Sustainability science and education in the neoliberal ecoprison

Abstract

As part of the general ‘greening’ of prisons in the last decade of neoliberalization and the formation of institutionalized programs to provide science and environmental education opportunities for the incarcerated, the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), a partnership between Evergreen State College and the Washington State Department of Corrections, has become the most vibrant partnership in the US to mesh the cultures and institutions of environmental science and corrections. Drawing attention to the SPP’s anchoring mission, which is ‘to bring science and nature into prisons,’ this article looks at environmental science education in the contemporary prison in light of recent discussions of neoliberal science and ecobiopolitical theory, with the final aim of developing what amounts to a carceral political ecology of environmental education amid an ever expanding neoliberal penal State.

Keywords:

• environmental education
• sustainability science
• prisons
• neoliberalism