Empirical

Toxic Prisons: on the environmental nature of correctional facilities

Maria Teresa Lopez Franco, UAM

2026

When we think of law and nature, or law and the environment, prisons rarely spring to mind. Other areas of the juridical universe are more obviously linked to ecological justice, such as Constitutions, courts, grassroots movements or the incorporation of native knowledge and worldviews into the way law is written and operates. However, as any other material institution, prisons are inserted into complex environmental networks, which makes an approach from an environmental perspective both enriching and necessary.

Firstly, research in the United States and the United Kingdom has shown prisons have a high environmental impact. They are very intensive in their use of materials and energy, as they concentrate large numbers of people and need to run day and night in order to operate correctly. Moreover, they generate large amounts of waste in the form of food waste, sewage, or even direct carbon emissions, as they often house industrial workshops dedicated to the employment and training of inmates in productive activities.

But prisons also generate environmental harm in other ways, aside from their “outward” environmental impacts. Due to their architecture, prisons expose incarcerated populations to aggravated forms of environmental injustice. In many ways, prisons are structurally unfit for life under extreme climatic conditions. The limited access to different types of goods, as well as the restricted ability to transform and adapt their surroundings, and the impossibility to relocate to other areas makes these populations more vulnerable to extreme climatic events such as floods or heat waves. The lack of sufficient heating, air conditioning, or even proper ventilation worsens these situations, which has been known to result in death of inmates in many occasions. Moreover, climatic events such as these are often handled to the detriment of the incarcerated, as correctional administrations often resort to lockdowns and extended isolation in order to keep security and control within the facilities, keeping inmates confined in their cells for up to 23 hours a day.

However, the environmental injustice suffered by these populations is not only limited to extreme, and thus occasional events. On the contrary, research has also shown a tendency to locate prisons in areas which are environmentally eroded and polluted. In many occasions, building a prison is deemed the last possible productive use of a land which has previously been the site of harmful activities such as mining. Prisons are often constructed near landfills, thus exposing inmates to poor quality air and water, or even to the presence of toxins which might have a negative impact on their health.

This tendency is also interesting from another point of view. Aside from the direct impact on inmates’ health, the inclination to build prisons near industrial sites and landfills allows us to connect the interpretation of penal institutions to cultural analysis on a more abstract level. In other words, it allows us to question what prisons reveal of our ways of life.

In regard to this, the location of prisons in these types of sites links these institutions to a broader universe of activities which represent the tendency to externalise processes, activities and waste and products which have a very negative impact on the environment but which, at the same time, are necessary to sustain our ways of life, particularly in big cities. This situates prisons in spaces where both nature and certain human groups are conceived and treated as superfluous, expendable and without worth, while simultaneously bearing the weight of others’ ways of life.

Lastly, the antagonism between prisons and nature is expressed in another aspect. While they are situated in somewhat rural sites, prisons tend to be highly artificial places. By design, prison walls leave outside any trace of nature: it is very rare to find prisons which incorporate “natural” elements, such as trees, flowerbeds or even patches of grass. In fact, these are often conceived as a security risk. This entails that the incarcerated have almost no contact with anything natural, and this radical separation from the natural world is a source of discomfort and pain. It is common to find longing references to the natural world in autobiographies and other testimonies, where inmates speak of the loss of nature (trees, rivers, the skies, the sea, etc.) as one of the primary deprivations that incarceration entails. Against the inertia to conceive imprisonment primarily as the deprivation of human relationships, as the loss of the social world, inmates often speak of the loss of nature as an equally harmful part of the experience of incarceration.

These ideas show us a path towards an environmental interpretation of prisons, and illuminate certain aspects of incarceration which may not come to light under the more classical approaches to these institutions, These interpretations often emphasis the juridical aspect of prisons, their disciplinary nature, but the relation between correctional facilities and the environment in which they are situated has rarely been a part of a broader description of prisons. However, this approach is relevant both in the interest of greening the exercise of law and in order to better understand the nature of imprisonment from an empirical and human perspective.

Prison bars”, Fernando Silveira, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0