“We Are the Minority and Society Doesn’t Care”: The Marriage Between Toxic Waste and Prisons

by Kevin Williams / Think Progress

When the Department of Justice proposed earlier this year to cancel the $444 million set aside for a new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, the nascent prison ecology movement — which views penal reform through an ecological lens — hailed it as a victory.

“I took it as a huge compliment to us that the DOJ ‘fessed up about not needing the Letcher prison. There are a lot of politics and back door dealings in budget decisions like that, but it read pretty clearly as DOJ saying to Trump’s budget team, ‘We’re likely to lose this one to amassing opposition,’” said Panagioti Tsolkas, a co-founder of the Prison Ecology Project (PEP), a division of the Human Rights Defense Center.

The prison ecology movement, which Tsolkas describes as an effort to “drastically change the idea of prison and an industrialized penal system in general,” has long fought against the construction of prisons in environmentally-sensitive areas and pushed back against overcrowding that often leads to pollution. Only recently has the movement achieved notable victories.

In its fight against the Letcher County prison, PEP forged an alliance with a variety of groups in the coal-caked hills of deep southeast Kentucky to send out mass emails and letters. They also ramped up a phone bank that, they say, has helped turn the tide of public opinion against the project in Letcher County, which would have beds for more than 1,000 inmates.

While it appears the DOJ has halted the prison’s construction, for now — a formal Record of Decision explaining the remediation plan for the prison site has not yet been issued — the project still has powerful allies. One such champion is Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee. His communications director brushed off the suggestion that environmental opposition has had an impact on the project and vowed that the prison construction will move forward.

“The prison construction project in Letcher County, Kentucky is still on track with full funding in place,” said Danielle Smoot, Rogers’ communications director. Smoot pointed out that the DOJ only proposed cancelling it, but that Congress, which has the final say, has not followed their recommendation. Rogers is satisfied that the prison — located on a coal strip mining site — will meet environmental standards.

It is unclear why the tough-on-crime Trump administration has opposed the construction of the Letcher County prison. Department of Justice deputy spokesman for public affairs Ian Prior declined to acknowledge whether it’s because, as the Washington Post recently reported, the administration tends to favor private over public prisons. To be clear, though, the Letcher County prison was planned for high security inmates, which are not housed by private prisons, according to Bureau of Prisons (BOP) spokesman Nancy Ayers.

The prison ecology movement is not just about pollution

The BOP’s final Environmental Impact Study (EIS) on the Letcher County prison declared that there would be “no significant impacts to vegetation, wildlife and threatened and endangered species,” nor would the facility at “have significant impacts to land use, air quality, or cultural resources.”

But the EIS doesn’t address the main concerns of those in the prison ecology movement — the whole structure of the incarceration system.

“We are not proposing LEED certified prisons. That simply feeds the perception that you can just put solar panels on a prison and everything is okay. The real issue is that there is a problem with the industry at its core. What we are proposing is, the scale of the prison system is the problem. Piling thousands into a building, into a warehouse is a problem,” Tsolkas told ThinkProgress.

According to the Prison Ecology Project, the problem of inmate health problems caused by environmental issues and overcrowding is one repeated across the country. State Correctional Institution — Fayette in La Belle, Pennsylvania is another facility on PEP’s radar. Immediately after the prison opened its doors in 2003, inmates and prison staff started complaining about health issues from an adjacent fly ash dump.

Sonny Markish, who lives in the house closest to the prison, is experiencing the same health issues as the prisoners, so he has something rare among those outside the prison walls: empathy.

“I know those people have done something wrong or they wouldn’t be there, but Christ, all of those people don’t have a death sentence. But they can’t get out of the prison,” Markish told Al-Jazeera America in 2016. Markish, himself, has had three kinds of cancer that he attributes to the fly ash.

On the other side of the state, everyday, Bryant Arroyo and a thousand other inmates at State Correctional Institution — Frackville in Schuylkill County, PA worry that simply taking a drink or brushing their teeth may be shortening their lives. But because of where they are, few people care.

“We are the minority and society doesn’t care,” Arroyo told ThinkProgress. He has been incarcerated since 1994 on charges of first degree murder. Arroyo added that people should care, if not out of compassion, but for economic reasons.

“At the end of the day, the pain and suffering of prisoners is borne by taxpayers … If the prisoner is drinking dirty water and gets sick, that can cost millions and the taxpayer ends up paying for it,” said Arroyo.

Arroyo said that on several occasions, recently, the prison has had to shut off the water altogether because it was foul-smelling and brown and prison staff resorted to handing out bottled water to inmates. An overwhelming majority of the prisoner population was exposed to this contamination and experienced bouts of diarrhea, vomiting, sore throats, and dizziness.

Pennsylvania prison officials, however, insist the state’s prisons are safe. Pennsylvania Department of Corrections spokesperson Amy Worden said in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress, “The health and safety of inmates and staff at Pennsylvania’s 25 correctional institutions is paramount.”

She added, regarding the fly ash that “in response to inmate complaints, the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection conducted a multi-level inspection at SCI Fayette to assess regulatory compliance. The initial report indicates there were no violations and more importantly no evidence of fly ash anywhere.”

And as far as water issues in Frackville, Worden said that while there have been occasional turbidity issues, “The prison is working closely with (the local water company) and they have assured facility officials that the water, although discolored at times, is safe to drink.”

Read the conclusion at Think Progress