Anything will be done to protect the financial infrastructure of a multibillion dollar corporate industry, in which inmates are commodities
U. S. & World News
PRISON WATER CRISIS
Anything will be done to protect the financial infrastructure of a multibillion dollar corporate industry, in which inmates are commodities
A couple hundred people arrived for a public hearing at Oak Grove High School in North-Central Alabama to complain about a sewage problem in the tributaries of the Black Warrior River, which has been known to be a popular site for boating, fishing and sun shining. The source came to be William E. Donaldson Corrections Facility, with about 1,500 prisoners; it was built to house about 600. The public has been complaining about sewage for years, but Alabama’ s Department of Corrections and Department of Environmental Management didn ' t take effective action. The dumping continued for almost another decade. Lawsuit after lawsuit by the Black Warrior River keeper, an Alabama non-profit, to get the Department of Corrections to agree to a plan that would repair and give upgrades to the prison’ s sewage plant yielded no results.
This situation hasn’ t just faced Alabama’ s DOC but also other Correctional Institutions around the U. S. Our prisons are a constant source of environmental degradation. It’ s now 2016 and at least 8 of 33 states’ prisons have been cited for water pollution problems
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over the past 15 years. In Washington State, the LEED-certified Monroe Correctional Complex has been caught dumping sewage into public waterways for over 25 years. Organizations like Prison Ecology Project are committed to overseeing human rights. Founded in 2015, they will focus on environmental impacts of the nation’ s booming prison economy. Environmental groups, aside from those targeting the prison system, have no interest in environmental reforms for prisoners.“ You’ re lucky to be taken seriously when presenting concrete problems” says Eric Baldwin of Texas, a current student studying in this field. He further states,“ In many ways, prisons can be viewed as a factory for humans.” Simply dismissing issues that can directly and indirectly be likened to hazards surrounding issues of human health rights should be, itself, a crime. Yes, there is a lot to fight, but this is one thing that has to go in front of the radar. Leave the“ buts” to those who chose not to care and act against the better judgments of environmentalists. This approach will begin to open doors in the area of environmental issues to a whole new world.