Prison abolition is environmental justice
Prism, 03/22/23: “After years of grassroots organizing, in 2019 the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) withdrew a proposal to build a maximum security prison in Roxana, an unincorporated town of 100 in eastern Kentucky’s Letcher County. The BOP announced it needed additional information for an environmental impact analysis, and it couldn’t find the justification for a new maximum security prison—the idea was originally floated in 2005 as a solution to prison “overcrowding.” But the federal prison population had dropped by 11% since 2009, and the BOP could no longer justify the construction.
In September 2022, nearly four years after the BOP tabled the concept, the agency announced it planned to build a medium-security prison in Letcher County. The agency’s argument for the new Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) is that it’s best to build a new facility from the ground up, rather than repair outdated and failing infrastructure at federal prisons elsewhere.
It’s an argument that doesn’t hold water for the many organizers, residents, incarcerated people, and environmentalists who have spent years fighting the BOP’s plans. They remain concerned that federal officials, including eastern Kentucky’s own congressional Rep. Hal Rogers, are willing to sacrifice communal and ecological health to maintain a harmful system.
In September 2022, nearly four years after the BOP tabled the concept, the agency announced it planned to build a medium-security prison in Letcher County. The agency’s argument for the new Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) is that it’s best to build a new facility from the ground up, rather than repair outdated and failing infrastructure at federal prisons elsewhere.
‘When we actually look at who is harmed in both of these instances, it’s the same people,’ said Jordan E. Martinez-Mazurek, co-founder of the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, which built the coalition to organize against a new prison. ‘It’s Black people, it’s brown people, it’s Indigenous people, [and] it’s poor folks. It is the exact same populations that are being harmed by dangerous environmental conditions … [and] being thrown in the cages’”