Photo courtesy of Pixabay.
Karla Biery ’24
Contributing Writer
Russell Maroon Shoatz is a 78-year-old prisoner dying of stage 4 colon cancer that he developed in prison. He has been in prison for over 50 years and is currently incarcerated in State Correctional Institute in Dallas, Pennsylvania. In 2014, PennEnvironment revealed that “Industrial facilities dumped 10,470,231 pounds of toxic chemicals into Pennsylvania’s waterways in 2012 making Pennsylvania the 7th worst in the nation for toxic releases.” Shoatz is one of many prisoners experiencing the first-hand health-related effects of climate change. Human rights are central to environmental rights because climate change is killing people; we need to respect the lives of all our fellow human beings in order to heal the planet.
The phrase “the world is dying” has been ringing in my ears since a recent conversation I had with a fellow student on the Mount Holyoke green. She expressed the pervasive urgency for planet earth, but the impact that climate change is currently having on people was left out of the conversion. Casual discourse of the “dying Earth” creates anxiety and panic, hindering our generation from believing that there are real ways we can protect the future of the planet and people’s lives.
Prisoners in the United States experience some of the most vicious repercussions of climate change exacerbated by the congested conditions of prison.
According to Statistica, the U.S. has the highest rate of prisoners in the world: for every 100,000 people, 639 of them are in prison. This means that U.S. prisoners are subjected to cramped living conditions, high levels of pollution and are at great risk of contracting airborne illnesses such as COVID-19.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization that supports criminal justice reform and racial justice through public education, details that not only are the environmental conditions surrounding prisons dangerous to the climate, but prisons are creating virulent air pollution as well. “EPA data shows that 92 informal actions and 51 formal actions were brought against prisons, jails and detention centers across the country under the Clean Air Act during the past five years,” according to EJI. The air around prisons is also becoming intoxicated by dangerous fumes. According to U.S. News, the state with the highest incarceration rate, Louisiana, also has the worst air quality in the country.
Paul Wright, the Human Resources Development Council executive director and a former prisoner, spoke of his personal experiences with pollution in prisons in an article from Prison Legal News. “I’d go to brush my teeth and the water coming out of the faucet was brown,” he said. The EJI also reported that “federal and state agencies brought 1,149 informal actions and 78 formal actions against regulated prisons, jails and detention centers during the past five years under the Safe Drinking Water Act.” There is a cruel intersection between prison and environmental justice: no one should be forced to use polluted water.
The tie between cancer and incarceration is still being investigated in the medical world. A 2021 study supported by the National Cancer Institute concluded that “incarcerated and formerly incarcerated patients likely have a higher risk of dying from cancer than the general population.”
A monthly newsletter from The Jericho Movement writes that there was a recent call for his immediate release into hospice care due to his terminal illness, yet Judge Kai Scott decided that he was too dangerous to be released despite being an elder dying of cancer.
We need to rethink how we view climate change. It is not only about turning off the lights and going vegan, though both are ways to reduce personal carbon footprint — it is about the livelihood of all people. We are future change-makers who have the ability to decide how prisoners in the U.S. are treated. The state of the Earth is in our hands. If we overlook the climate-induced sufferings of prisoners, we will continue to ignore other life-threatening environmental issues that prevent the world from being safer for all people.