Dearest Readers,

Welcome to the first issue of 2024! In these harrowing times, we hope Issue 41 of The Abolitionist, focused on ecological justice, sheds light on how abolishing the prison industrial complex (PIC) is a necessary steppingstone in saving the planet.

As every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 has been the world’s hottest on record, making 2024 likely even hotter than its preceding year as the top runner historically, climate crisis is one of the most pressing causes for urgent strategy, mobilization, and concern. As various crises have hit us with increasing frequency for the past few decades, we know that today’s climate disasters and tipping points aggravate the economic damage done by the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining how crises are compounded, we see more and more that the climate crisis has more to do with institutions, economic priorities, and political systems than weather.

It is important now more than ever for imprisoned people, anti-prison advocates, and abolitionists to join forces with environmentalists and ecologists. Because the PIC has gravely altered the economic and infrastructural landscape of the US, the PIC also poses numerous implications for the sole contributing factor to climate change— the use of fossil fuels. While 20 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are due to deforestation— exceeding the emissions from all passenger vehicles on the planet (according to Conservation International)–it is the PIC that incentivizes further industrial development through the maintenance and construction of existing and new cages.

More so, corporations and police are especially salient in the fossil fuel industry, as Associate Professor of Philosophy and African Studies at Georgetown University, Olúfémi O Táíwò argues in his 2020 Dissent Magazine article “Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis”: As executives and leading capitalists profit from polluting and destroying Black, Brown and poor communities, they evade regulation and accountability by commandeering political systems and processes. Then, police continue to use military weapons and tactics to protect profiteers from the oppressed and activists who seek to forestall apocalypse once crises accelerate. Similarly, we see this dynamic in what has become a “Great Climate Migration” from the Global South to the Global North. Consequently, concentration camps on the US-Mexico border detain climate refugees–the many who flee homelands struck by climate disaster due to imperialist practices and extractive economies. Rather than mitigate climate change, imperialist countries like the US expand walls and fortify border militarism. It is no coincidence, then, that with the hastening of ecological collapse, we see the rise of fascism globally.

Given the interconnectedness between the PIC, ecological destruction, and crises, those concerned with saving our ecosystems must consider strategies that address how the PIC drives ecological collapse, while anti-prison advocates and abolitionists must remember that we cannot build a world without cops or prisons if we destroy the planet. And the clock is ticking. Táíwò, many ecological and climate justice leaders, as well as the United Nations have warned already about the possibility of “climate apartheid”—a world in which only elites are able to access basic forms of protection and ecological security while everyone else faces the devastating effects of climate crisis and ecological destruction. Not only has the PIC played a major role in exacerbating climate chaos, but again, since the PIC congealed institutions of policing, imprisonment, and surveillance to manage perceived crises of social control, the PIC will remain the enforcer of climate apartheid, protecting the elites from ecological demise.