Carceral Geographies and Disparities in the Proximity to Environmental Hazards in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia

The United States has had a long-standing history of incarceration and the use of carceral logic, which has resulted in the US having one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Research on incarceration has expanded into new disciplines, such as green criminology and environmental studies. Environmental Justice (EJ) researchers have begun to integrate concerns for incarcerated individuals into their work. The EJ scholarship has long prioritized understanding how race, socioeconomic status, and procedural injustice exacerbate exposure to environmental toxins and produce poor health outcomes. All of these concerns are manifested in carceral settings, but incarceration intensifies these problems in ways that create a hyper-vulnerability that is unique to incarcerated individuals. However, studies that examine the intersections of environment and incarceration are often limited because they do not address the gender or age of detainees, focus on relatively few locales, and only consider prisons as the primary unit of analysis. The research in this project examined the locations of 199 prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) and their proximity to superfund sites, Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) sites, and municipal waste facilities. One-, three- and five-mile buffers were drawn around each carceral facility to determine the number of hazards with a given radius. A two-step nonlinear regression was performed if there are variations in the distribution of environmental hazards based on the gender or age of the detainees. The results of these tests show that, in general, correctional facilities that house youth or women are just as likely or more likely than those that house only adults or only men to have environmental hazardous at any given radius. The results suggest an urgent need to consider gender and age dynamics in analyses of carceral institutions.