ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of ‘green’ jails and prisons—new carceral spaces being built using environmentally friendly construction materials and practices, along with infrastructure that (purportedly) reduces energy consumption and waste, while improving the environment in which incarcerated individuals live and work. The authors consider how claims concerning the sustainability of facility construction and operations have contributed to the establishment of new and bigger institutions designed to deprive people of their liberty. By analysing and assessing the marketing materials of the agencies promoting green initiatives in ‘criminal justice’, the authors demonstrate that, in some cases, neither sustainability nor prison reform are primary or even normative goals. Rather, these initiatives are driven by their ability to cut state or municipal costs. Accordingly, the authors urge scepticism of ‘greening justice’, given such initiatives’ role in legitimating carceral expansion and penal reforms that fail to challenge the persistence of ‘human caging’. Importantly, the authors also devote attention to organisers and groups protesting the construction of new jails and prisons, in part through campaigns that point to the social and ecological toxicity of such facilities (whether touted as ‘green’ or not).
