Hazards and Incarceration Facilities: Evaluating Facility-Level Exposure to Floods, Wildfires, Extreme Heat, and Landslides in Colorado

Abstract

Incarcerated people are some of the most vulnerable and at risk in our society. One understudied source of this high risk is the exposure of incarceration facilities to environmental hazards. This study addresses this gap by developing and applying spatial analyses to evaluate the exposure of incarceration infrastructure to wildfire, flood, extreme heat, and landslide hazards. First, we classified the exposure to these four hazards for all known incarceration facilities in the state of Colorado. Next, we statistically evaluated various demographic and infrastructure metadata to distinguish between elevated- and low-exposure facilities for each hazard type. Finally, we compared the exposure of incarceration infrastructure with the state’s kindergarten–12th grade (K-12) education infrastructure. We found that approximately 75% of studied incarceration infrastructure is in the elevated exposure group for at least one of the four categories studied. We did not find a significant correlation between landslide risk and the location of incarceration infrastructure. We found racial disparities—two of the hazards having greater exposure in facilities with higher rates of incarcerated people identifying as Black (in the case of extreme heat) and Hispanic or Latino (in the case of floods)—whereas wildfires and landslides did not appear to pose significant equity concerns. We found education and incarceration facilities to have statistically significant differences in exposure for one hazard, floods. The results of this study highlight the disproportionate risk exposure experienced by Black and Hispanic or Latino incarcerated people. The quantification of facility-level exposure to hazards is timely and poised to guide strategies that increase the resilience of the incarcerated population in Colorado and beyond.