Forgotten PlacesFrom Environmentalism to Prison Abolition
Introduction
Forgotten places, defined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, are places where peoples who have been abandoned by the state are vulnerable to state captivity and poor health. Places whose demographics are delineated along racial and economic logics established long ago (Maynard and Betasamosake 2022). This article explores the concept of forgotten places with a focus on prison and its damage to the land and its people. We have witnessed the expansion of prisons over the last 40 years. Out of the 32 prisons in California, 23 of them were built over the last two decades (Gilmore 2023). Even though there is a disconnect between crime and prisons, which proves that mass incarceration is not the solution to public safety, why do we still have so many prisons? To answer this question, we must see prisons as a part of the entire system beyond the prison structure itself. The Prison Industrial Complex is a term that has been used since the 90s to describe the complex and overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, detention, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems (Henry and Gaspar) . Angela Y. Davis says that prisons exist to disappear from social and political life the people whose very presence otherwise asks us to account for the social, racial, and economic inequities of our societies. We must account for those that are in forgotten places when we talk about environmental issues and we must step away from the “divide and conquer” mindset when we talk about different social issues.
Part 1 discusses the environmental harm prison causes to the nearby communities that are predominantly communities of color and will help us better understand the role the prison industrial complex plays in climate change. Part 2 provides a brief history of the collaboration between the prison abolition movement and the climate justice movement. MELA (Mothers of East Los Angeles) is an organization formed by three latina mothers that protested against the construction of a prison in their neighborhood. This is an early victory of environmental justice in California. In 2001, a conference, “Joining Forces: Environmental Justice and the Fight Against Prison Expansion”, was held at Fresno State University. The conference further showcased the similarities between the two movements and called for solidarity among communities. Part 3 centers on abolition as a creative project and dives deep into a series of art works by Maria Gaspar on Cook County Jail in Chicago. Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound and performance. Part 4 is my critique on the Age of Resilience by Jeremy Rifkin. In the book, Rifkin imagaines a post-capitalist society that relies on the concept of “resilience”. I want to pose the question of “resilient to what” and “who is benefitting from resilience. I would also like to point out my problem with community policing, a concept in the age of resilience as it relates to the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex. Part 5 introduces abolition ecology, to see freedom as a place and to liberate the places with spatial confinement such as prisons. I’ve come across a term in the Native Hawaiian language, Kanaka Maoli. “Ea” means life, breath and water and it explains the abolition ecology perfectly.
Thesis Statement:
The necessity of prison abolition in environmentalism by examining the connection between the prison-industrial complex and climate change through the history of prison abolition movements in the US and art projects that centers on prisons, environment and abolition.
Prisons Are Environmental Hazards
Because we have forgotten the people inside the prisons, the existence of prisons as part of the environment we live in is overlooked in the discussion of climate change and environmental justice. Prisons have historically been toxic spaces that have harmed the health of those forced inside while causing environmental harm to surrounding areas. Prison construction served as a way to repurpose already polluted lands. There are 589 federal and state prisons constructed within 3 miles of a Superfund site, the toxins of which can cause long-term chronic illness and cancer. In 2000, the Folsom State Prison in California polluted the American River with 700,000 gallons of raw sewage. Between 2008 and 2015, the Monroe Correctional Complex in Washington dumped roughly 500,000 gallons of contaminated water in nearby waterways. According to the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, a nonprofit advocate of Alabama’s Black Warrior River, Donaldson Correctional Facility illegally dumped untreated sewage into a tributary of the river for more than a decade, resulting in more than 1,000 violations of the Clean Water Act (Uyeda 2023). A useful framework when thinking about prison as a part of environmental injustice is Prison Ecology. Prison ecology is the intersection between mass incarceration and environmental issues. In other words, it examines the relationship between prisons and nature: the environmental issues that occur within and around prisons and how they impact inmates and the surrounding environment. Environmental injustice often arises when prisons are located too close to low-income neighborhoods or communities of color (Berg 2019).
History of solidarity and collaboration
Mela
MELA, the Mothers of East LA or Madres del Este de Los Ángeles, is a organization formed by three latina mother, Juana Beatriz Gutierrez, Aurora Castillo and Lucy Ramos, to organize against a prison in California planned for their neighborhood, Boyle Heights, a historically Chicano neighborhood. Because of the displacement of residents and toxic pollution from previous state construction plans, Gutierrez, Castillo and Ramos were determined to resist and eventually succeeded. This is an important early victory for the struggle for environmental justice in California.
Gutierrez, Castillo and Ramos became early leaders in the movement against environmental racism that takes seriously toxic threats to communities that are most impacted and marginalized by environmental crises (Mcleod 2023).
Central valley
To stop the construction of a prison in Delano, California, a conference for environmental justice and anti-prison activists was held in February 2001. The purpose for the meeting was to develop strategies for mixing issues, understanding, and campaigns throughout California’s prison region. The conference featured a series of panels in which activists including the founders of MELA talked about how they had come to understand the problems where they lived (Mcleod 2023). The purpose of the conference was to build a coalition with an understanding of the environmental harms for both the places where prisoners come from and the places where prisons are built. Participants of the conference were asked to brainstorm alternative outcomes to prisons and toxic waste. The conference shows a growing awareness among prison abolitionists and environmental justice activists, a deepening understanding of targeting of communities of color and poor communities for environmentally disastrous land uses and the flaws and discrimination in the environmental policy making and enforcement of environmental laws. The coalition seeks to eliminate the location of environmentally toxic facilities and end environmental injustices (Gilmore 2023).
Abolition is a creative project
An abolitionist approach requires us to imagine alternative strategies and institutions. We must dream outside of how society is currently organized and think beyond the belief and value systems that pose prisons as solutions to social problems (Gaspar). Marcuse states that creative imagination is not the rationality of performance principle but also a productive force applied to the transformation of our society (Miles 2012). This echoes the quote from Angele Davis, abolition demands creativity and imaginative possibilities that have been closed off through capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy.
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. The following section features a series of work by Maria Gaspar on Cook County Jail in Chicago, the neighborhood she grew up in (“Bio — Maria Gaspar”).
Disappearance Jail (Series), Maria Gaspar, 2021-Ongoing
Disappearance Jail (fig 1 & 2) is a series of prints of prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities in Gaspar’s home state, Illinois. These carceral locations are obscured through perforations as an eventual erasure of carceral geographies (“Disappearance Jail — Maria Gaspar”). According to visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, we make sense of what we see through what we already know and have experienced. Therefore, forms of power, narrative and ideologies inform and make sense of how and what we see (Gaspar). We are conditioned to believe that prison is the solution to crime, that we do not see carceral institutions as an oppressive system. Many of the images in Disappearance Jail are sourced online, while others are quite difficult to obtain or can only be sourced through the use of specialized databases or satellite imagery. There is a visual power in the scarcity of prison images that dictates what is visible and invisible to the people. This idea echoes the definition of forgotten places which “forgotten” and “invisible” all point to a position of power and privilege. Through the gesture of perforation, Gaspar redefines visuality by erasing prisons from images which is different from the intentional invisibility of prisons. There is empowerment and reimagination of what our society would look like without prisons in her work Disappearance Jail.
We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis), Maria Gaspar, 2023
We Lit the Fire (fig 3) transformed jail debris from the demolition of the division 1 building of the cook county department of corrections in Chicago, IL to sounds of music and vibration. Materials of confinement and oppression are turned into experiences of resonance and liberation by musicians and performers (“Forces and Waves — Maria Gaspar”). Picking up and reinventing pieces of institutions, we are able to release the restrictions institutions have placed on us and regain the power within us. Music and sounds have always been symbols of liberation and revolution. Perhaps because its power to bring joy to, unite the people and to foster support and care. The reworking of materials of oppression reminds of Maria (2014) by Rose B Simpson where she reclaimed fossil-driven car culture for a queer indigenous futurism (Demos, Scott, and Banerjee 2021). Both Simpson and Gaspar attempted to bridge the western split of art and utility and evoke the feelings of sensitivity and sensibility through rhythm of vibration whether from jail debris or cars.
Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, Maria Gaspar, 2016-2018
Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall (fig 4) is a series of community-engaged radio/visual broadcasts located between the largest architecture of Chicago’s West Side, the Cook County Jail, and the working-class residential area of the Lawndale communities. Radioactive centers the voices of those currently incarcerated by broadcasting and projecting intimate and creative stories from inside Cook County Jail to outside its' border. When the project debuted on September 15-16, 2018, community members and passersby gathered to watch the north-side bordering the jail become a screen featuring audio and animations created by currently and previously incarcerated people (“Radioactive: Stories From Beyond The Wall — Maria Gaspar”). Gaspar reminds the viewers the importance of bridging the communities inside and outside the prisons. Recalling the previous sections where we have talked about the environmental harms prisons cause to nearby neighborhoods, Radioactive helps form an alliance between people inside and outside of prisons by interpersonalize systemic issues. Radioactive steps away from negative stereotypes associated with crime and incarcerated people and humanizes them as who they are beyond the hypervisible labels on them.
Marcuse and Beuys ask the question how political can art be and whether art can be campaigning (Miles 2012). From my perspective, politics is art because we need creativity to rethink the systems we live in and art offers a path for the future while depicting struggles in our society .
Integrating Rifkin
In the Age of Resilience by Jeremy Rifkin, he defines resilient society as a self-reliant society that recalibrates economic performance from efficiency to adaptivity, progress to resilience, productivity to regenerativity (Rifkin 2022,). I would like to question the normalization of resilient language in the event of climate change because it assumes the endless capacity of marginalized groups to cope. Rifkin's future planning fails to address vulnerabilities of marginalized communities and the problems they face such as food insecurity and gentrification. This raises two questions: resilient to what and who is to benefit from resilience. Resilience focuses on climate proofing the future instead of the ongoing and historical causes of harm (Ranganathan and Bratman 2021).
The prison industrial complex encompasses policing as part of the prison system. Rifkin uses Chicago’s community policing as an example of building a resilient society. Community policing was introduced to neighborhoods in Chicago in which the police department worked together with the neighborhood organization to improve public safety. Rifkin suggests that by engaging people in the process of decision making (peerocracy), governance is brought closer to the communities (Rifkin 2022). However, the tactic decentralizes police functions without decentralizing police authority. The illusion of increased public safety and participation in politics is a reaction to increasing militancy and resistance. The combination of high intensity policing and low intensity warfare emerged in the practice of community policing (Gilmore 2023).
In conclusion, the concept of a resilient society still functions within and perpetuates the system of oppressions today. I want to focus on vulnerability and resistance instead. To acknowledge the vulnerable positions we are placed in racial capitalism and move towards abolition through collective resistance.
Abolition Ecology
To understand abolition ecology, we first need to imagine freedom as a place. According to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a place is not just a locality, but also as an entire ensemble of people and the bonds among them. This includes the relationships between people in households, in cities, in the countryside or in the workplace that crosses borders (Abraham 2023). The entanglement of people and environmental resources in systems of oppressions functions to empower some and disempower others. Prison deprives life-giving resources from populations deemed a threat to a dominant socio environmental order. Meanwhile abolition geography is built on the interdependence of all life forces with syncretic practices that join disparate struggles, people and places. Prison abolition works against racist practices of criminalization and contentment as a part of abolition ecology. Abolition yields the labels that divide us - native/settle, civilian/soldier, citizen/non-citizen and works towards a collective access to life resources such as clean water, fresh air, and stable living space. Therefore, abolition ecology makes the forgotten places visible and transform the entire landscape of how we live. Gilmore suggests that a geographic notion of abolition must center an understanding of territory as an indigenous nation's homeland because abolition challenges the notion that territory is alienable and exclusive. An indigenous studies framework demands that we learn the reciprocal relations between indigenous people and their lands (Heynen and Ybarra 2021).
An article that I’ve come across that helped me the indigenous framework in abolition ecology is “Accompaniment Through Carceral Geographies: Abolitionist Research Partnerships with Indigenous Communities” by Laurel Mei-Singh. Mei-Singh introduced ea, the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) concept meaning life, breath and sovereignty, the core values of abolition ecology. The people of Makua Beach draw the relationship between environmental and ancestral relations as a wellspring of collective health and determination, opposing the destructive, atomising forces of militarism. The concept of ea echoes abolition ecology and rests on the experiences of people on the land, relationships forged through the process of remembering and caring for places (Mei-Singh 2021).
Wai’anae, Mathew Brandt, 2016
Brandt took photos of Wai'anae nature, he later developed them, folded them in banana leaves and buried them on the ground. This transformed the photographs into abstract printings (Hoke). This painting breaks the boundaries between photography and the subject that is being captured in the frame. Nature rejects its subjectivity and subjugation and asserts its agency over human practices through Brand’s transformation. It makes me think of confinement and elimination which occurs both in photos and prisons. Photos often overlook the history of colonialism and oppression by minimizing atrocities through so called objectivity. To me, prison is also a place of elimination where people who are affected by social injustices disappear.
The Solitary Garden, Jackiei Sumell, 2019-Ongoing
Another art project that centers around confinement and elimination is the Solitary Garden (fig 6&7) by Jacket Sumell. The Project is a result from a 12-year collaboration between Sumell and political prisoner Herman Wallace. Herman spent over decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit.
In the letters Herman wrote to Jackie, he says “Jackie, in your letter you asked me: “What sort of house does a man who has lived in a 6’ x 9’ cell for over 30-years dream of?!”— In the front of the house I have 3-squares of gardens. The gardens are the easiest for me to imagine, and I can see they would be certain to be full of gardenias, carnations and tulips. This is of the utmost importance. I would like for guests to be able to smile and walk through flowers all year long.”
To fulfill Herman’s dream, Sumell turns solitary confinement cells into garden beds that are the same size and blueprint as the cell Herman lived in with plants, flowers and herbs designed and planted by incarcerated individuals (“About — Solitary Gardens”).
The Solitary Garden (fig 6 & 7) shares similarity with We Lit Fire and Trusted the Heat by Maria Gaspar in a way that both projects reinvigorates materials of confinement. The importance of life and resources in abolition ecology is also present in the Solitary Garden (fig 6 & 7) as people plant flowers and harvest food.
Conclusion
This article primarily contextualizes the environmental harms prisons pose on nearby neighborhoods and the prison abolition movement in the US. However, I want to shed light on communities around the world such as Uyghurs and Palestinians that are living in open air prisons where their freedoms and mobility are restricted. They face environmental and public health threats associated with colonialism (Pellow et al,). I want to call for a transnational perspective on prison abolition and finally, an abolition of the nation-state world that we live in today.
Fig1&2: Disappearance Jails, Maria Gaspar, 2021 -ongoing
Fig3: We Lit Fire and Trusted the Heat, Maria Gaspar, 2023
Fig 4: Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, Maria Gaspar, 2016-2018
Fig 5: Wai’anae, Mathew Brandt, 2016
Fig 6 & 7: The Solitary Garden, Jackiei Sumell, 2019-Ongoing
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