Linking Environmental and Criminal Injustice: The Mining to Prison Pipeline in Central Appalachia

Abstract

Abstract

Environmental justice continues to expand as an organizing concept and goal for scholars and activists around the globe, challenging our very understanding of “environment.” The redefinition of environment to where we live, work, and play has, however, largely failed to include the more than 2 million people in the United States living behind bars. The lack of attention paid to the incarcerated may not be surprising, but here I argue that prisons and the penal system fall squarely within the purview of environmental inequality scholars. I begin by outlining the legal underpinnings that have made our incarceration nation possible. I then discuss the rural prison boom of the 1990, and how local policymakers, believing prisons might serve as economic lifelines, welcomed them into their struggling communities. We then turn to the case of incarceration in central Appalachia, a space where resources and wealth have long been funneled away, leaving those living in the coalfields to countenance severe ecological and human health degradation. As coal reserves dwindle, the region is now seen fit as a suitable place to deposit societal “refuse” in the form of inmates in what I term the “mining to prison pipeline.” Linking criminal and environmental injustices in this way, I aim to encourage other scholars to explore the prison and environmental nexus.