Dozens of organizers, community members, and friends and family of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people marched through downtown Pittsburgh during a protest in 2018. Source: Fight Toxic Prisons, 2018.
In January of 2026, Winter Storm Fern swept across the United States, bringing subfreezing temperatures, snow, ice, and prolonged power outages. Twenty-four governors issued emergency declarations, but even still, thousands of people were left behind in prisons and jails unprepared to protect them.
Carceral facilities often face disasters with little to no emergency management support, systematically exposing incarcerated people to heightened disaster risk that remains largely invisible within systems designed to safeguard the public. As climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, incarcerated people live on the sharp edge of institutional failure—limited in their ability to engage in protective action.
My research examines how the carceral justice system makes people more vulnerable to environmental hazards. In this work, collaboration with community-based organizations is essential to rigorously document harms and, in turn, to use this evidence to challenge systems that perpetuate injustice. Partnering with these groups and supporting their work can accelerate the translation of research into action, which is especially critical in moments when our systems are most strained and those at greatest risk have the least recourse.
Filling the Gaps When Formal Systems Fail
When Winter Storm Fern began, the advocacy group Fight Toxic Prisons received information about the lack of heat at Oak Park Prison in Minnesota. In response, they mobilized alongside other community-based organizations to ensure people incarcerated there had access to space heaters, extra blankets, warm beverages, and other basic protective resources. During extreme cold events, these resources are a lifeline for a population vulnerable to cold-related mortality.
Examples like this show how grassroots efforts fill gaps where formal systems fail. During disasters, advocacy networks activate to connect people to critical information about facility conditions, coordinate mutual aid, and pressure agencies to move incarcerated people out of harm’s way.
Research can complement these critical interventions by systematically and empirically documenting harm, challenging norms that exclude those most affected, and amplifying community-based work. In my own collaborative efforts with Fight Toxic Prisons, this has involved leveraging my own skills as a researcher where and when they are most needed.
Engaging advocacy networks as a researcher requires rejecting extractive research practices in favor of accountable, relationship-based scholarship. Such an approach elevates grassroots organizers and incarcerated people themselves as co-producers of knowledge and collaborators in advancing solutions to reduce risk and prevent future harm.
Best Practices for Community-Based Collaboration
Effective collaborations begin with recognizing that people closest to harm are most excluded from formal decision-making and taking action in the face of threats. In the case of carceral facilities, these spaces are often sited in environmentally risky locations and rely on aging and inadequate infrastructure. Moreover, carceral facilities operate under conditions of confinement that restrict protective behaviors, such as evacuation, self-provisioning, or access to emergency information. When disasters disrupt power, water, ventilation, and medical services, these constraints transform routine vulnerabilities into acute environmental health risks.
It is important to remember too that people who are incarcerated and their advocates hold situated knowledge about facility conditions, emergency protocol breakdowns, and everyday practices shaping disaster vulnerability. Disaster research is enriched by recognizing the value of this knowledge. It is therefore critical to start by building trusting relationships with advocacy organizations, legal groups, and family networks already mobilized around carceral conditions before disasters happen and before a research project is formally launched. This requires setting aside research-driven agendas and moving at the speed of relationships rather than the academy.
Collaboration also requires reorienting research toward accountability. By co-developing research questions, sharing preliminary findings in accessible formats, and supporting campaigns that leverage research to drive change, researchers can align their work to serve community priorities.
Researchers should aim to amplify the essential work that community organizations are already doing to make carceral risk visible and actionable by contributing data infrastructure, archiving disaster impacts in carceral settings, and translating lived experience into evidence informed policy arenas.
In practice, this can involve writing policy briefs, gathering documentation for litigation or public records requests, or co-developing public tools for organizing. The Toxic Prisons Mapping Project— a participatory research initiative to map the environmental hazards that prisons, jails, and detention centers face—illustrates how research can enable systematic analysis and lend legitimacy to patterns that community groups already document on the ground.
The Toxic Prisons Mapping Project is a participatory research initiative founded by Ufuoma Ovienmhada in collaboration with Fight Toxic Prisons that maps environmental hazards near prisons and jails, weaving together facility-level data with firsthand narratives from people incarcerated in toxic prisons.
Broader Horizon
Carceral disasters are products of governance arrangements that exclude incarcerated people from protection. When emergency managers and corrections agencies fail to coordinate, when evacuation plans omit prisons and jails, and when disaster assistance frameworks exclude incarcerated populations, harm is produced by design. Community-based organizations like Fight Toxic Prisons—and the researchers who support them—make these failures legible and contestable.
In doing so, we open space for preparedness models that treat carceral facilities as integral to public safety and human dignity. This also links this more immediate disaster-focused work to a broader horizon of abolition, decarceration, prison closures, and the prevention of new prison construction. While community-based collaborations do not immediately resolve these systems of oppression, they can reduce immediate harm and build the evidence base needed for slow but still transformative change.
Making incarcerated people visible in emergency management is not about adding another population to a checklist; it is necessary for just accountable disaster governance. There is an opportunity to make research count—and a responsibility to take it.
Maggie León-Corwin is an environmental sociologist whose research sits at the intersection of human-environment interactions with a focus on environmental justice and disaster studies and spans three interconnected domains: carceral environmental justice, disaster risk and infrastructure resilience, and environmental risk perception. León-Corwin uses a mixed- and multi-methods approach, integrating quantitative, qualitative, geospatial, and policy analysis with community-engaged frameworks to co-produce actionable insights for technical and policy audiences.