Members of Boston’s congressional delegation on Wednesday introduced a resolution to create a declaration of environmental rights for the country’s nearly 2 million incarcerated people, a move that lacks an enforcement arm but could serve as a blueprint for future policy, advocates say.
The resolution, filed by Senator Edward J. Markey and Representative Ayanna Pressley, points to environmental hazards such as mold, contaminated water, and extreme temperatures that people face while they’re detained in jails and prisons and calls for incarcerated people to have legal remedies when exposed to such dangers.
“Everyone has a right to clean air, water and living environment, including people who are currently incarcerated,” said Pressley in a statement.
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The plan comes after the two Mass. leaders in March visited MCI-Norfolk, the largest state-operated prison that has over the years grappled with its own water crisis. It was written in part by incarcerated advocates at the prison, including the African American Coalition Committee, a prison-based criminal justice reform group.
In 2018, inmates at the prison raised money to get clean drinking water by buying bottled water from the commissary to distribute to other inmates. The year prior, a Globe review of state records found that 43 percent of all water samples collected at MCI-Norfolk since 2011 showed elevated levels of manganese, which can lead to adverse health effects.
The resolution points out that nearly a third of federal and state prisons — including MCI-Norfolk — are within three miles of a superfund site, locations that the federal Environmental Protection Agency finds to be especially hazardous. Many of those sites are also located close to low-income communities and communities of color.
“Our criminal legal system’s decision to put millions of people behind bars has torn apart families, destabilized communities, and allowed others to profit from mistreating other human beings,” Markey said. “As we continue to fight for decarceration, we must also give currently incarcerated people the right to a healthy and safe environment.”
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While the resolution does not have legal teeth, it could set a baseline to build future policy from a new perspective that centers environmental justice and abolitionist values.
“That will be really a huge shift in the way that the prisons operate right now,” Christine Mitchell, an organizer with Deeper Than Water, a coalition advocating for prisoner rights. “We don’t think that these settings can ever be safer or healthier or more humane, and that really the best way for our communities to be healthy and safe is through decarceration.”
The resolution, which has been assigned to the judiciary committee, comes amid a fight for criminal justice reforms aimed at reducing the prison population and improving conditions in the country’s prisons and jails.
In December, Markey also introduced legislation that sought to end solitary confinement in federal prisons, jails, and detention centers, with limited exceptions. And in Massachusetts, which as already halved its incarceration rate of the last decade, state officials have announced plans to close a medium security men’s prison in Concord by this summer.
“For persons with lived experience, this resolution marks the beginning of connecting the intersections between carceral states of being and humanizing incarcerated populations,” said Michael L. Mauney II, an organizer detained at MCI-Norfolk.
Esmy Jimenez can be reached at esmy.jimenez@globe.com. Follow her @esmyjimenez.
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