Carceral Ecologies: Environmental and Social Impacts of the Prison-Industrial Complex in the U.S. South

This essay investigates prisons in the U.S. South as infrastructures of state-manufactured socio- ecological warfare. Drawing from necropolitics, carceral geography, and political ecology, I propose carceral socio-ecological violence as a framework for analyzing how incarceration produces environmental violence that extends beyond confinement. Prisons contaminate ecosystems, dismantle community knowledge systems, and undermine the social cohesion required for collective survival. EPA compliance data from 232 facilities across thirteen states (2019–2024) reveal sustained and extreme violations: wastewater discharges exceeded federal toxicity thresholds by 2,400%, and radiological contamination persisted for twelve consecutive reporting cycles. Over 72% of these violations occurred in communities facing structural poverty, racial segregation, and political disenfranchisement—elements of a broader strategy of state-sanctioned abandonment. The essay examines the 2025 rollback of environmental protections, including the closure of environmental justice offices, deletion of compliance and violation records, and mass exemption of industrial polluters from federal law. In response, I propose a community-based Environmental Justice Governance Framework rooted in collective autonomy, including independent monitoring networks, direct community control over environmental and public health decisions, and decentralized resource infrastructures. Carceral socio-ecological violence exposes how mass incarceration, environmental degradation, and epistemic erasure function as interlocking systems of racial control. Affirming the necessity of abolition, I call for the transfer of environmental and public health governance to communities historically targeted by state violence and systemic neglect.