Emily Zhu - Carceral Spaces, Polluted Places: Prisons and the Distribution and Cleanup of Superfund Sites

For decades, incarcerated individuals and antiprison organizers have worked to draw attention to the intersections between mass incarceration and environmental injustice. Only recently has academic scholarship begun to follow suit to examine prisons as a site of environmental risk. In this project, I examine how the presence of prisons is related to the distribution of toxic waste sites in the EPA’s Superfund program and their remediation. Despite limited scholarship, prisons are a particularly critical site to examine questions of environmental justice, given the historical and contemporary entanglements of the carceral system with race, class, and state violence. This project contributes to a growing body of scholarship on prisons as a site of environmental injustice by providing empirical estimates for this relationship on a national scale. I present two key findings: 1) census tracts with correctional facilities are significantly more likely to contain active Superfund sites, and 2) Superfund sites in proximity to state and federal prisons are associated with faster cleanup rates. These mixed findings motivate further research on the relationship between prisons and toxic waste, as well as between prisons and environmental injustices broadly.

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