LISTEN: Ufuoma Ovienmhada on toxic prisons

Transcript

Brian Bienkowski

All right, I am super excited to be joined by Ufuoma Ovienmhada, how are you doing today?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

I'm doing great. Brian, yeah. How are you doing?

Brian Bienkowski

I'm doing well. How did I do on your name?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Oh, perfect, yeah. A lot of folks struggle, but I really appreciate the effort and the intentionality to pronounce it well.

Brian Bienkowski

And where are you this morning?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

I'm in DC.

Brian Bienkowski

DC, wonderful. So you are not from there originally. Tell me about growing up in Texas?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so I was actually born in Detroit, Michigan, which we've talked a little bit about Michigan. So first seven years of my life were there, but I don't have too many memories of that time. And really, most of my upbringing was in Texas. We moved to the Dallas Fort Worth area when I was seven, and most of my family is still there today. I grew up mostly in a city called Keller. It's a small suburb outside of the DFW area, and Keller is not my favorite place in the world, but it was a solid place to grow up, I was honestly raised in a pretty cookie cutter suburban neighborhood with like, near identical planned homes, great schools, and I'm very grateful for the sacrifices my parents made, immigrating from Nigeria and working to give us a safe environment with awesome educational opportunities, But the city was pretty uninteresting for a kid. The main activities we could do were to go to the movies or just go to the mall. And there wasn't much nature hiking that was accessible. The trees in in our yard were like little babies, and the parks were grass, and so I definitely didn't grow up with like, a natural fondness for the environment, as others who've joined this podcast probably have, but beyond the physical or built environment, the other thing that really shaped my experience and memories of Keller Texas was its demographics. So I remember about a decade ago or more, checking some statistics, and Keller was 1.6% black. I checked the census before this call, and it's now a whopping 3% Black, and so that said I had several Black friends, but bBack culture and history wasn't really a significant part of how I understood myself growing up being a minority in those spaces. In the classroom, I was regularly the one of only, you know, one or two Black people in a room, and so beyond some brief learnings, you know, the one unit about slavery or the one unit about civil rights in US history class, I had very little academic or cultural knowledge about Black American life, and for the most part, the cultural norms and ideas that came from the ethnic groups that my parents were from in Nigeria were really the predominant lens through how I understood myself growing up.

Brian Bienkowski

It's pretty shocking to get older and think about what we were taught in history classes. I mean, I think about growing up in Michigan, for example, I live in a tribal community now. I think there's 12 recognized tribes here. I didn't even know tribes existed in this state until I was, you know, 18 or 19 years old. And it's just whether it's Black history or Indigenous history, it's just kind of shocking, the erasure.

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

I mean, absolutely, and it's not, it's not unintentional. You know, I've, I've seen, I think, not too long ago, some efforts to even remove that one slavery unit from history books in Texas. And so it's definitely intentional that people are not growing up Understanding the experiences of other identity groups in this country.

Brian Bienkowski

I definitely want to get into you. We don't have a lot of engineers in this program, and I'm always really happy when we do, because I think it's a it's a discipline that can bring a lot to the EJ field. But before we get to that, did you you talked about your your parents bringing some of their culture into the house. What did that manifest in food, music. How did you get in touch with some of your Nigerian roots?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so definitely music. I love Afrobeats. I love dancing. I actually ended up joining an Afrobeats dance group when I was in college. Food. My mom is, in my opinion, the best cook in the world. Of course, everybody says that I literally just made plantain yesterday for breakfast, which is, I mean, plantain is eaten in a lot of cultures, but it's definitely a comfort food for me because of how I grew up.

Brian Bienkowski

So what is it, or what was it that drew you to study engineering?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so kind of connecting to Nigerian culture. There's, you know, First, there's the kind of Nigerian, or more broadly, immigrant, trope of parents encouraging children to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer due to the perceived like financial stability of those careers. So there was that expectation in the background. However, there were also several personal drives for me. I genuinely enjoyed my math and science classes. I would do math for fun in my spare time, and I I also loved art. Growing up, I would paint and draw, and I still paint today, and I started to see engineering as the, what I thought was the perfect marriage between math and creativity. In addition to that, my mom worked at an airline company, and so I became very fascinated by planes. I actually built a clay model of an airplane once for a class project. So if you asked me when I was 12, I would have said that I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. Things changed a bit in high school when I started to get more excited about sustainability science, I joined an after school club called the earth warriors, where we would learn more about the environment, and we would do like neighborhood cleanups of trash in the community. And then I also took a biology class where I first learned about biofuels, the ability to drive fuel from renewable biomass like algae. And so when I applied to college at Stanford, I actually said in my applications that I wanted to be a bio engineer. But once actually got there, that desire changed pretty quickly after taking chemistry and being thoroughly humbled by the pacing and the difficulty of the course, coupled by my disinterest in actually understanding the fundamentals of chemistry. So I ended up pursuing mechanical engineering as a broader alternative to foster my engineering interest across multiple themes. So that's what I pursued in undergrad, but I eventually would continue to pursue engineering in grad school, where I did a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics, so kind of coming back to that initial interest as a child.

Brian Bienkowski

Well, well, thank you so much for that. And here is a question that I've been asking everybody, and I just told my podcast guest yesterday that this is from Ami Zota. She is the one who makes makes me ask this question, because everybody says, oh, gosh, that's a big, unwieldy question. And I want to make sure that people know it's not me who brought this question to the podcast. And that is, what is a moment or event that has helped shape your identity up to this point

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so mine is a prolonged moment or event, I guess so. Really, undergrad, I went to Stanford, and although it is a PWI, which stands for predominantly white institution, for me, it was actually the most diverse environment I had ever been in up to that point. So my class of 2018 had Black population of closer to 6% and you know, that's why I wanted to share the context of Keller and the environment that I grew in. And in addition to that, there were a lot of diversity of other racial, racial and ethnic groups as well. A lot of programming specifically for me, I had a lot of opportunities to learn and develop my Black and African identity, both in and out of the classroom. I took history classes about South Africa. I got very involved in black community groups. I was like I mentioned it in an Afrobeats dance group. I was in the Society of Black Scientists and Engineers. I joined a historically Black sorority, and I would attend events in a dorm called Ujima, which is a Swahili word for cooperative economics. I ended up actually staffing in that dorm as a ra my senior year, where students and staff would gather to discuss historical and sociopolitical topics relevant to the global African diaspora, which includes Black Americans, Caribbeans, Africans and more. And in these spaces, I was really learning both about the cultural values and interest of these different groups, but I was also learning about the historical and ongoing struggles of these different identity groups across the African diaspora, and it really cultivated a political consciousness in me, where I started to have a very deep value for social justice. And that was cemented through a few more key moments with which I think I'll get get more into with the with the next question, but I did other extracurriculars as well, but really the most significant events that shaped my identity pertain to my experiences within the black community at Stanford.

Brian Bienkowski

I think it's so cool to go to college and get involved in these kind of things that give you kind of a personal growth in in addition to a career and professional growth. I I don't know if many people do that. I didn't, and there are so many of these opportunities at university, especially large universities like that. That's really cool. It seems like it shaped you. And as you mentioned, this kind of social consciousness. Did that dovetail with some of your increased awareness of environmental injustice?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so I definitely had an indirect path into environmental justice research, research and activism. So building on what I was saying earlier, part of me diving deeper into my Black identity in undergrad was developing political consciousness. For me, this looked like navigating a seemingly incessant deluge of police brutality on unarmed black people, including Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. It was extremely traumatic to see and hear of violence against Black bodies so casually on social media, and it generally shifted to my core, even more so when people that I loved I was hearing were being wrongfully tackled by police back home. And so it really became something that I saw, not just on social media, but even in my personal life. And I couldn't continue to just see the world through just an engineering or technical lens, and I was deeply motivated to learn about, talk about, and challenge pressing issues such as police violence. And this interest continued into my graduate school. Years in grad school, I continued to pursue education in STEM subjects. Specifically, I started doing research in satellite remote sensing and its applications to environmental monitoring and sustainable development. To explain remote sensing a bit more. There's thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth, taking images and measurements of the electromagnetic spectrum, and these images and measurements are useful for monitoring land use and land cover change in the earth. Satellites help us to monitor hurricanes, track deforestation, etc, and many other applications. So I was doing research using satellite remote sensing to map invasive plant species in coastal West Africa. Outside of those STEM interests, I continued to pursue classes and readings from scholars of history, race and politics, and I was also the co-president of the MIT Black Graduate Student Association in 2020 during this tenure, it coincided with, of course, the COVID pandemic in 2020 and then also the murder of George Floyd. And I literally remember, we were at home because of the pandemic, so we weren't in school, and I was receiving my I was attending my virtual, online commencement ceremony for my master's degree. And I didn't want to attend. Actually, left the virtual ceremony because I was just locked into the news, watching the increasing unrest and news coming out of the George Floyd issue, and it was really just one of the most blatant, ruthless examples of police brutality I had seen recorded as the Black Graduate Student Association. We were really motivated to bring that energy and activism to our campus. And so we started to talk to Black students, undergrads, grads, staff, understand their experiences with policing on campus and what types of biases they were experiencing. And we were uncovering significant things. And it was kind of just through this, you know, one could call it extracurricular interest in activism that I started to by extension of being interested in police, I was also increasingly interested in prisons as connected through the prison industrial complex. So I was reading about prisons, and I stumbled upon a book called Golden Gulag. It was actually recommended to me by a friend. This book is by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and it describes how prison building in California was expanded as a fix for social problems such as homelessness and drug use. And Gilmore talks about some intersections with the environment. And so I'm getting to this. I'm. On this question of environmental justice, she talks about the ways that the state, being California, often pursued problematic land for a prison building. This includes post industrial land that was still saturated with the residue of industrial activity, and also post agricultural land that was made idle because of years of drought in California. During a similar time frame, I was reading more and more about articles that talked about prisons being located on or adjacent to landfills and toxic industrial facilities, which was really echoing this narrative that Gilmore was saying in the book. And I was also learning about the vulnerability of incarcerated people to disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. And I was reading from scholars like David Pellow, who called for including incarcerated people in fights for environmental justice. He was one of the first people I saw really making bridging that connection through the words environmental justice. And this was probably one of my most formal academic introductions to environmental justice as a movement in literature. And I immediately saw connections to the work that I was doing using data from satellites to map environmental phenomenon.

Brian Bienkowski

David Pellow has been a long time source of mine and a friend of EHN, who has written some essays for us. It's been a while since I've talked to him, but it's really it's a small world. It's really great to hear that he he kind of was part of your journey here. So I was wondering if you could explain the term prison ecology to listeners and some of the major environmental ills harming prisoners, and how it informs your research?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so that's super awesome about David, big fan, and he's been a great mentor to me as well. So prison ecology refers to the intersection between mass incarceration and environmental issues. This includes some of the issues I previously mentioned, but I'll make that more concrete with some some facts from research from multiple scholars. So for example, one scholar found that at least 732 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund site, which are among the most polluted locations in the United States, I mentioned the vulnerability of incarcerated people to disasters. So people in prisons as well as jails and detention centers have been abandoned during Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Ian, left to sit in flood water for days without adequate resources being provided, such as water or medications. There's also issues of water quality. A study has shown that prisons experience elevated arsenic content in their water compared to general populations in the southwestern US. We can also talk about air pollution. In Texas, a study found higher burdens of particulate matter 2.5 air pollution, which is air pollution of size 2.5 microns or smaller, in counties that have state operating prisons than in counties without. Some of my own work has also looked at air pollution, and I found that over a four year period, 40% of prisons had worse air pollution than the United States average. This was from 2019 to 2022, one of the most blatant examples of environmental burdens in prisons and other cultural landscapes is the extreme heat issue. So there have been numerous researchers starting to document the heat exposure that incarcerated people are experiencing. For example, one researcher found higher associations between heat and mortality in the prison population than the general US population. This is this issue is aggravated by the fact that 45 states currently do not provide universal air conditioning in their prisons. They may have heat mitigation protocols such as distributing ice or water, but if you're in a facility that is 100 degrees, 110 degrees, 120 getting a little bit of ice is not going to do a whole lot to regulate your body temperature. And of course, all of these environmental burdens are associated with significant physical and mental health effects, including respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, depression, suicidal thoughts, etc. And one more thought I just want to make clear that I alluded to was that, while prison ecology as a term is commonly used by researchers, these environmental issues also plague jails and immigrant detention centers in the US any type of. facility, and for this reason, some people, such as Dr Nick Shapiro, prefer the term carceral ecology.

Brian Bienkowski

So I'm thinking back to that girl who built the clay plane, and now you're and now you're looking at environmental ills and injustice in prison. So I'm wondering if you could talk about using your background as an aerospace engineer, including this use of satellite, remote sensing technology, and how are you using it to seek environmental justice at prisons?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so I'll start with the aerospace engineering piece, because, yeah, when I say that, that's my degree, and then I talk about the research, people are confused. And really, my research in aerospace started with learning about satellite ecosystems, how you develop a satellite, how organizations like NASA design, launch and operate large missions to collect data from satellites. And part of my research interest really started from the premise of satellites historically have not been designed to support environmental justice advocacy. They've historically been designed with either military interest in mind or the interest of climate scientists, you know, wanting to improve their measurements and forecast of climate change. And so I was really interested in what does it look like to use this technology for this user group, this stakeholder group of environmental justice advocates that it wasn't designed for. And so in my work, I look at both applying satellite data, but then also zooming out higher level to think about system level policy changes or process changes that would help us to expand the utility of satellites for environmental justice advocates. And a lot of those reflections or ideas that I have have come from doing in depth work on this topic of prison ecology. So I I was mentioning earlier that when I learned about this issue, I immediately realized that as a spatial and geographic issue as a pattern, there was an opportunity for satellite data to be used to support measuring environmental burdens in prison landscapes. And the utility of satellite data here was that compared to, say, ground monitors, it can offer better spatial resolution and spatial coverage than our alternative sensor capabilities. So one clear example of this is the use of satellite data to measure land surface temperature, or LST. LST is a measurement of how hot the Earth's surface feels to the touch. So for example, if you were to go outside and touch the asphalt road or touch the roof of a building, that's what LST from a satellite would be measuring, and how this applies to prisons. So people are probably familiar with the heat island effect, which refers to the idea that urbanized parts of the earth, areas with a lot of built up buildings and asphalt and concrete, may experience higher temperatures that compared to suburban or rural surroundings. This is due to the absorption from those man-made materials prisons, like urbanized parts of the US may experience higher land surface temperatures and kind of a localized heat island effect, what me and from colleagues are calling a carceral heat island effect, due to the fact that their building materials are often made out of concrete, brick, metal, all of which conduct heat and slowly release it back into the environment. To contextualize this a little bit more. And one example, I took an image. I grabbed a LST image from a satellite of a prison in Massachusetts, and you can clearly see that the location of the prison versus the surrounding forest had a differential of 19 degrees Celsius, which is equivalent to 34 degrees Fahrenheit. So then you can imagine how that type of thing changes at the peak of summer on a really hot day in the heat wave. And so my research agenda at large is to use geospatial data, which includes, but it's not limited to satellite data, to map patterns of these environmental exposures and environmental injustices in carceral landscapes, both just measuring the burdens compared to what we understand as hazardous thresholds, and then also comparing these burdens to general non incarcerated populations. I believe this is important, both from a public education perspective, but I also my main focus actually, is to use this data to inform grassroots activism seeking to interrupt this. Justice and carceral landscapes.

Brian Bienkowski

So speaking of that, I know you work with the coalition, the Grassroots Coalition Fight Toxic Prisons, and you also have a really cool mapping project out recently. So I was wondering if you could talk about how that coalition fits into your work and the mapping project.

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so Fight Toxic Prisons is a national grassroots coalition that aims to connect conduct, organizing, advocacy and direct action at the intersection of incarceration, health and environmental issues. So FTP has been around for, I think, probably about a decade now, or a little bit less, and they do things like try to prevent hazardous... they do things like try to prevent prisons from being built on hazardous or toxic waste sites. They try to close prisons in toxic areas. And they also do advocacy during disasters such as hurricanes, to try and provide relief through water bottles to currently incarcerated people, and they'll also do phone banking campaigns to try and get the prison officials to evacuate in advance of a disaster. So I learned about FTP work pretty early on, when I was starting to learn about prison ecology and I but I didn't reach out, and I ended up meeting members of FTP actually through a friend who was actually organizing with them at the time for some of their disaster response. When I met FTP, we realized we had a mutual interest in using data to map patterns of environmental burdens in carceral landscapes, and so we continued to connect and build trust, and actually got to host some workshops using GIS to look at hurricane data and overlay that with prison landscapes, and use that in actually one of their their phone banking campaigns in advance of Hurricane Ian. So we were just connecting and getting closer. And then there was an opportunity from NASA to develop a grant project using satellite data to support environmental justice advocacy, and specifically the grant was to develop a public geospatial tool that can support a specific issue. So we were really excited when we saw this. We applied, we ended up being awarded. And I've now been partnering with FTP for about three years now, and through a participatory community engagement technology development process. So we've this grant project specifically has had a two year time frame where I began with interviewing formerly incarcerated people as well as activists across the United States to just further understand their experiences with environmental burdens, and also specifically asking them the question of, how do you want to use geospatial data? Do you even want to use geospatial data? Other limits do you have concerns just to really understand before diving into any technology development, like, do people actually want this? Is this useful? And are there things I should be wary of, and how I'm even shaping or framing my research? And that was really useful. Then, in partnership with FTP, we hosted focus groups. So we ran focus groups with formerly incarcerated activists, where we would show examples of existing geospatial tools that aren't necessarily prison specific, and ask for their feedback about the functions, the data, the user interface, those types of things. And then we also conducted a year long effort at doing additional interviews, specifically with formerly incarcerated people, as well as family members friends who have a loved one currently incarcerated, to just hear people's firsthand experiences with environmental injustice in these spaces. And so this overall, the data development I was doing using satellite data, these interviews we were doing, all of these ended up feeding into the development of the Toxic Prisons Mapping Project. This is the online geospatial tool that we just launched last week. And just to give a bit of overview about it and how we think it'll be useful to organizers and family members. There's three tabs on the tool. So there's a hazards tab that contains real time data on active environmental hazards from public updated sources such as the National Weather Service. So for example, you can open the tool right now and see forecast of temperature for. The next three days overlaid with carceral facilities all across the US. So if you are someone who has a loved one inside, you can say, oh, it looks like a heat wave is going to be hitting this area. Let me send in some money so that my loved one can try to purchase some extra water from commissary, or a small fan, something of that sort. Or you can also see a forecast for a hurricane, and that can help to inform larger scale campaigns, such as these phone banking campaigns that I was mentioning that fight toxic prisons does as part of the work. There's also the insights tab on the tool, which contains space show temporal data on other environmental indicators. So this is the these are data sets that I've developed through my dissertation work, and then I also incorporate some data sets from other scholars as well. And what the point of this tab is to allow people to look at patterns of historical environmental burdens and to compare and contrast across facilities. So you could use this tab actually to look at the you could filter by a state. You could filter by California, for example, and across eight different indicators, you can see which prisons have the highest environmental burdens across those indicators, and you could also filter by jurisdiction or security level things of that nature. And so this is meant to help to inform longer term organizing and advocacy and policy making. And lastly, we have the storytelling tab, which contains narratives from people who were incarcerated at specific prisons, as I mentioned. So in this tab, you can both read or listen to the voices of former prisoners and their loved ones describing the estate of the air, water and land in the places that they were incarcerated. And this allows people to get a sense of the material realities behind the quantitative data. This was one of the biggest takeaways of the community engagement and the interviews that I did, and something that people really said was a priority if I were to pursue developing this online tool. Because satellite data is cool. I'm a big fan of satellites, but the obvious limitation is they cannot see inside of a building. They can give you a sense of the environmental system happening around a place, but those are different than the actual experiences people are having, and the environmental burdens go beyond heat and air pollution, things that you can measure from a satellite to also things like black mold and horrible food quality and broken showers. And so by including these first hand narratives, it allows people to get a much fuller picture of the environmental injustice that people are experiencing, and also allowed folks to just have agency over their own stories in this process, and I actually want to take the opportunity to share one person's narrative. This is from Jennifer Toon, who was formerly incarcerated at the crane unit, a prison in Texas, and she's now the founder of Lioness Justice Impacted Women's Alliance.

Jennifer Toon

We often, you know, drenched our clothes and water, put them back on, laid in the floor, poured water on our floor. You know, we were, you could buy a little fan from commissary, and we would just lay in it. You know, it didn't take long for it to evaporate in your drawers, to clone you just keep doing that all day, especially during certain hours of the day, from like two to six, and sleep through it often, especially if you didn't have to be at work, you just, you just tried to sleep through it, laying in a puddle of water the best you could. And that was essentially it.

Brian Bienkowski

I think there's a bias in our culture against people who are incarcerated. And I'm wondering if, as you've engaged in this research and explained it to people, or told people that you want to pursue it, if you've faced, if you've if you found that to be the case among people who are like, Why are you studying prisoners?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Our culture has definitely made a concerted effort to make us think of prisoners as the worst people in the world. Make us think of them as disposable. And I think there's, there has been, and continues to be, efforts to really emphasize narratives of crime and increasing crime, especially from black people, immigrants, etc, that just help to demonize people who oftentimes are just trying to survive, and oftentimes are primarily guilty just of poverty or homelessness and are being punished by incarceration. Of course, there's the. You know, more egregious types of crimes as well. But I think what I've come to understand and really value through talking to, I've probably spoken to upwards of 30 to 40 people who have been directly impacted by the prison system, is that regardless of the mistakes or crimes that someone has committed, the prison system is not helping, the current US. Prison System is not happening helping. Those spaces are not actually designed to rehabilitate people. You can think of all these environmental burdens that I just mentioned. But it goes further than that. I've had people detail examples of sexual abuse to me. I've had people detail having their prized photos from family members being taken away from them because maybe they were a little sassy to the prison guards that day. I've had people talk about being denied water, being denied showers, things that are supposed to be rights within these spaces or or being transferred out of a facility after trying to advocate for better conditions, and they'll be transferred as retaliation.

Brian Bienkowski

I want to circle back real quick about some of your research that looked at more than 1600 prisons over the last 30 years or so and evaluated heat exposure at these facilities. So I'm wondering if you could tell us, like, what were the major findings, and what does it tell us about heat exposure, vulnerability and risk?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, thanks so much for asking. So yes, the climate is getting hotter and hotter, which is, you know, an issue for everybody, but especially people who are incarcerated. When free, people such as you and I experience heat, we can take off our sweatshirt or go get some water or leave the space that's making us hot. People who are incarcerated cannot and so they thus face heightened vulnerability due to many factors. And this was exactly what I was interested in studying in this paper. So I did map exposure, so just documenting patterns of where prisons were experiencing the highest temperatures across the US. And that was pretty a pretty expected finding of seeing that the southwestern US were the hottest prisons. However, I also looked at other things, such as changes in summertime heat compared to the historical record, so really starting to understand the impacts of climate change on changing heat exposure in certain areas. So through that, I was finding that prisons in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast were getting hotter faster than other prisons in the other parts of the United States. Then circling back to this vulnerability piece, I of the study team we're looking at ways to measure vulnerability as a factor that could worsen heat exposure. To get at this idea a little bit more, we know that if we're in a crowded room, it's going to feel hotter than if we're by ourselves in that room, right? And and prisons are often overcrowded. There are several other types of conditions of confinement that make prisons more vulnerable to exposure from heat. I looked through scientific literature on heat as well as vulnerability factors that can worsen exposure to heat, and then I connected that to variables that were measurable about the prison system. So these included factors such as overcrowding. I was also able to measure whether or not a prison had staffing issues, whether or not they were medical facilities or house elderly people, all types of things that could make that population more vulnerable to heat exposure. And so I found in the study that nine of the variables that I tested had statistically significant higher heat exposures than the prisons without those variables. To give an example, staffing was one of those. So there is a variable of prisons that had unconstitutional conditions related to staffing. So this could mean that the staff are neglectful, or it could mean that the they are understaffed, which is actually a huge issue, especially in the Texas prison systems and Florida prison systems. The reason why the staffing part is a potential vulnerability factor is because staff are often the ones who are tasked with implementing what little heat mitigation procedures might exist. So they'll be the ones handing out ice or escorting people from hot cells into an air conditioned respite area. And so if an area, if a specific prison, has poor staffing. Conditions, they may face aggregated vulnerability. And then what I'm showing in the study is not only aggregated aggravated vulnerability, but also higher heat exposure than the prisons without those conditions. So essentially, what I've done in the study is show a multitude of ways that you can look at this issue of heat. You can look at it purely from the exposure issue of where is it hottest? You could also look at it from where are the conditions getting worse fastest due to climate change? Or you could look at it from this vulnerability perspective as a means of trying to interrupt risk related to heat exposure.

Brian Bienkowski

So you've outlined a lot of the problems and injustice that we're seeing in prisons. Are you seeing any improvements, solutions, progress on this front?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah, so due to the increased research and advocacy and journalism around this issue in the last few years, there has been some important movement. So there is actually just this summer, Senator Markey and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley introduced the environmental health and prisons act to Congress. This has not been passed yet, but this would help to create oversight around environmental issues in federal prisons. So that's a positive. And there are also several state prison systems that are taking actions against specific environmental burdens such as extreme heat. So there are efforts in several states to incrementally add air conditioning to prisons in response to the extreme heat problem. However, while these things are helpful in the short term, I actually want to make clear that interventions like air conditioning are not a long term solution for this issue of environmental injustice and toxic prisons, and there are a few reasons for that. The first is that the prison system will find unique and innovative ways to misuse well intentioned interventions. For example, in my interviews, I had multiple multiple people talk about how there would be money allocated for repairs to the roof or to leaks, things like that, and they would never get done in the prisons that they were in, and it would be misused, the funds would just disappear. I also, I briefly mentioned this respite thing. So in Texas, respite refers to these air conditioned rooms that, in theory, people who are incarcerated are supposed to have access to 24/7, whenever they want. However, a formerly incarcerated man named Sean in Texas at the Clemens unit described how the guards would blatantly ignore people's requests to go to respite. In another case, in, I believe, New Mexico, someone detailed how the facility did have air conditioning throughout but they would specifically use air conditioning in solitary confinement and blast it at uncomfortably cold temperatures as punishment for people. So there's that issue of these things that are seemingly good still being used and used to abuse people. But then prisons are toxic and multitude of dimensions. The same prison that installs air conditioning may still have horrific water quality, unsanitary food, black mold on the walls, the monetary investment to make these environments truly humane and hazard free is on the order of magnitude of billions of dollars, if not more, and this is going to just increase in light of climate change, which will increase things like energy demand and thus associated costs. The last thing I want to emphasize is that prisons are also toxic psychologically and socially, which I've alluded to previously, the neglect and abuse experienced by incarcerated people. It's also really common for doctors who are about to be stripped of their license, to be sent to prisons to continue practicing medicine, and so they're experiencing really the worst of the worst in terms of health care. Personally, I do not believe reform is worth the financial or labor cost that it would require, and I really align with the broader movement of organizers and community members and researchers who want to see our government invest in public infrastructure and resources that address core drivers of crime, things like poverty and homelessness and lack of educational opportunity. I also believe that community level restorative and transformative justice programs that can help to foster accountability, healing and reconciliation in lieu of the prison system, which really only fosters punishment and debilitation would meet, would be much better for addressing holistic health, well being and safety for our population in the United States.

Brian Bienkowski

So this work can be heavy, and I'm wondering what you do to maintain kind of mental health and wellness. Yes,

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Yeah. So as I'm reflecting on this, I think some of my past times are likely explained by me wanting to escape from this very mentally heavy research. So I love watching silly dating shows like The Bachelor and Love Island. I love romantic comedy books and movies. I also enjoy science fiction, but honestly, these days, even science fiction is sometimes too heavy for me.

Brian Bienkowski

I know whenever I talk to folks about, you know, reading what I read in the spare time, it's like, I don't read anything about the environment. Are you kidding me? Like, no, it's like graphic novels. There's I don't want to do I don't want to do that. So Ufuoma, before I get you out of here, and thank you so much for today. I find your research really important and fascinating, and I'm just so glad you're in this program. So I have three rapid fire questions that are supposed to be fun, and then we'll get you out of here. So what are you most looking forward to this week?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

The Agents of Change retreat next Monday

Brian Bienkowski

That's right, we get to see each other in person, the whole group, most of the group, will be in Philadelphia again, and that is, that would be my answer, too. If I wasn't a researcher, I'd want to be

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

a coffee shop owner.

Brian Bienkowski

Oh, that sounds fun. And my first concert was

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Jonas Brothers.

Brian Bienkowski

I feel old.

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

I'm aging myself. I was gonna say twice. I saw them twice.

Brian Bienkowski

And what is the last book that you read for fun?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Three-Body Problem, but as I mentioned, that was getting a little bit too heavy for me.

Brian Bienkowski

And who is that by? And what's it about?

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

I forget the name of the author right now, but it is about aliens, and basically whether aliens can save humanity from ourselves. And so it was really interesting, really, really great sci-fi book. They also developed it into a Netflix series, but it was heavy. There was a lot happening.

Brian Bienkowski

Yes, I'm noticing a lot of the Sci Fi and graphic novel genre are doing a lot of climate or COVID adjacent kind of storylines, which I think is cool to introduce people to these issues. But for people like me and you who want some escapism from our day jobs, maybe not so great, but we will check out that book. And Ufuoma, thank you so much for being here today, and I will see you in a few days.

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Thank you so much for having me.