Op-ed: Toxic prisons teach us that environmental justice needs abolition
Prisons, jails and detention centers are placed in locations where environmental hazards such as toxic landfills, floods and extreme heat are the norm.
May 29, 2020, should have been a pride-filled day as I, a Black daughter of immigrants, would confer a master's degree from MIT.
Instead, I grieved as I watched news coverage of the murder of George Floyd four days prior by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. For nine minutes and 29 seconds, Chauvin kneeled on the back of Floyd’s neck, as Floyd uttered “I can’t breathe” multiple times until his final breath. The phrase, “I can’t breathe,” was also said by Eric Garner, Manuel Ellis, and Elijah McClain under duress before being killed by police. Awareness of police violence was not new to me – years earlier, a loved one had been wrongfully tackled and jailed – but that day, something shifted in me.
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Initially, this shift was limited to questioning the role of police on my campus and in cities in general. Like many of my peers, I began to embrace a stance that called not for police reform, but police abolition. We considered that given the history of policing in this country, which was developed to preserve the racial hierarchy of the slavery and Jim Crow eras, a solution to stop police violence was to reduce reliance on police by investing in public social infrastructure such as affordable housing and mental healthcare that could address root causes of crime. But proponents of abolition philosophy felt we could go even further: not only could we end police, but we could close prisons and build new justice systems and institutions rooted in care and restorative processes. I know for many, this is a shocking and extreme stance. When I first heard about it, I certainly had my doubts about whether our society could really operate without prisons. After all, I had grown up with the usual conceptions that prisons make us safer and they are ‘necessary’, ‘rehabilitative’, spaces for people who do crimes.
But then I learned about a pattern of prisons, jails and detention centers being placed in locations where environmental hazards such as toxic landfills, floods and extreme heat was the norm, threatening the health and well-being of incarcerated people and staff – a reality that counters any prospect of true rehabilitation in these spaces. I also spoke with dozens of formerly incarcerated people who explained that the physical and mental suffering they endured in prisons from both environmental and social factors left them in much worse shape than before their sentences.
It became clearer to me how, as researchers Ki’Amber Thompson, Erik Kojola and David Pellow have described, “I can’t breathe” reflects both a cry against physical police violence, but also state-sanctioned environmental injustice that limits and shortens breath in prisons and other carceral facilities. If we think about environmental justice as everyone’s right to exist in safe and healthy places, prisons in the U.S. are a direct threat to that vision and it becomes clearer why we need prison abolition alongside police abolition. After understanding the problem, we can start to imagine alternatives that keep us safe and bring us toward a world where we can all breathe.
