The United States imprisons the most people in the world, a disproportionate amount of whom are people of color. It is also the second worst emitter of gases that cause climate change. 

In between these two truths lie two uglier ones: people facing incarceration suffer the worst of the changing climate, and the prison industrial complex worsens the growing planetary crisis.

Let’s unpack how these issues intersect, with help from Scalawag’s article, “Abolition in the Era of Climate Change,” by Aarohi Sheth.

For starters, prisons are not keeping pace with rising global temperatures, especially in southern states like Texas that face inhospitably hot and humid weather. In prisons, these conditions have proven deadly when combined with the underinvestment in air conditioning, lack of shade, and overcrowding inside concrete structures that are the norms in many facilities.

“It’s not uncommon to have several days of triple-digit weather,” Dr. Amite Dominick, the founder and director of Texas Prisons Community Advocates, told Scalawag.

A Brown University study in 2022 found that on average, 14 people die in prisons annually due to heat-related causes. A Texas Tribune analysis reported that at least 41 people died in prisons during the state’s 2023 heat wave alone. 

“Temperatures inside facilities have risen to as high as 149 degrees Fahrenheit,” Sheth reports. “Climate change will only increase this number.”

An effort in the state legislature in 2021 to set up a mandated prison temperature range of 65 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit eventually failed, though a new version of the bill is now on the table, Scalawag explains.

“This is the weaponization of the environment,” PushBlack affirms. “Torture takes many forms during incarceration, and the lack of heat control is one of the most overlooked.”

On the opposite side of the thermometer, cold snaps and snow storms are also wreaking havoc on prisons, from damaging pipes and backing up sewage lines to caving in roofs, per Scalawag.

Yet extreme temperatures are not the only dangers here. Extreme storms like hurricanes are also occurring more intensely and frequently. While they are scary and dangerous to any community, they mean something else entirely to those riding them out in prisons. 

Facilities often come to a standstill amid flooding, which can mean no power, no plumbing, no visitors, and no court dates. The situation often takes much longer to improve than it does outside prison walls, as emergency aid is slow to reach those who are incarcerated. This has been the case in many major storms, including Florida’s Hurricane Milton in 2024, Texas’s Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and Louisiana’s Hurricane Katrina two decades ago.  

Comprehensive disaster plans in prisons often don’t exist either. While some facilities are getting in the habit of moving incarcerated people in advance of hurricanes, many are still often left in place against evacuation orders, according to Scalawag.

These conditions create a fraught reality for people in prisons. Some find themselves making daily “life-or-death negotiations for basic necessities,” such as eating spoiled food or taking altered medication during heat spells, the outlet reports. 

Yet taking any health risks is extra costly when incarcerated, given the abandonment of proper medical care in the for-profit prison system, which The Kansas City Defender documented in an investigative report.

Some people do take measures into their own hands, such as those incarcerated in the Texas heat who resorted to flooding their toilets and lying in the water to cool down. However, prison wardens are known to withhold things like AC, heat, and showers in retaliation for anything they choose, so acting out of desperation is not an easy choice to make, per Scalawag.

Not to mention, many prison complexes are knowingly built near or on top of things like former landfills, coal waste pits, and superfund sites. These toxic locations aren’t doing any favors for incarcerated populations’ health.

None of these aggressions of the prison industrial complex are random. They are the designs of a system that seeks to incarcerate as many people for as much profit and power as possible.

“The United States has the biggest prison system for a reason: to maintain empire,” Sheth explains. “The determination of who is bad and good is a colonial activity, and the prison system is imperial law.”

Plus, prisons use a ton of energy, pollute nearby communities, and force people into labor that enriches other polluters in corporate America. These practices are only adding fuel to the climate crisis — the same one that exposes people in prisons to such suffocating temperatures and dangerous storms in the first place. 

This intertwined nature of the climatic and carceral systems likely means several things for the future, according to Scalawag.

The outlet predicts that as climate anxiety increases, it will be leveraged to inflate the amount of money and trust given to law enforcement and politicians. Meanwhile, the amount of climate refugees migrating to the United States will also increase. Both trends will stoke the prison industrial complex and push it to expand, not improve conditions for incarcerated people. 

That’s why the fight to stabilize our changing planet must also include the decarceration of the United States. Positive steps to better manage extreme heat are underway, like the nation’s first heat wave ranking system in California. Yet people living in prisons remain at risk and need widespread reform of both infrastructure and policy to survive growing climate pressures.

“If history is our main indicator, it’s just going to get worse unless people decide to pay attention to it and make some kind of a change,” Dr. Dominick told Scalawag.

Contact your representatives in Congress to stand up for both people and the planet, and lend any support you can to organizations fighting against incarceration. Here’s five to get started: 

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