Presentation short abstract

Prisons operate as toxic waste infrastructures, managing surplus lives under racial capital. Our participatory action research challenges this logic, centering lived experience to re-humanize incarcerated people and affirm recognition, accountability, and dignity.

Presentation long abstract

Carceral environments, like their inhabitants, remain spatially and politically 'out of sight' (Nixon, 2011), despite being hotspots of intersecting climate risks, contamination, and extreme human vulnerability. This paper examines carceral facilities as waste infrastructures – places where human beings rendered surplus to racial capital are warehoused alongside environmental hazards, treated as disposable, and exposed to harms they cannot escape. We use a participatory action approach, through semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people and advocacy partners, and campaign events aimed at creating a New Jersey Bill of Environmental Rights for Incarcerated People. Our research reveals how environmental harm is (re-)produced, (re-)lived, and normalized inside prison walls through three interlocking processes of (1) silenced risk communication; (2) embodied toxicity and health deterioration; and (3) institutional abandonment and expendability of life. Many incarcerated people come from neighborhoods already functioning as waste sinks – places marked by industrial pollution, unhealthy housing, heat islands, and respiratory illness – and return to them with worsened health. Rather than an aberration, carceral waste exposure is actually embedded in a continuum of place-based environmental injustice and ‘slow violence’ across space and time.

While prisons may function as infrastructures for managing toxic waste and human excess, the participatory research informing an ongoing advocacy campaign seeks to break that logic. By re-humanizing incarcerated people through centering their lived experiences of environmental harm, this work aims to shift public narratives from waste to worth, and to position carceral environmental injustice as a site of necessary intervention, accountability, and collective resistance.