Act recognizes the right to live in a healthy environment and offers much-needed environmental protections for people in prisons.

First Published by The Prison Policy Initiative. Written by Emmett Sanders, July 18, 2024

On Thursday, July 18, 2024, U.S. Senator Ed Markey and Congressperson Ayanna Pressley, both of Massachusetts, introduced the Environmental Health in Prisons Act. Prison Policy Initiative is proud to support this bill, which seeks to address hazardous environmental conditions in federal prisons.

The bill has several provisions, all focused on increasing transparency and creating healthier environments for those in prisons. This act:

• Requires stricter monitoring and reporting from federal carceral agencies on a wide array of pollutants and environmental hazards, including air and water quality, temperature, mold, pests, light levels, noise pollution, and more, and establishes oversight through an independent advisory panel.
• Requires people held in federal carceral facilities to be informed as to potential environmental hazards, their effects, and precautions they can take to protect themselves.
• Mandates and funds several feasibility studies and pilot programs, including studies on decarceration as well as those that address mitigating environmental harm.
• Offers much-needed whistleblower protections for both incarcerated people and prison staff who request information about a facility’s environmental data or who raise concerns about potential unreported hazards.

Advocates have long sounded the alarm that prisons are situated, constructed, and operated in ways that perpetuate environmental injustices. Fully one-third of all federal and state prisons lie within three miles of designated federal “superfund” sites — toxic waste areas most needing extensive cleanup. Pollutants such as arsenic and lead are regularly found in prison water, and people in prison often are forced to suffer through dangerously excessive heat and other extreme and sometimes deadly conditions.

We at Prison Policy Initiative strongly support the Environmental Health in Prisons Act. It adds a much-needed layer of independent oversight for a prison system that has long deprioritized the environmental well-being of those it imprisons. The hazardous conditions in prisons can have deep and long-lasting physical and mental health consequences, can socially and economically devastate families and communities, and can create enormous strain on the prison system, which is tasked with providing long-term medical care and mental health care in the aftermath. We are proud to support these efforts toward better policy, more equitable and ethical environmental justice, and the recognition of incarcerated people as human beings with a right to be free of toxic prison conditions.

Read the official press release for the Environmental Health in Prisons Act here.

For further information on the need for environmental justice in prisons, consider the following resources:

• Heat, floods, pests, disease, and death: What climate change means for people in prison
• Prisons are a daily environmental injustice