Climate and Punishment, an investigation from The Intercept’s newsroom, uses datasets for heat risk, wildfire risk, and flood risk and analyzes them against a federal government index of facilities from across the United States’s sprawling mass incarceration system. The data and analysis provide a groundbreaking, comprehensive look at the effects of the climate crisis and environmental disasters on people behind bars — and the political figures and institutional morass leaving these people at risk. Climate and Punishment includes an initial suite of three stories, a video, and an interactive map.
The data used in Climate and Punishment is drawn from different sources depending on the climate hazard being investigated. All of the work uses a 2020 register from the Department of Homeland Security of more than 6,500 carceral facilities of all kinds in the U.S. To analyze this list of facilities against wildfire risk, The Intercept used U.S. Forest Service data. For flood risk, The Intercept drew on the First Street Foundation’s “Flood Factor” risk assessment tool. And for extreme heat risk, The Intercept used the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists’ dataset and modeling.
Read about the methodology for Climate and Punishment and explore the whole project at https://theintercept.com/series/climate-and-punishment.
Editor-in-Chief: Betsy Reed.
Author: Alleen Brown.
Data Compilation and Analysis: Alleen Brown, Akil Harris.
Project Editors: Ali Gharib, Roger Hodge.
Creative Direction: Philipp Hubert.
Art Direction and Product Design: Fei Liu, Soohee Cho.
Deputy Managing Editor: Rashmee Kumar.
Copy Edit: Sunny Sone.
Product Development: Fei Liu.
Software Engineering: Stephanie Harris, Carl Licata, Raby Yuson.
Video Production: Lauren Feeney, Stuart Harmon, Travis Mannon.
Map Production: Akil Harris, Fei Liu.
Research: Paul W. Smith, Truc Nguyen, Holly DeMuth.