Hai Zhou
Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC)
Lake Worth, FL, United States
Hi all! My name is Hai Zhou and I am a first-year graduate student at Wagner School of Public Service specializing in public and nonprofit policy. This summer I will undertake an internship at Human Rights Defense Center, and I will explore the violations of prisoners’ health rights, with a focus on their environmental health.
The United States has only 5% of the world population, yet it is home to approximately 20% of the total prisoners across the globe. This is a salient problem, and people are starting to pay attention to the social and economic implications of mass incarceration. However, one issue seems to elude people’s minds—environmental health concerns.
In the 1980s, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) to fund the effort to clean up environmental hazards, and since then, the EPA has been responsible for making sure that people’s environmental health is protected from hazardous wastes. There is one group, however, that has been constantly neglected by the EPA, and they are none other than prisoners. Living on or next to hazardous sites such as abandoned coal mines, landfills, and former nuclear power plants greatly increases prisoners’ risk of getting cancer.
Moreover, some prisons in the southwestern part of the country are located on hot spots of Coccidioidomycosis, a disease that disproportionately affects ethnic minorities, who are much more likely to end up in prisons than white people. Some prisons are located where natural disasters (i.e., Hurricane Katrina) are frequent, and there are no evacuation plans when disasters strike. Many jails and prisons are poorly ventilated and are not air-conditioned, and overheating can increase inmates’ risk of cardiovascular diseases.
I am interested in learning a few things from this project:
- The mass incarceration process.
- The relative burden that environmental health places on prisoners, compared to other health concerns such as HIV/AIDS and TB.
- What nonprofits can do to make policy changes.
- The potential role of the Eighth Amendment in protecting prisoners.
Currently, criminal justice reform is not on many lawmakers’ agenda, and few people care about prisoners. Improving prisoners’ living condition is no easy task and is a hard to sell to the public. The framing of this issue is key to making change. Human rights are never easily achieved, and that is why we need to work hard to protect them.