FordMatrix+2

Prisons, how do they affect our environment?

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates of any nation. Nearly two million people are in custody in both federal and state penitentiaries (Harrison & Ph.D., 2006). These two million people are housed within 1668 prisons (U.S. Department of Justice, 2000). This creates a great amount of overcrowding, as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics; prisons are at nearly at a hundred and five percent of their capacity. Having this concentration of people can have a variety of environmental effects as well as physiological effects. Prisoners inside these intuitions need the basic amenities like food, and shelter. But heating can be a large part of the environmental damage that prisons emit. Heat pollution and energy consumption are two factors that go hand in hand. A Large portion of a prison expenses is allocated in heating and cooling, both of air and water. Heating water and heating the buildings is an energy intensive practice, with the largest loss of heat throw windows and poorly insulated roofs. Poor insulation and high ceiling interior spaces add to heating and cooling costs. The estimated expense for energy consumption per month nationwide is about 50 million dollars (Boothe, 2010), that’s approximately thirty thousand a month across every U.S. prison.

Water is an underappreciated and valuable commodity of the post-modern era. An average prisoner uses between seventy-five and a hundred gallons of water a day, with approximately fifty gallons being heated water (Boothe, 2010). This water is used for bathing, cooking and laundry; this is typical of a large dwelling like hotels or colleges. Water is a commodity used once in this day and age; water used for anything goes directly down the drain. Some but not all water could be used for agriculture, redirecting “grey” water from showers, and laundry requiring that they contain bio-degradable detergents, which most of them are. Most prisons have community gardens, which this water could be directed.

As seen in the documentary “Dirt” as humans of this era we have lost our sacred connection with dirt and all that it means to our survival and for our health. The garden’s or farms that prisoners work on re-connect them with the soil. These institutions are becoming a hot bed for sustainable research because prisoners have nothing but time. And allows them to work productively while serving there sentence, will at the same time educating (Ulrich & Nadkarni, 2007). There are tremendous social and emotional gains that the prisoners gain when aiding in sustainability research, due to the limited access to nature. One such project is to grow moss pots, for sale to the public. Environmentalists and prisoners collected data over an eighteen month span on how to farm mosses more effectively and efficiently with little environmental impact (Nadkarni). As people, not just prisoners reconnect with the earth they build a community. They have helped to plant trees in urban areas, and upon their release, have gained the experience that they can apply to a job outside the walls of a prison.

Community gardens help both prisoners and non-prisoners learn about the soil, and how and where our food comes from. In the San Francisco Bay area gardens at schools are popular, that let school children play in the dirt (Ferris, Sempik, & Norman, 2001). Gardens like these built at prisons, also go to feeding the residence, there for reducing the need for “food-miles.”

In all, prisons occupy large amounts of land, some as large as one thousand acres, they consume several thousands of water and generate trash, all to house and detain those that break the law. Steps can be made to run prisons more sustainably, like many of those I have outlined above. For all the bad things that prisons represent, they soon may be doing much good.

=Additional Resources= The Greening of America's Prisons http://criminaljustice.change.org/blog/view/the_greening_of_americas_prisons

[|The Evergreen State College and Washington Department of Corrections · Sustainable Prisons Project]

Green Jobs for Jailbirds http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/green-jobs-prison-work

California's Overcrowded prisons (slideshow) http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/03/24/us/20100324-CALPRISON_index.html

=Photo Credits= (clockwise from top left)

//ADX Federal Supermax Prison, Florence, CO//. Digital image. //Supermaxed//. 2010. Web. 31 Oct. 2010. .

Reuters. Solar panels on the grounds of Ironwood State Prison near Blythe, Calif. Several prisons and jails around the country are pursuing green upgrades. Digital image. //Environment//. New York Times, 3 Mar. 2009. Web. 31 Oct. 2010. .

Crowded in Corectional Faciliy. Digital image. //Dekalbcountyilsheriff//. Web. 31 Oct. 2010. .

Johansson, Ann. Digital image. //Californias Overcrowed Prisons//. New York Times, 2010. Web. 31 Oct. 2010. .

 =Bibliography= Boothe, B. (2010, September 29). //Prisons: Prisons Can Reduce Energy Expense by 90% 7 Point System.// Retrieved October 28, 2010, from Boothe Global Perspectives: http://bootheglobalperspectives.com/article.asp?id=383

Ferris, J., Sempik, J., & Norman, C. (2001). //Peopl, Land and Sustainability: Community Gardens and the Social Dimension of Sustainable Development.// Retrieved October 29, 2010, from Wiley Online Libary: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9515.t01-1-00253/pdf

Harrison, P. M., & Ph.D., B. A. (2006, May 21). //Bureau of Justice Statistics.// Retrieved 10 28, 2010, from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/pjim05.pdf

Nadkarni, N. M. (2006). //The Moss-in-Prison project: disseminating science beyond academia.// Retrieved October 30, 2010, from http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/1540-9295%282006%294%5B442%3ATMPDSB%5D2.0.CO%3B2

U.S. Department of Justice. (2000). //Sourebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2003.// Retrieved 10 28, 2010, from Albany.edu: http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t1102.pdf

Ulrich, C., & Nadkarni, N. M. (2007, September 4). //Sustainability research and practice in enforces residential institutions: collaborations of ecologists and prisoners.// Retrieved October 27, 2010, from http://www.springerlink.com/content/3074v62030633859/fulltext.pdf