Abstract
This article examines the ways in which sustainability discourses intersect with carceral policies. Building new prisons to ‘green’ industry standards; making existing prison buildings less environmentally harmful; incorporating processes such as renewable energy initiatives; offering ‘green-collar’ work and training to prisoners; and providing ‘green care’ in an effort to reduce recidivism are all provided as evidence of ‘green’ strategies that shape the experience of prisoners, prison staff and the communities in which prisons are located. Although usually portrayed positively, this article proposes an alternative, potentially more contentious, interpretation of the green prison. In the context of mounting costs of incarceration, we suggest that green discourses perversely are fast becoming symbolic and material structures that frame and support mass imprisonment. Consequently, we argue, it may be the penal complex, rather than the environment, which is being ‘sustained’. Moreover, we suggest this is a topic worthy of attention from ‘green criminologists’.
Highlights
Where is the green prison in green criminology?In recent years concerns about climate change, the global poverty divide and the waste generated by casual consumption of disposable goods have moved being ‘green’ from fringe to fashionable to fundamental
There has been a dramatic growth of interest in topics that come under the umbrella term ‘green criminology’, following the publication of a special issue of Theoretical Criminology on the subject in 1998
The fourth reason why we might expect green criminology’s interest to be piqued by the green prison, is that this emergent field shares a vocabulary similar to that used by prison researchers, those who write from a critical, radical or abolitionist perspective
Summary
Where is the green prison in green criminology?In recent years concerns about climate change, the global poverty divide and the waste generated by casual consumption of disposable goods have moved being ‘green’ from fringe to fashionable to fundamental. While it is natural that an emerging field would pursue innovative lines of inquiry, it is noticeable that green criminologists have eschewed some of the traditional concerns of the discipline, including largely neglecting to capture what ‘green’ means to the established structures and processes of criminal justice. This is starting to change (see, for example, White and Graham, 2015), but there remains little work which addresses environmental strategies in relation to punishment and even less on the specific ways in which environmental and sustainability discourses reflect, influence, mesh with or, mask carceral policies and practices
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