Climate Justice, Public Health, and Mental Health in Prisons and Jails

Research on the linkages among climate change, public health, and mental health is still in its early stages, with scholars just beginning to explore possible causal pathways between anthropogenic climate disruptions and a range of impacts on human well-being. Heat waves, rising temperatures, wild fires, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, droughts, desertification, and the loss of forests, rivers, and glaciers have all been cited as examples of climate-driven effects on our ecosystems, but what do we know about the documented effects of climate change on mental health? How might climate change contribute to the emergence or intensification of anxiety, mood disorders, depression, suicide, aggressive behaviors, and despair? And how do such phenomena present themselves among marginalized and vulnerable populations, such as incarcerated persons? These questions are particularly relevant considering the recent growth in studies that find that carceral institutions are sites where climate change threats are particularly pronounced, suggesting the need to expand the scope of research on climate (in)justice into prisons and jails. Furthermore, new terms have emerged from the literature to capture and reflect the spectrum of consequences on individual and collective mental health, including ecoanxiety, eco-guilt, ecopsychology, ecological grief, solastalgia, and biospheric concern, but few of these terms have been effectively applied to the experiences of populations marginalized by structural inequalities and institutional violence. Drawing on literatures from multiple fields and centering illustrative cases from around the United States, this chapter seeks to explore how climate change is shaping the public health and mental health experiences of incarcerated populations, with the aim of deepening our understanding of the full impacts of a changing climate on human health and understanding how people are coping under such circumstances.