with the facilities that expose their residents to the greatest environmental hazards—and eventually the abolition of the carceral system as it exists today (Davis, 2003, 2014; Davis et al., 2022; Gilmore, 2007, 2017, 2022; Kaba, 2021; Miyake, 2021)) as a corrective to this violent, racist, state-sanctioned imposition of environmental vulnerability. In an age of increased climate-related disasters and hazards, it is timely to revisit findings about incarceration infrastructure vulnerabilities to account for both daily and extraordinary conditions, recognizing the upgrading and “greening” of facilities will fall far short of what is needed (e.g., Jewkes and Moran, 2015). In applying our findings beyond incarceration settings, we encourage scholars of climate-related vulnerability to pay close attention to the roles spatiality and restricted agency play, and to center the expertise of those with firsthand lived experience of that vulnerability. Our study offers an extreme version of how spatial, infrastructural, and agential conditions determine who suffers vulnerability and detriment because of climate change.
Highlights
Coupled with the extreme temperatures, wildfire smoke, and floods that climate change brings, a lack of agency renders incarcerated people profoundly vulnerable. The incarceration-climate change nexus remains understudied, in part due to a lack of data and transparency in carceral systems. The way that carceral facilities are built, maintained, and operated creates axes of vulnerability in terms of temperature, air, and water. Incarcerated people have limited spatial agency to mitigate those axes of vulnerability. Incarceration infrastructure creates material realities that regularly cross the threshold of cruel and unusual punishment.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the formerly incarcerated individuals who made the effort to recount their experiences with the research team. We thank the nonprofit organizations that helped us connect with these individuals. We thank the members of the larger RISE (Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity) research group at CU Boulder for the research they conducted leading to this study: Sara Glade, Shelly Miller, Caleb Schmitz, and Dave Ciplet. This research was funded by the RISE Interdisciplinary Research Theme at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado Boulder, RISE Interdisciplinary Research Theme.
