[00:00:11] Hey hot cakes, welcome to Hot Take, the podcast where we talk about the climate crisis and all the ways we are talking and not talking about it. I'm Amy Westervelt.

[00:00:21] And I'm Mary Annaise Heglar. This episode, we have a conversation that I've been looking for it, too, for a really, really, really long time. We are going to talk about climate change and prisons, more specifically climate change and prison abolition and restorative justice and transformative justice and all of those sorts of things that are not exactly I think that they're easy to talk about, but they're hard questions to answer. And it was just really great to have this conversation with one of our favorite guests and our second repeat guests on Hot.

[00:00:55] Take Amy. Tell them who it is.

[00:00:58] It's Drew Costley!. Oh, yeah,.

[00:01:05] Drew is just a really great person to talk to. He's done a lot of there, actually isn't a lot of reporting on climate change in prisons in in detail. But Drew has done some of that work, and he's also just a great person to talk to and have these messy kind of conversations with. So very excited to share this.

[00:01:24] I think Drew might be my favorite environmental journalist right now. I just I really like

[00:01:30] you know, they listen to the show,

[00:01:32] I really like his writing. I like his writing.

[00:01:35] And I think he's just a really solid reporter.

[00:01:38] And and he thinks about things you just alienate at 70 percent of our audience. But I will say that,

[00:01:46] I mean, I like all the climate writers, OK? Yeah.

[00:01:51] Don't cancel me and cancel Amy.

[00:01:53] Don't cancel me. Actually, don't cancel anybody.

[00:01:56] Do restorative justice. You'll learn about it in this episode.

[00:02:00] Yes, that's right. That's right.

[00:02:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without further ado, are you ready? It's time to talk about climate.

[00:02:18] Drew, welcome back to take our second repeat guess. It's great to have you back here with us. The last time that you were here was the August or maybe it was September, but you were out in California like Amy and it was on fire. And both of you had to cancel last minute because you lost your voices. How are you doing now?

[00:02:40] I'm doing all right. I, I moved. And it's not because it's not because of all of the various calamities that could happen in California. It's to be closer to home and closer to my parents. So I'm doing all right. And I'm glad that it's warming up on the East Coast. I also do not like the fact that I'm back where I'm back in a place where meteorologists always report warm weather as good without any sort of, you know, understanding that like if it's 70 in December, that's not a good sign. So so, yeah. So I'm I'm like, am I getting used to being back home? But I'm doing I'm doing OK.

[00:03:27] Yeah, good. So the main reason we wanted to have you on is to talk about prisons because [00:03:36]so in doing the research for this show so many times I found articles that were like most people don't think of prisons. When I think of climate change, I was like, how the fuck not? [9.2s]

[00:03:47] [00:03:47]It's one of the most [0.8s]

[00:03:48] [00:03:48]vulnerable populations on Earth. So if we're going to think of climate change, you should be thinking of the most vulnerable populations and you don't have to look much further. And prisons are inhumane by design. They're the outgrowth of slavery. There's the school to prison pipeline. They are designed to be inhumane and they're already like kind of this chronic emergency. And then you throw climate change on top of them and it gets so much uglier. [31.7s]

[00:04:21] [00:04:21]Yeah, I mean, I feel like this past year we really saw that. Right, with like not just all the natural disasters, but that on top of covid and like, just how horrific it was in prisons. [10.6s]

[00:04:33] [00:04:33]Yeah, I mean, all over. And it's been like I mean, you know, it's like one of the front line pop. It is one of the front line populations people don't think about are just starting to think about front line populations right in like there are a lot of them. You know, we you know, often when I report on the environment and climate, so it's like race and class. But, you know, all these other vulnerable populations that are being impacted and, you know, in prisons have been sort of, you know, for years now going back to Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Katrina. Yeah. Yeah. It's been, you know, people who can't can't escape, literally. [42.3s]

[00:05:19] In doing a lot of the research for this show, I found some really like just harrowing stories out of prison. And I'll start with extreme heat and cold just because of the cold snap in Texas this past year or Texas and all over the south as a Mississippi. And I should be careful to note that every time I talk about it, how that ice storm just completely took out heat and drinking water from all the prisons. But also most prisons don't have air conditioning or heat in them. And the ones that are in the south, people can literally bake to death. There are people who just like collapse from heat stroke. It's not uncommon. And most prisons are old and they're made out of these heat retaining materials. So they're designed to stay hot when it's really and that becomes a problem as the country becomes hotter. And then when there's when it's cold, there's just no respite. There's no like way for people to protect themselves from the from the elements. And there's no plan. So, yeah. Like and also the other thing about heat and extreme cold is that it increases violence and that's violence in between prisoners. There's also violence against themselves. So suicide attempts increase when it gets hotter. And probably the the scariest thing I read about was about prisons in Israel, because this is a global problem right now. It's going to it's going to be worse in certain parts of the country. So I looked at Israel where prisons are underground and where that means they have no ventilation at all and they're designed that way to present to prevent prisoners from having access to sunshine. And it turns it into hell. And so also the guards. Yeah, right. And. So the guards are also, you know, kind of conditioned to be cruel to prisoners, and so they will take away their fans in the summer and a lot of the same things happen in prisons here. And so people are just like in these unventilated cells, packed together with no fans and like trying to cool themselves by putting, like I read about people having a barrel of water and one prisoner per day could get in the barrel of water to try to cool themselves off.

[00:07:49] That's that's ridiculous. Oh, my God. I hadn't heard about that.

[00:07:56] Yeah. I really had to dig for that story. But like, that's the thing about about how prisons fare when it comes to climate change is that you kind of have to dig for those stories because people don't like looking at what's happening there. Honestly, even last summer when we were talking about prisons and the wildfires, most people were talking about prison labors and prison firefighters. They weren't talking about like what's actually happening to the people in prisons. Are they being evacuated or are they safe? Do they have?

[00:08:25] Yeah, there's this like respectability aspect to that, too. It's like these people who are like saving our lives, you know, so they they're worthy of all of our attention, you know, whereas like the people who aren't firefighters somehow, like, have less humanity because of that. Yeah, I think it's fatigue. And I mean, that's part of the you know, I guess like part of like the thesis of prison is like you go away and we don't the normal people, quote unquote, don't have to deal with you while you ostensibly rehabilitate, you know, in in and it's led to so much neglect.

[00:09:03] Well, it just is so like it's so none of it is conducive in any way to rehabilitation to it reminds me of when you were talking about the guards in Israel. It reminded me of that whole like Stanford prison experiment thing, which I feel like people reference all the time. But it's like, you know. Yeah, like your. [00:09:22]Yeah, I don't know. You're giving some people total power over other people and like and also kind of. Yeah. Pushing this story that those people, you know, deserve to be punished. It's about punishment. It's not about rehabilitation. [13.8s]

[00:09:38] [00:09:38]It's really actually it's more about revenge, I believe, than it's even about punishing, because the thing about punishment is like punishments end and the way that we treat prisoners in this country is like, you can never redeem yourself. You will suffer for the rest of your entire right. [18.2s]

[00:09:56] That's right. The punishment never ends, even for the most minor of I don't know. It's just it's very it is really troubling. And then, yeah, on the wildfire front, it's like, OK, you know, you have prisoners that are trapped in in prisons like they never did. Did you ever see any stories, Mary, about people about like organized evacuation of prisons in California

[00:10:24] California, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. So last summer when the wildfires raging, my first thought was like, what's happening to the prisoners? And I was looking for people being evacuated. And I did read stories about areas where prisons were in the evacuation zone. But last minute they would decide not to evacuate them. In Oregon, I did read about prisoners being evacuated, but where do they go? They go to another prison that is already overcrowded, that is already like got covid all over it. So like, well, what is the actual plan to deal with prisoners when it comes to these sorts of things? And there doesn't seem to be one.

[00:11:07] Right. And yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, because like prison like prison culture in the US, like, grew out of just like, OK, well, let's try to limit the let's try to limit or completely take away the freedom of, you know, of blacks that are trying to get free. You know, that was the plan, the no plan besides that. Right. I think I don't think there ever has been one since then. You know, it's just been going to the different marginalized populations that you that you that are vulnerable to one going to prison. And then you just forget about them once they're there or you or you abuse them like you were talking about earlier.

[00:11:43] And it's it's also the case during hurricanes. That's another really terrible event in prisons. I think we all kind of I say we but honestly, I need to stop saying that because most people weren't paying attention. Right. The three of us farthest back in 2005 with Katrina, people were like Lockton. Sales of the floodwaters are like rising all the way up to their chests. And like these are this is like the Orleans Parish jail, right? Like people are there for drunk driving. It's like dangerous ordinarily, commy. Right, right. Right. Or even just there, because of confusion or there, because they were like, evacuate it. Like, there's all sorts of reasons you can be in jail. But also it doesn't fucking matter because nobody deserves to be treated that way. It doesn't matter.

[00:12:34] Like I actually don't care whether they are guilty of a violent offense or completely innocent. I don't give a shit. You don't treat human beings that way. Like I was reading these stories after Hurricane Harvey, where it was like actually the Houston SPCA did better for the one hundred and fifty three cats and dogs than the state did for the prisoners. You know,

[00:13:00] Metropolitan American, urban America.

[00:13:06] And it's becoming more and more common, right? Because there is Harvey, I'll just give you some stats on Hurricane Harvey. Three thousand prisoners in Texas were stranded without food or water for days in twenty eighteen prisons within the evacuation zone in Florida, schools were left all by themselves during Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Florence in South Carolina. The state declined to evacuate more than a thousand people across multiple prisons. And two mentally ill women who were being transported between facilities were drowned when the transport van carrying them was swept away by the storm. Because usually these evacuations are left for the last minute and there's no practice involved. And I also remember reading about evacuation drills that were planned and abandoned in the middle because it just got too complicated. So, like. Exactly. So climate change is going to keep getting worse and there's no plan. And there seems to be just no, there's a real resistance to having a plan. Right.

[00:14:08] Meanwhile, there's like a there is a plan to, like, build more prisons.

[00:14:20] And a lot of the jails will say that they evacuated their prisoners. And then later on, you find out that that means that prisoners were moved somewhere else on the same property. And even when prisoners are evacuated, they have to leave behind things like family pictures or legal paperwork, things that they can't get back. So if you're working on an appeal like

[00:14:44] of it because you had to leave at the last minute.

[00:14:48] Yeah, right. Like these are all these, like, ripple effects that that folks don't take into account. And I can tell that, like, I'm really bumming you guys out. So I'm just going to throw one more thing on you. The aftermath of the storm is even worse because the spread of disease,

[00:15:05] of course, because it's like standing water. Right.

[00:15:08] So, yeah, standing water he moved to.

[00:15:16] Yeah. That's I mean, that's the Niko's. And then also, like, you know, in a lot of these situations, I wouldn't say that, like, been careful to not lump people who were in prison or in jails with people who aren't, but also are still marginalized like poor folks, people of color. But a lot of these a lot of states, especially a lot of southern states, they just don't have, for some reason, emergency evacuation plans. It's not something that they like across the board for people that they are, you know, supposedly care about who on the outside they don't have they don't have plans for them either. You know, like with Hurricane Harvey, there are you know, there are people reporting that they just want no plan to get poor Latin Exxon black folks to evacuation centers that were like far away from their communities. It was like no plan for that. So, you know, if they had no plan for the people, that there's, you know, that on the outside that didn't do anything, you know, bad. You know, I guess you can't really expect them to do much for people who are inside.

[00:16:25] That totally makes me think of the people that are stuck in ice facilities when these things happen to, you know, which is like a different type of jail cell.

[00:16:39] Yeah, no, they suffer a lot of the same faith. So to be honest and the thing with ICE facilities, that makes it even more fucked up. I wrote about this in the newsletter recently is that ICE has full power to release people. If they can't safely hold right, they can just say, you know what, we can't do this safely, so we're going to let you go. And they don't do it. They didn't do it during the ice storm. They didn't do it during the hurricanes last year. They just don't do it. And it just seems to me

[00:17:08] like there's this mentality in all of those examples of just, you know, somehow these people deserve whatever happens to them, you know, and like don't and don't deserve sort of, you know, full human respect for because they were poor or because they immigrated illegally or they committed some kind of crime or whatever. And it's just like.

[00:17:33] Yeah, yeah, it's gross, yeah, yeah,

[00:17:39] so I mean, I think that that's all the more reason why prisons are like. There, in emergency. Yeah, the emergency gets more there, like this chronic emergency all the time, but climate change, I think, moves them into the category of an acute emergency.

[00:18:00] [00:18:00]I think Drew's description of them as front line communities is like it's it's weird that you don't see that ascribed to prison populations that much, but that's absolutely what they are. And and probably like, you know. The most vulnerable because they can't they because migration is not an option for them. [20.9s]

[00:18:22] [00:18:22]Yeah, I mean, the sex trip, you know, the whole point is like this trip folks are there, agency, right and right. And when you do that, like, it becomes hard for them to because at least someone on the outside could I don't know, like like for example, like it's a terrible thing to have to decide between. But like, if, you know, you can at least go and hide in a different part of your house if if you can't evacuate in a storm, whereas, you know, if you're in prison, like, you know, they're not going to they're not going to loosen, you know, restrictions of movement or anything necessarily. [35.5s]

[00:18:59] Right. Right. And I worry about as storms and wildfires become more and more unpredictable. Right. Because like like just watching California burn last year. Yeah. One one little gust of wind and things become real unpredictable real fast. And to see prisons be that close to towns that just like completely went up in smoke and the state said, no, we're not going to evacuate them like that, could

[00:19:27] it's really just that people could have just but

[00:19:29] yeah, it's like it's fire is by its very is by its nature, unpredictable, like, you know, it's always unpredictable. So like that's terrible anyway. And then and then. Yeah. Like a big part of what's been happening in California is the big shifts in wind patterns and currents and things like that that like make it even more. And it really can be it's like a minute, you know, and all of a sudden that's what happened. When Santa Rosa burned a couple of years ago, too, was like people were, you know, went to bed under, you know, the assumption that it was sort of far away from them and like literally had to run out of their homes to avoid dying. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

[00:20:19] Yeah, it's, uh. Yeah, it's irresponsible and it's sadistic and psychopathic, honestly. I mean,

[00:20:31] I would say it's cruel and unusual.

[00:20:34] It's pretty unusual. I mean, prison in general is just cruel and unusual. But yeah. Yeah, it's even more cruel and unusual.

[00:20:49] So I noticed from your Twitter that you are into sports, including basketball, so I looked up at some questions on basketball and I don't know if they're going to make sense because I only hardly understand basketball. So why the chicken crossed the basketball court

[00:21:15] He heard the ref was blowing fouls.

[00:21:18] Oh, wow. That's like a dirty joke. A dirty chicken joke isn't what is blowing, Bowlsby.

[00:21:32] I thought that was like a basketball term.

[00:21:34] I mean, there's I mean, Amy took Amy took it one way.

[00:21:43] Oh, OK. I hope the next word is PG 13.

[00:21:49] Why can't basketball players go on vacation right now?

[00:21:54] Because they're they have code restrictions, too. No, that wasn't a good answer. Let me see. Because. Oh, because they can't travel.

[00:22:10] Melbourne, I don't know what that means, but you do.

[00:22:26] Hey, have you left us a reviewer writing it? If not, why not?

[00:22:29] Yeah, come on, get on that. Well, the fuck are you doing it?

[00:22:33] Yeah, two things. One, it makes our egos feel good when there are lots of readings and it makes us feel bad when there are not a lot of readings.

[00:22:42] Most important part of all of this. OK, tell us. We sound pretty.

[00:22:52] the way that Apple decides whether to show your show to other listeners. So, yeah, it helps us it helps us go up in the charts and helps us find new listeners, all those things.

[00:23:03] Right. And if you have a negative review, we have a special system for that. Make sure you send it to Brian Darkon at Earthier Dotcom. This our idea and came in at Arthur Dotcom. It'll get to us just in a special package.

[00:23:32] Then you get into the way that prison labor is often used to deal with these disasters, and that is happening more and more to you know, you mentioned the prison firefighters in California just this past year. I think they finally were like, OK, fine, we will allow these people to get jobs as firefighters when they leave prison, which was like a huge deal. And it's like ridiculous that it was a huge deal, you know.

[00:24:02] people also forget that, you know, usually, like you'll see stories about the prison firefighters in California, but all of the Western states use prison labor for firefighting. Arizona, it's like actually there are more prison firefighters than non prison firefighters.

[00:24:24] So, hey, Arizona, it's bad. It's bad. And then, you know, there's all sorts of other ways that that prison labor gets used to deal with, with natural disasters, you know, across the board. Didn't you say, Mary, that they were that BP used prison labor to deal with the deep water?

Transcription

If you want to see the true toll of the climate crisis, you have to train yourself to look for the most vulnerable populations. And you’d be hard pressed to find a population more vulnerable than prisoners. This week, we’re joined on the podcast by one of our favorite guests ever, Drew Costley, to talk about why there is no humane future for prisons and what might come next.

S2, Ep21 | Hot and Cold with Rev Yearwood and The Coolest Show

S2, Ep20 | The Ultimate Abolition

Hot Take is a holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it. Hosted by real-life friends Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt—an essayist and a journalist— Hot Take offers a unique perspective on the issue of climate change. With a breath of fresh humanity and humor, conversation moves swiftly from cackling about the bad week an oil company had, to speaking seriously and passionately about the unequal distribution of climate impacts and our own experiences of climate grief. And then washing it down with a round of dad jokes! Every week, we’ll connect you with the latest climate news and with the journalists and storytellers trying to make sense of this complex issue to help you see the world through climate-colored glasses. We ended production on Hot Take at the end of 2022, but you can still access episodes here, or 

A holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it.

S2, Ep20 | The Ultimate Abolition

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S2, Ep21 | Hot and Cold with Rev Yearwood and The Coolest Show