Conclusions and Recommendations

The Heat-Incarceration Feedback Loop

Examined together, the three intersects reveal a system-level pattern: a heat-incarceration feedback loop in which extreme heat compounds every stage of criminal justice contact, and the criminal justice system in turn amplifies heat vulnerability. This cycle did not emerge from climate change alone; it is rooted in and continues the same processes of disinvestment, segregation, and racialized political economy that concentrated both extreme heat and incarceration in the same communities.

In urban communities where incarceration rates are concentrated, extreme heat increases violence, mental health crises, and substance use; each of these increases contact with the criminal justice system (Intersect 1). Once incarcerated, individuals are exposed to facilities with inadequate or nonexistent cooling; heat-driven illness, violence, and infractions extend sentences through credit loss and parole denial, keeping people inside longer and at greater cost (Intersect 2). Upon release into community corrections, supervision constraints, housing instability, and the absence of any climate emergency supports expose this population to extreme heat again, now with the accelerated health vulnerabilities that incarceration itself produces; violations rise, and re-incarceration follows (Intersect 3). The cycle repeats.

The feedback loop is experienced disproportionately by communities of color. Non-white residents face higher thermal inequity in disinvested neighborhoods, are stopped and incarcerated at disproportionate rates, and bear the household economic consequences; incarceration widens the Black-White homeownership gap and reduces household assets, compounding heat vulnerability across generations (Intersect 1). Inside prisons with inadequate cooling, 81.1% of those confined are people of color who entered with existing health vulnerabilities produced by the same thermal inequity in their home neighborhoods (Intersect 2). Upon release, formerly incarcerated people of color carry accelerated health vulnerabilities, higher rates of housing instability, and weaker support networks into heat-exposed neighborhoods; the absence of emergency protocols leaves every heat-related compliance decision to the discretionary authority that research has shown to be racially biased (Intersect 3).

The fiscal distributions of this loop are stark. Between 2015 and 2024, CDCR spent $133.5 billion on prison facilities and administration (Intersect 2), combined state parole and county supervision spending totaled $30.9 billion (Intersect 3), and California invested approximately $6.67 billion in community resilience programs that could address the root causes driving criminal justice contact and heat risk (Intersect 1; see Appendix A for budget data). A single 14-day heat event in 2022 cost the state an estimated $3.2 billion (California Department of Insurance, 2024); a decade of community resilience investment amounts to roughly twice the damages of one heatwave. In 2024, California spent $155,875 per incarcerated person in state prisons; of that, $7,052 went to rehabilitation programs. In 2024, California spent $13,630 per person under community supervision; a chronically unsheltered person costs the state an average of $35,600 per year, while supportive housing costs an average of $20,000 per person per year and reduces recidivism risk sevenfold (CA Assembly Committee, 2022). Unmitigated extreme heat is projected to add $19–27 million in annual marginal costs to CDCR by mid-century through extended time served alone, a figure that excludes healthcare, litigation, and post-release costs.

These proportions reveal a system that spends an order of magnitude more on maintaining carceral infrastructure than on the community-based alternatives that could replace it, and climate change is widening that gap every year. The feedback loop will persist as long as the structural conditions of disinvestment, segregation, and carceral expansion that produced it remain intact; reforms that reduce one measure of incarceration without reaching the underlying conditions are absorbed into the system’s existing fiscal and institutional commitments. Breaking the loop requires redirecting resources from the systems that concentrate vulnerability toward community investments in stable housing, health and social services, and local economic power that build healing and belonging. The structural conditions driving this loop were built over generations; dismantling them requires investment on the same timeframe, one that aligns with the multi-decadal horizon of climate adaptation.

Accountability to Abolition

Reform proposals must be assessed against whether they disrupt the root causes that drive the heat-incarceration feedback loop or reinforce them; the Critical Resistance guide and Sanders’ carceral humanism toolkit provide that assessment across all three intersects.

Intersect 1: Community-led resilience and diversion

Community-based youth diversion delivered through these spaces is more effective than conventional judicial processing and costs one-tenth as much as detention; state climate resilience programs should recognize community-driven diversion as a climate adaptation strategy and fund it accordingly. The built environment influences heat-related violence, and bundled investments in greening, building remediation, and community programming address both heat exposure and the conditions that drive criminal justice contact. These hubs build community capacity that is owned by and accountable to impacted residents. State funding that trusts communities to define their own priorities represents a structural reversal; the same neighborhoods that lost investment and autonomy through segregation and carceral expansion are directing resources toward their own futures. This funding does not expand the reach or authority of the carceral state.

Intersect 2: Carceral facilities

The strategies most aligned with abolition reduce person-years of incarceration and withdraw resources available to the carceral system: reforming infraction protocols, retroactive credit restoration, publicly-accessible interior heat monitoring data, and phased facility closure prioritized by heat vulnerability and cost. Cooling facilities address an immediate human rights crisis, but investing billions in climate retrofits for punishment-model infrastructure extends the political and fiscal life of those facilities. This is the same pattern the background identified in California’s prison construction boom: state capacity absorbed into carceral infrastructure rather than directed toward the communities those facilities draw from (Gilmore, 2007). A cooling-only strategy scores poorly on every dimension of the Critical Resistance framework: it does not reduce the number of people incarcerated, shift resources to communities, or challenge the logic of caging people in facilities that make them sicker and more likely to return.

Intersect 3: Community corrections

Strategies most aligned with abolition reduce the supervision conditions that function as exposure mechanisms during climate emergencies and remove barriers to affordable housing, employment, and healthcare access for formerly incarcerated individuals. The movement of individuals from prison to community supervision does not constitute progress toward abolition unless it is accompanied by a reduction in the state’s power to surveil, control, and re-incarcerate. Emergency protocols for this population should be developed through research authored by formerly supervised individuals; policy designed without the experiential knowledge of those it governs is more likely to extend surveillance than to reduce it (Jolivétte, 2025).

Recommended Strategies

Recommendations are organized by implementation timeline and tagged with their source Intersect.

Limitations and Research Gaps

This capstone is limited in several important ways that should guide future research.

Intersect 1’s assessment of community resilience programs is based on publicly available grant data, organizational documentation, and interviews. Long-term outcomes data for resilience hubs’ impact on both climate resilience and criminal justice involvement does not yet exist; these programs are too new.

The cost model in Intersect 2 estimates marginal costs from extended time served due to heat-driven infractions and violence, but excludes healthcare costs, litigation, post-release recidivism costs, and staff impacts. The full cost of inaction is substantially higher than the projected $19–27 million. The causal relationship between heat days and infraction rates lacks direct empirical study; the model relies on a range estimate informed by baseline violation data and qualitative research. CDCR does not publish the granular incident-level or daily data that would allow precise attribution of behavioral outcomes to climate events.

Intersect 3’s analysis is limited to policy gap assessment and literature review. No primary data was collected from individuals currently or formerly under parole supervision regarding their experiences during heat events. Climate and community corrections literature is near zero; this assessment should be considered a first step.

Throughout this capstone, specific recommendations have been limited to topics where research and advocacy already led by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals exists. For all other topics, this capstone frames the problem space where more extensive community-led research could be furthered. Follow-up research on all three intersects should be authored by and center the voices of individuals who have experienced these systems.

Contributions

This capstone makes several contributions to the fields of urban planning, climate adaptation, and criminal justice reform.

• It identifies a heat-incarceration feedback loop as a system-level phenomenon by applying an environmental risk framework to the continuum of criminal justice contact, from community through incarceration through re-entry, and tracing the loop’s structural roots in disinvestment, segregation, and carceral expansion.
• It constructs a composite Prison Heat Risk Index and cost model that quantifies facility-level heat risk across 31 state prisons and projects the marginal fiscal impact of unmitigated heat on incarcerated person-years.
• It conducts the first climate-specific policy gap assessment of California’s community corrections system, documenting the absence of extreme heat provisions in the state parole regulatory framework and three county probation departments.
• It applies two abolitionist accountability frameworks across all three intersects, testing whether proposed strategies dismantle or reproduce the conditions that concentrated both heat and incarceration in the same communities.
• It publishes three open datasets: a facility-level dataset of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability data for California’s 31 state prisons; a database of community-based climate resiliency grant awardee projects with characterization categories; and structured statewide incarceration population and corrections budget data from 1920 to 2025.