Big shout out to all activists, groups, and organizations working toward prison abolition or who are engaged in activities to improve the current state of our criminal justice system. Efforts from groups like Young Abolitionist, Lipstick, “Vivian” from U-Mass Dartmouth, Greater Tabernacle Church, CURE, Black & Pink, and the many other noble entities is what makes up the life blood of our Emancipation Initiative and infuses us prisoners with a sense of hope and self-worth. Thank you!
Listen people, the power of inclusion goes a long way and prisoners are totally excluded from our American democracy. American prison facilities function as unregulated invisible cities that are unfit for human habitation. Occupants sanctioned to serve time in such places are entirely excluded from environmental regulations designed to protect the health and welfare of minority and low-income populations. Prisoners are alienated from provisions like the Clinton administration’s Executive Order 12898 (E.O. 12898) that was created specifically to address environmental issues that disadvantaged communities face. Applying the wisdom that prisoners temporarily surrender their rights as citizens as a result of their crime, arrest, trial, and conviction is not only flawed but inconsistent with our American democracy. Prisoners still remain citizens of the United States and are entitled to equal protection and safety rendered to all citizens afforded by our Constitutional system of government (14th Amendment). Persons relegated to prison facilities are disproportionately affected by environmental harms and are condemned to state imposed cruel and unusual treatment.
State and federal regulators fail to regulate environmental hazards faced by persons held in our nation’s correctional facilitates. The most effective way to remedy these ills is by restoring prisoners’ voting rights because the pains will only persist as long as we lack political power or influence to address the environmental inequities that we suffer from. There is no legitimate reason to not allow prisoners to vote or to keep us from participating in local, state, and federal elections.
Prison is a place where regardless of who you are, all persons subject to its jurisdiction relinquish the better part of their liberties as U.S. citizens. This relinquishment, in a sense, not so much only condemns the residents that transition in and out of these facilities, but more so condemns the prison facility in itself to a permanent state of impotence. Immediately following the opening of a prison facility, its health and living sustainability will progressively diminish because of the indifference to those the building was built to house. Slightly different form the “Put It In Blacks Backyard (PIBBY)” concerns voiced by low-income and minority communities regarding “locally undesirable land uses (LULUs),” prison facilities are the undesirable land use with many of us black and minority men designated as the hazardous waste within them. Evidence shows that race and criminal status accounts for the indifference of prison officials towards the environmental health of a prison facility and its occupants—in part because of the overrepresentation of blacks and minorities in prison. Blacks and Hispanics “represent approximately 30 percent of the population [who]…comprise over half of those incarcerated,” (1) thus providing an explanation for the continued indifference by government officials and policymakers failure to enforce strict environmental regulations.
I was really happy to learn about the research conducted by the noble group designated the Prison Ecology Project (PEP) which aims to address and expose environmental damage from under-regulated prisons and environmental justice concerns regarding prisoners. They do a great job at magnifying the scope of indifference by state and federal regulators. For the sake of highlighting the multiple effects of regulatory indifference, PEP cited that in one facility, administrators “falsified water pollution reports…reports covered up excess fecal coliform levels in the daily 350,000 gallon wastewater byproduct…,” (2) PEP also released research reports outlining chemical spills in South Carolina, regional jails of Virginia, Rikers Island jail in New York (being located on a toxic waste landfill site), Florida jail’s flooding which resulted in gas leaks killing two prisoners and injuring others, Colorado prisons being located in contaminated areas, arsenic in Texas and California water supplies within state prisons—and a laundry list of many other environmental iniquities throughout various DOC facilities in America. These inequities persist because of prisoners’ exclusion from the political process.
In addition, as a result of prisoners being excluded from the political process, prison facilities fall into a category of what social scientist Susan Cutter describes as social vulnerability, she says: “determinants [that make environments vulnerable] include demographic characteristics (race, ethnicity, income, etc.), resource access, political access, social capital, physical disability, infrastructure, housing stock…[and] other factors” (3). Prisoners have none of the above accesses, resources, or capital, resulting in such sordid and vulnerable environmental prison conditions. Miserable conditions of prison life have been lauded by former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld, who compared the maximum security prison “to the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno [saying] that was the way he wanted it,” (4) not for getting this is the place where former NFL star Aaron Hernandez just took his own life. Other public officials bask in the excitement of prisoner disenfranchisement—as one New York State Senator, Dale Volker, stated he was “glad that the almost 9,000 people confined in his district [could] not vote because “they would never vote for me” (5) demonstrating his appreciation for prison exclusion.
Our Emancipation Initiative aims to empower the people to begin the process of compelling government to sanction universal prisoner suffrage. This would cause the ecological/environmental crises that DOC prison facilities suffer from to instantly improve as local, state, and federal regulators to become responsive to restoring dignity to convicted prisoners along with the prison facilities they’re held in. Voting rights would extend provisions such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From May 23, 2016 through July 7, 2016 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up a “Draft EJ 2020 Action Agenda” that would provide: “[a] mission-critical program accountability through measurable goals that will: (1) ensure prompt, effective, and efficient complaint docket management; (2) enhance ECRCO’s external compliance program through proactive compliance reviews, strategic policy development, and engagement of critical EPA, federal and external partners and stakeholders (e.g., recipients and communities); and, (3) strengthen ECRCO’s workforce through strategic human capital planning, organizational development and technology, and training to promote a high-performing organization. (Draft EJ 2020 Action Agenda, Environmental Justice Strategic Plan.”)
Although this Action Agenda is tentative, prisoners would be included to be allowed access to the gains of such provisions which would permeate throughout prison facilities as prisoners began to use resources such as “Toxic Release Inventory (TRI)” tools to report environmental issues. Our families and loved ones could also begin organizing around the authority of Executive Order 12898 to begin closing down toxic prisons unfit for human habitation similar to the efforts of “ROC” which is a group formed from the mothers of incarcerated persons in California (Mothers Reclaiming Our Children). Our collective efforts are a tool within itself to combat environmental injustice along with addressing governmental indifference rooted in racism from conservative white and far right (and left) law makers.
Sorry people I hate to be longwinded, but I just want to touch on a few more things because environmental assaults within prisons is a real issue and I feel like those who oppose laws that would enforce strict regulation of environmental policies within prisons only do so because of politically motivated reasons. Most of them justify their positions on the basis of cost-benefit, utilitarian principles. Cost-benefit analysis holds that accrued cost of enforcing environmental regulations in prison will not benefit society—and if it would—the cost will outweigh the benefits. The idea is that “why should state government spend more tax payer money, aside from the basic housing expenses (food & clothing), to enforce costly regulations for an unworthy population”? This argument, with a skewed reasoning, caters to the interest of the greater good which would be to sustain the practices of regulatory indifferences. Although that route maybe, in real-dollar amount more cost-effective, the collateral effect of housing prisoners in environmentally unregulated prison facilities and denying them a voice (voting power) to speak out about the abject conditions they live in creates animus within the psyches of the incarcerated population which spreads throughout the 600,000 persons that are released from prison everyday into society from prisons and jails. Harsh treatment and exclusion serves only to boost recidivism rates throughout society causing collateral consequences primarily in poor and minority communities. This works to perpetuate a malicious cycle of exclusion and mass-incarceration.
Finally, recidivism rates will begin to decrease if we expand our democracy through enfranchising prisoners. Allowing prisoners to participate in the political process makes them stakeholders and gives prisoners incentive to steer clear from engaging in future criminal activity. It will also begin the process of our society addressing toxic and overcrowded prisons. Voting amplifies the local knowledge within prison facilities serving to improve conditions of confinement and quality of life to those subject to such conditions. Furthermore, prisoner suffrage would provide us with some freedom of thought to actually reflect on behaviors that led many men into this predicament as opposed to constantly worrying about conditions of confinement because incarcerated men & women could begin taking the necessary steps to address and correct need areas for improvement that will ultimately create a healthy prison environment conducive for rehabilitation. Healthier prison environments will eventually communicate into healthier communities amounting to an overall greater good.
People, let’s get behind our Emancipation Initiative to begin addressing these cruel and unusual death traps we call prisons! Much love and power to the people.
Your Champion,
Derrick Washington
(1) Carson, E. A. (2015). Prisoners in 2014 (NCJ 248955). Retrieved from Bureau of Justice Statistics website: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf
(2) Prison Ecology Project, https://nationinside.org/campaign/prison-ecology/facts/
(3) Cutter, S. L., Mitchell, J. T., & Scott, M. S. (2000). Revealing the vulnerability of people and places: a case study of Georgetown County, South Carolina. Annals of the association of American Geographers, 90(4), 713-737.
(4) Gilligan, J., & Lee, B. (2004). Beyond the Prison Paradigm: From Provoking Violence to Preventing It by Creating “Anti‐Prisons”(Residential Colleges and Therapeutic Communities). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1036(1), 300-324.
(5) Peter Wagner, “Temporary Populations Change the Political Face of New York,” Aug. 30, 2004, Prisoners of the Census,http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/…/temporary-populations/. Peter Wagner, “Locked Up, but Still Counted: How Prison Populations Distort Democracy,” Sept. 5, 2008, ibid., http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2008/09/05/stillcounted/.