Alligator Alcatraz and the Environmental Politics of Prison Abolition

ABSTRACT: This essay takes the immigrant detention facility “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades as a starting point to examine the place of nature and nonhuman animals in prison abolition. The case reveals that political struggles over human confinement are simultaneously struggles over conceptions of nature and claims to land. I theorize an emergent abolitionist environmental politics that could help us take on the interrelated crises of climate change and carceral state building and advance multispecies flourishing. This emergent politics, I argue, should be understood as a form of coalition politics, and cultivating human enjoyment of nature could help sustain abolitionists in this difficult but necessary work.