Team
PRODUCTS OF OUR ENVIRONMENT
New York and Massachusetts, USA
Isabel Lane, Jared Bozydaj, Lifers and Long-Termers, Jane Robbins Mize
Products of Our Environment (POE) is a collaboration between free and incarcerated scholars and writers committed to social and environmental justice. As part of IEC, we are developing a curriculum for a participant-led, non-credit-bearing workshop on arts and the environment that will be run through the Lifers and Long-Termers Organization in New York State. We will explore ways in which an imprisoned population is especially vulnerable to energy production and its byproducts: extreme heat due to climate change; locating prisons near and on superfund sites; and insufficient plans for evacuation in case of nuclear and climate disaster. This project will ultimately result in the publication of a workbook for self-study in and beyond the prison.
Team Updates
Products of Our Environment – Nov 22 Presentation
Image: Eastern State Penitentiary, Exterior Wall and Rose Hips (photo by Isabel Lane) The relationship between prisons and environments is often less than obvious, perhaps simply because the carceral system is so entangled with the word *justice* that *environmental...
About the Team
Isabel Lane is a literary scholar, teacher, and abolitionist. Her work focuses on the intersections of literature and environmental harm—from nuclear weapons and waste to prisons and the environments they contain, border, and exist within.
Jared Bozydaj is an incarcerated writer and group facilitator. He has spent his twenty-one years of incarceration building community and advocating for change within the carceral system. He is currently writing his senior thesis on Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoevsky for Bard College.
Lifers and Long-Termers is an incarcerated-led community organization that offers self-help classes, peer-led groups, and community-building workshops for individuals serving a sentence of at least fifteen years.
Jane Robbins Mize is a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Department of English as well as a Public Pedagogies Fellow for the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.