Introduction

This paper considers the intersections of environmental justice concerns with the U.S. prison system through the experiences of political prisoners and politicized prisoners from high-profile revolutionary movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. I reflect on these populations’ key leaders in what I call the prisoner-led environmental justice movement. I include prisoners across a range of revolutionary social movements—Black Power and Black Liberation, Indigenous and American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence, White/European American anti-imperialist, and radical ecology movements. I contend that each of these movements reflects an environmental justice-related orientation because among their primary concerns are combatting state and corporate power, racism, colonialism, and militarism and their effects on vulnerable peoples and ecosystems, in favor of community-based solutions that would result in peoples exercising democratic control over land, territory, and space. None of these movements has been typically framed as part of the environmental justice struggle, so this paper is an effort to offer that critical intervention. And just as Berger has argued that prisons and jails were important sites of political formation for the civil rights movement, I argue that spaces of incarceration serve a similar function for the environmental justice movement. To that end, in the following sections I connect the scholarship on environmental justice to the prison system and prisoner rights movements.

From: Capitalism Nature Socialism 2018 29 (4)

Editor: Wang Yi