Global governance and climate stress of incarcerated women: the case of the U.S

ABSTRACT

This paper takes the United States as a case study on the gendered implications of hyper-incarceration in the age of climate emergency. Prisons here are often located on toxic sites and constitute sources of contamination; climate change and global warming exacerbate these conditions. Incarcerated women and their communities are particularly affected. The female incarceration rate has skyrocketed, and women come to the carceral complex with unique histories of abuse, and higher rates of physical and mental illness. Researchers and policymakers need to address, analyse, and include incarcerated women’s experiences of climate stress in global policy mechanisms such as the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (“Bangkok Rules”). Abolition feminism and the voices of incarcerated women should meaningfully help connect the dots in the larger framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

KEYWORDS:

• Incarcerated women
• environmental injustice
• United States
• climate change
• global governance

Acknowledgments

I am grateful and humbled by the women who gardened with me and shared their time and stories with me. I thank Melissa Thompson, Susan Lee, Marion Boeker, and Kathryn Feltey for feedback on earlier drafts. I thank Rosemary Barberet for inspiring me to think and write about this topic and all the editors of this special issue for their time and great effort to make this a better paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I follow an inclusive understanding of the category woman that includes non-binary and gender creative identities independent of sex assignment at birth. The United States carceral system does not. It follows a binary system of sex-segregated facilities. All the women I met during my field research were assigned “female” at birth; their gender identities were not the focus of data collection.

2. The carceral complex in the United States consists of thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. It consists of 1,566 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,850 local jails, 1,510 juvenile correctional facilities, 186 immigration detention facilities, and 82 Indian country jails, as well as military prisons, civil commitment centres, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the United States territories (Sawyer & Wagner, 2022).

3. Consider the staggering numbers of murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits in the United States Homicide is the third leading cause of death among Native girls & women aged 10 to 24; four out of five Native women experienced some form of violence in their lifetime. More than half of Native women have experienced sexual violence, and they are 2.5 times more likely to experience rape than other women in the United States For more data and advocacy, see Coalition to Stop Violence Against https://www.csvanw.org/ or National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center https://www.niwrc.org/.

4. A notable initiative in this realm is the Prison Ecology Project established in 2014 by the Human Rights Defense Center (https://www.humanrightsdefensecenter.org/). It evolved out of Prison Legal News which had been founded by the then incarcerated organiser Paul Wright and regularly compiles and publishes reporting on environmental harm within and by ways of the carceral complex. Another intersectional collaborative is Fight Toxic Prisons! (https://fighttoxicprisons.wordpress.com/about/), described more in-depth in Bradshaw (2018).

5. Data are continuously updated on https://covidprisonproject.com/.

6. The investigative independent outlet Intercept mapped climate risks (heat risk, wildfire risk, flood risk) for 6,500 United States detention facilities based on 2020 data with an interactive map available here https://projects.theintercept.com/climate-and-punishment/index.html.

7. Keywords addressing women and incarceration are entirely missing; I searched the publicly available programs using the individual search terms: prison, incarcer*, incarcerated, detention.

8. Publicly available here https://teamup.com/ksjgjdxx23dqs947md.

9. A panel on “Lack of Women’s Access to Justice in Turkey” organised by the NGO Set Them Free, is available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYq73VpK9-M, as well as three presentations in the context of the “Feminist Approaches to Justice” series organized by the International Sociological Association in cooperation with the Division of Women and Crime of the American Criminological Society, World Society of Victimology, and Criminologists without Borders: Redefinition of “Incarcerated Women’s Identities in South Africa” (Dr. Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Walter Sisulu University South Africa) available here https://youtu.be/IN10UPPPF5I, “Women’s Experiences Navigating Prisons in India” (Dr. Penelope Tong, School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India & Ntasha Bhardwaj, Founder-South Asian Institute of Crime & Justice Studies, India; Doctoral Candidate, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, USA) available here https://youtu.be/92crY4abgHY) and), and my own presentation on “Prison Gardens as a Pathway to Climate Justice in the United States” is available here https://youtu.be/8o8aEH49Ojo.

10. More information and deadlines here https://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/communications-procedure.

11. More information and detail can be found here https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures-human-rights-council/special-procedures-human-rights-council. For example the Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment issued a call for input on women, girls to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment (October 14, 2022) that should include the perspective of incarcerated women, https://www.ohchr.org/en/calls-for-input/2022/call-inputs-women-girls-and-right-clean-healthy-and-sustainable-environment.

12. See the ratification status dashboard of the OHCR for specific country information https://indicators.ohchr.org/.

13. Website of the caucus https://www.uswomenscaucus.org/.

14. While discussing this paper during the CSW parallel event on March 24, 2022, I was made aware by Dr. Jan Fritz that the EPA has a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) which provides independent recommendations to the EPA and allows for public comments. I have taken the opportunity to intervene at the meeting on April 20–21, 2022 and submitted a written comment on prisons on toxic sites in order to avoid new prison construction on a toxic site in Cleveland/Ohio. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-09/NEJAC%20Public%20Meeting%20Summary%20April%202022_0.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Daniela Jauk-Ajamie

Daniela Jauk-Ajamie, PhD, is an Assistant Professor for Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Akron, Ohio. She received her master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Graz in her home country, Austria. She completed her PhD in Sociology as a Fulbright student at the University of Akron/OH in 2013. Her areas of research interest and teaching are gender and sexualities, inequality in the criminal legal system, and qualitative methods. She is currently working on projects in clinical sociology and research around environmental injustice, reproductive justice, and gardening in carceral and re-entry settings.