Carceral Bioethics of Place: Environmental Punishment and Justice in the U.S. South

J Healthc Sci Humanit. 2025 Spring;15(1):26-36.

ABSTRACT

This conceptual paper advances a carceral bioethics of place to examine how environmental exposure operates as punishment in the U.S. South. While bioethics has traditionally focused on medical decision-making, southern carceral landscapes-such as Alabama’s Elmore County mega-prison, Louisiana’s Angola facility, and Mississippi’s Parchman Farm-reveal how the locations and conditions of incarceration embody ethical violations. Built on contaminated or flood-prone land and housing largely occupied by Black and low-income men, these institutions reproduce a legacy of racialized environmental and penal inequality. Using the four principles of bioethics-autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice-and firmly situated in the discipline of critical criminology, this paper interprets both prison siting and neglect as constituent elements of structural and environmental violence. These harms are put into a historical context of slavery, convict leasing, and mass incarceration; environmental neglect is interpreted as a state-sanctioned violation of moral obligation. The essay concludes with A Southern Bioethics of Justice-an integrative framework linking environmental health, carceral policy, and ethical accountability-to guide future research and reform. By extending bioethics beyond the clinic to the built environments of punishment, this paper reframes incarceration as an ethical frontier of public health and human rights in the contemporary South. Methodologically, this conceptual analysis draws on critical criminology, bioethics, and environmental justice, illustrated through southern case vignettes.

PMID:42027231 | PMC:PMC13101426