CONCLUSION

California is a leader in addressing climate change in the United States and has an urgent responsibility to consider the impacts of climate change on incarcerated people throughout the state.

As temperatures rise, cold fronts move in, wildfires spread, and flooding increases, we must come together to consider how we can keep our most vulnerable communities safe from harm. With the general trend towards decarceration in our state, we have shown it is already possible to close prisons, reduce our prison population, and reinvest in the communities most harmed by climate change.

This research is only the beginning of increasing our understanding of how climate hazards affect incarcerated people, how to bridge the chasm between written CDCR policy and its implementation, and how to confront the harmful carceral system.

We suggest further research be conducted on the following topics:

The particular impacts of extreme temperatures on individual prisons as it relates to the issues of infrastructure, access to heating and cooling facilities, and the geography of each prison location play a significant role in how people experience extreme temperatures.

Analysis of the CDCR budget to understand how much money is saved when CDCR releases individuals and closes prisons and how these savings can be reinvested into environmental justice communities, over-policed communities, and re-entry programs.

Strategies that would hold CDCR accountable to its written policy and ensure implementation across facilities.

Policies to improve communication between incarcerated people and their loved ones on the outside in times of emergency

Strategies to integrate the justice system-impacted communities into the policy making and accountability process.

Including incarcerated people and prison facilities in measures of environmental justice such as CalEnviroScreen.

We hope our report follows the ethos of Ella Jo Baker and the Ella Baker Center in grasping issues by the root to understand how communities of color, low-income communities and people impacted by incarceration can come together to transform our criminal justice system. In a speech in Atlanta, Ella J. Baker said it best:

In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”

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