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Brigid Bergen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergen, filling in for Brian who is off today. It's Climate Week in New York City, and it's timed to coincide with the world leaders gathering here for the annual UN General Assembly and the Climate Ambition Summit, which the UN is holding tomorrow.

The Brian Lehrer Show is doing a segment every day this week for Climate Week NYC in conjunction with Covering Climate Now, a media collaboration that includes this show and WNYC. Covering Climate Now also announced its 2023 Journalism Award winners. They recognize outstanding coverage of the climate emergency and its solutions. Today we'll speak with one half of the winning duo in its Multimedia category.

Alleen Brown is a New York-based journalist focused on environmental justice, and along with Akil Harris, she's been recognized for work that explores the intersection of mass incarceration and the climate emergency. The groundbreaking project appropriately called Climate and Punishment, maps over 6,500 correctional facilities across the country and analyzes them for heat, wildfire, and flood risk.

Alleen joins me now here in studio. Welcome to WNYC, and congratulations.

Alleen Brown: Thank you so much.

Brigid Bergen: Listeners, we're talking about the intersection of climate change and mass incarceration, and I want to hear from you, or if you've encountered Alleen Brown's work in The Intercept or elsewhere and want to ask her a question. I know we sometimes get calls from detention facilities here in New York City, and we can certainly take your calls. If you're listening from Rikers or another local facility, tell us what your experience is like in terms of the environment. The number is 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. If you can't get through on the phone, you can text at that number or tweet us @BrianLehrer.

Okay, so Alleen, how did Climate and Punishment come to fruition?

Alleen Brown: Well, I think with my work, I cover environmental justice, and I'm always looking for stories that are under-covered and populations that are vulnerable to the climate crisis, but aren't getting the attention that they deserve. I'd seen some one-off stories about people being impacted by hurricanes who were incarcerated, but I felt there were a lot of unanswered questions about what this looks like across the US and how the range of climate-related crises is impacting people inside prisons.

Brigid Bergen: Here are a few of the headlines. These are pieces that were published by The Intercept. "In sweltering Texas, prisons without air conditioning are about to get a lot hotter." Another is, "As wildfires threaten more prisons, the incarcerated ask who will save their lives." And very visually, "With floodwaters rising, prisoners wait for help in floating feces."

I mean, Alleen, those headlines give you a real sense of the urgency of your reporting. Can you dig into one or two of them, give us a summary of those pieces and what you were trying to uncover there?

Alleen Brown: Sure. I'm actually going to mention a piece that was part of this series, but is a headline that you didn't mention and touches on a lot of these themes. One of the stories that stuck with me most was the story of Angel Argueta Anariba. Angel grew up in Honduras, his family was in agriculture, and in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch hit, he was forced to leave Honduras. He was a climate migrant.

He came to the US, worked for a number of years, and ended up caught up in the criminal legal system. He was arrested in circumstances that he describes as self-defense. He was demanding pay for some work that he had done and a situation escalated. He did his time in prison, and was immediately transferred over to ICE detention where he spent another seven years as he fought for asylum. He says that if he went back to Honduras, he would be killed.

This climate migrant, while he's in ICE detention, ends up in a jail in Louisiana. While there, he repeatedly was impacted by hurricanes, really severe hurricanes. During one of the hurricanes, the electricity was impacted. His unit lost power, and so the toilets weren't even working. Again, I know this is very visceral, but I think, again, it speaks to the urgency and the cruel and unusual nature of what we're talking about. People incarcerated there, these migrants seeking asylum, were forced to defecate on trays because the toilets were full. These were trays that their food had been served on. Angel suffered some respiratory issues because of the stench and the heat, the ventilation was poor.

Again, two other hurricanes hit while he was there. In one case, a pepper spray-like substance was sprayed into the facility to control people who were inside who were understandably uncomfortable. I think that just gives a sense of the kinds of things people are facing. I'll pause for a moment, but heat is the other thing.

Brigid Bergen: How did you find Angel and start to begin to tell this story? I can imagine you were dealing with people who have a very, obviously, restricted environment. As a journalist, your access to that environment is presumably also restricted in many ways. How did you find him, and where is he now?

Alleen Brown: Yes. Me and my reporting partner, Akil Harris, a lot of our energy went into this big data project, but at the same time, months ahead of our publishing date, I was using all angles I could think of to reach people who are incarcerated. In Texas and Florida, a big way that I did that was through Facebook groups where families and loved ones of people who are incarcerated exchange resources and share ideas. Of course, I checked in with the moderators before I did that or before I used that space. I also have reached out to some public defender organizations.

Brigid Bergen: Sure.

Alleen Brown: Angel is represented by Bronx Defenders here in New York, so they helped me connect to Angel. The people who I spoke to really did have to consider the threats of retaliation and the sense that their pretty dire circumstances could be made worse if they speak out, so it was challenging to find people who wanted to share their story with me and also share it on record.

Brigid Bergen: Listeners, we are talking about the intersection of climate change and mass incarceration. My guest is Alleen Brown. We're looking at some of the work she had in The Intercept and elsewhere. We want to hear from you. What is your experience with being in a detention facility or having a family member in a detention facility, either here in New York City or elsewhere, and climate emergencies, whether it is flooding, hurricanes, wildfires? We know that there are a growing list of ways these facilities are vulnerable, and we want your help to report this very important story. The numbers 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. If you can't get through on the phone, you can text that number or tweet.

Alleen, we talked about the impact of a storm, but heat is also an incredible threat to these environments. Certainly, I'm sure air conditioning is not something that is in any sort of large supply. Can you talk about what you found in your reporting about the risk of heat, particularly when we think of some of those forecasts we've seen this summer with 112-and-up temperatures?

Alleen Brown: Yes. I think heat is really the most deadly climate-related threat that people who are incarcerated are facing. I think people think about air conditioning and historically, we've thought of it as a luxury, but in this new era of climate crisis with the heat intensifying, heat and a lack of air conditioning is really a matter of life and death. In 44 states across the US, according to USA Today, prison facilities are not universally air-conditioned.

A lot of my reporting for this series focused on Texas, where families have really started to organize around the heat, where one researcher estimated 250 people have died, these are uncounted heat-related deaths, over the last 20 years. One of the things that I found interesting and important is that this isn't just a problem in the South. The same researcher, Julie Skarha, who did that report on Texas, looked across the US to see how heat and mortality were related in prisons. She found that in the Northeast, a two-day heatwave meant a mortality increase of 21%.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Alleen Brown: That's higher than any other region, block of states that she looked at. Her understanding is that that is because of a combination of the fact that people's bodies are not prepared for heatwaves, being acclimated to heat makes a big difference in terms of how your health will be impacted during a heatwave; and the buildings are not prepared for heat. Although many, many facilities lack air conditioning in Texas and across the South; in the Northeast, it's even more rare that prisons have air conditioning and have measures to deal with heat.

Brigid Bergin: Let's bring some of our callers into the conversation. Ali in Brooklyn. Ali, thanks for calling WNYC.

Ali: Hi. Thanks for having me. I am an adjunct instructor who teaches at a number of community schools. I'm with the Bard Prison Initiative's Microcollege in the New York City region. I am teaching a course called Sustainability, Diversity, and Inclusion and actually, we're working to bring in a scholar from the MIT Media Lab who does similar work on heat and similar indicators using satellite data. I guess I just wanted to share that that's some of the work that's being done. My course is called Sustainability, Diversity, and Inclusion, and my students at the Microcollege are working on considering a number of these issues in similar ways.

My question was, have you thought about the carbon output of prisons and institutional settings, and has any work been done to contextualize that?

Brigid Bergin: Great.

Ali: Thank you.

Brigid Bergin: Ali, thanks so much for calling and raising a good question. Carbon output. Alleen, did that factor into some of your research or any of the data you looked at?

Alleen Brown: That's not something I've looked at extensively. I guess the thing that comes to mind, I know the publication Grist did a big report on environmental impacts at Rikers several years ago. One of the things that the reporter noted was that there-- I don't know. I believe it's still there, but there has been a power plant on Rikers Island, and the pollution there has impacted people inside the prison.

I don't know as much about carbon output, but I would say that beyond climate-related issues, there's a long history of prisons and other detention facilities being sited in places with poor air quality and other environmental contamination.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. An opportunity for Ali and his students, potentially, to dig into something that hasn't had a closer look. Thanks for calling, Ali. Alleen, you've talked about how you crunched a lot of data. What kind of data sets did the project use to analyze heat and wildfire and flood risks?

Alleen Brown: Yes. For heat, we used a data set prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists. What was really interesting about that data set, they focused on heat indexes or heat indices at a county level across the US. They also did projections out 100 years to see how the heat would increase over time. That was a really important aspect of our reporting. We were able to show that tens of thousands of people are facing really dangerous heat now, but that the proportion of the US population facing Texas-level heat, for example, will dramatically expand in the coming years.

For flood data, we relied on the First Street Foundation's Flood Factor data, which I would say is a little bit more up-to-date than FEMA flood maps, for example. It also takes into account a wider range of factors, including climate-related factors. That's based on the specific location of the facility rather than being county level. For fire data, we relied on US Forest Service's data that looked at wildfire risk across the US.

Brigid Bergin: I want you to talk a little bit about how you and your partner ensured that the experience of incarcerated people were central to the project. I know that it's certainly central to the video that you produced. All of this reporting can feel very abstract, but you don't do it like that. You talk about the impact on individuals.

Alleen Brown: Yes. We, to some degree, wanted to listen to our data and tell a story with the data, but from the very beginning, we were reaching out to people who are formerly incarcerated, currently incarcerated, loved ones of incarcerated people, and people organizing. There is a growing set of people organizing around climate impacts on prisons, so we really wanted to know what would be useful and where there was work to be done. One of the outcomes of that was producing this map that is searchable, where you can look at a particular geographical location or a particular prison and see the climate-related impacts that each prison in the area is facing. You can see what kind of heat-related risk, wildfire risk and flood risk each facility faces.

I also think it's just valuable. It's so rare that we get a look at how many sites of incarceration are in our own communities. When a hurricane is coming to your town, for example, you can look at this map and say, "Whoa, what is this facility doing right here on the coast? How are they going to handle this?"

Brigid Bergin: I know that part of what we are focusing on right now is this idea of extreme heat, but we're shifting seasons and we're going to start to experience, in certain parts of the country, extreme cold. Did you find anything in the data that pointed to how that impacts certain facilities and what, if anything, needs to be done to protect people who are incarcerated there?

Alleen Brown: This project didn't focus too much on cold, but inevitably through my reporting, stories of people dealing with really cold, dangerously cold situations came up again and again. Even Angel, the person that we started with, faced this cold snap a couple years ago that really impacted his facility in Louisiana because again, the facility wasn't prepared for it. There have also been these cases where people who are incarcerated have died because of heat during the winter because of infrastructure failures.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Alleen Brown: I think across the board, prison infrastructure is just not prepared to keep humans safe. With the climate outside becoming so unpredictable, that makes these facilities, many of which were built 20, 30 years ago as the war on drugs kicked off and are deteriorating, the climate crisis is hitting them just as they're falling apart.

Brigid Bergin: Alleen, can you talk about some of the impacts your project has had? I think it's been incorporated into a few academic disciplines, a medical school curriculum. How is your work helping other people learn more about these issues?

Alleen Brown: Yes. I'd say I'm seeing it cited pretty often by people organizing around the impact of the climate on people who are incarcerated. In Texas and Florida, people have been organizing around the heat for a number of years because it's so dire, and people have been reporting deaths related to the heat, which again, go uncounted for many years. In other places, people are just starting to realize how vulnerable people who are incarcerated are, and try to get the attention of policymakers as they attempt to mitigate those harms. I'm hearing that this has been really useful in these burgeoning organizing efforts for people to wrap their head around what we're facing.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go back to the phones. Let's go to Mook in Carrboro, North Carolina. Did I say that right, Mook?

Mook: Yes, yes, you got it. Thanks. Thanks for really calling attention to this important topic. You mentioned earlier that the prisons were built about 20 or 30 years ago. I was just wondering if new prisons are being built today or in the future, where they're being built, and whether they consider these climate factors in the construction of those prisons. Thank you.

Alleen Brown: Yes, that's a good question. I think that's the big question now and the intersection that we're at is that to avoid situations where a lot more people are dying or people are experiencing what can be called none other than cruel and unusual punishment, there's either going to have to be big investment in prison infrastructure, new prisons, modified prisons, or a shift toward different forms of accountability and justice that don't involve incarceration in these facilities that don't keep people safe.

Now already a lot of facilities across the South are starting to install air conditioning in existing prisons. There have been proposals for new climate-friendly prisons to be built. Here in New York City, for example, probably a little over half of people in New York City jails are in air conditioning, but nearly half are not. One thing that local lawmakers say, or I guess prison officials say, is that the infrastructure is not set up to install air conditioning. That will only happen as the city shifts to borough-based jails away from all these facilities being concentrated on Rikers Island. You do see these infrastructure fixes and new prisons popping up across the US, again, sometimes on contaminated sites.

Brigid Bergen: So not always great. Alleen, I'm wondering what you think other journalists can learn from the Climate and Punishment project, and how they can utilize data and this methodology in their own reporting projects.

Alleen Brown: Yes. I would say I think that there are stories about the impacts of the climate crisis on people who are incarcerated in every community, and it should be something that we're talking about every time there is a heatwave and every time a hurricane or wildfire hits. I think the map itself can be used by reporters for that purpose. Also, I think I learned some things about the geographic nature, I guess, of the climate crisis, and the way you can really use mapping to tell a story on a pretty big scale.

Brigid Bergen: It is tremendous work. Congratulations again. My guest has been Alleen Brown, climate journalist, and one of Covering Climate Now's 2023 Journalism Award winners for the project Climate and Punishment. Really appreciate you coming in.

Alleen Brown: Thank you so much.

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