These are some of the issues raised by two University of Colorado Department of Medicine faculty members — Katherine LeMasters, PhD, and Lawrence Haber, MD — in a correspondence titled, “The Hidden Crisis of Incarcerated Individuals During Wildfires,” which was recently published in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas journal.
“Climate change has intensified wildfire conditions worldwide, doubling their frequency over the past two decades,” the authors wrote. “Wildfires pose immediate health risks including burns, extreme heat, and smoke inhalation, along with long-term pulmonary, cardiovascular, and mental health impacts. Incarcerated individuals are a population uniquely poised to suffer from extreme weather events, as demonstrated by the 2025 Los Angeles (LA) fires.”
LeMasters, an assistant professor of general internal medicine, is a social epidemiologist who focuses her research on how the system of mass incarceration creates and exacerbates health inequities. We recently spoke with her about her concerns on how climate change may affect incarcerated youth and adults, the need for more research, and the actions she hopes to see leaders take.
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
What made you want to write this correspondence? Was it the LA fires, or had you been thinking about it beforehand?
When the COVID pandemic hit, prisons and jails experienced some of the biggest outbreaks of the virus, and I think that’s the first time the general public realized how massive our criminal legal system is and how it really wasn’t prepared for this crisis. Once that public health emergency subsided, I started thinking about what the next crisis impacting these facilities may be. I realized that climate change is that next crisis, and it is already having an effect, as shown by studies on extreme heat and how that negatively impacts incarcerated people’s health, primarily through increased suicides and cardiovascular deaths.
When I moved to Colorado in 2023, I saw that wildfires are a big issue. It made me wonder how wildfires are impacting these facilities. Overall, there is a lack of research on this, and it’s not often written about. When I connected with Dr. Haber, who offers clinical care to incarcerated patients, it was around the time the LA fires happened. We felt this correspondence was an opportunity to bring this timely and terrible issue to light.
In the correspondence, you write that incarcerated individuals are ‘uniquely poised to suffer from extreme weather events,’ like wildfires. Can you explain why that is?
It’s multifaceted. People who are incarcerated disproportionately come from disadvantaged backgrounds and from places where they haven't had access to health care. Many folks are disproportionately sick coming in. For example, the prevalence of asthma for incarcerated individuals is double that of the general population. There are also many with mental illness who take psychotropic medications that prevent them from sweating, for example. Wildfires often bring a lot of heat, so those individuals may suffer.
Many of these facilities are also very old, and a lot of them have poor ventilation, which can pose risks like ashes from fires entering the facility through the vents. A lot of these facilities were also built in at-risk, high disaster areas.
Also, people who are incarcerated do not have the ability to decide when to evacuate. In this correspondence, I mentioned that 4,700 people in the Castaic jail complex, which is four north LA county facilities, were told to shelter in place rather than evacuate, despite there being evacuation orders. They didn’t have the infrastructure to evacuate everyone — one of the issues was a lack of buses — so only some people were evacuated. It shows the systems set up for evacuation are insufficient.
You also explain that it’s not just adults at risk — it’s also incarcerated youth. For example, the Barry J Nidorf Juvenile Hall, which houses 100 people aged 14-18, was under an evacuation warning due to the LA fires, and no one was evacuated. Can you talk more about that case and what it represented to you?
In this case, the facility was in an evacuation warning zone, so there were no mandates to leave. The advocacy organization Youth Justice Coalition LA shared audio that it reportedly obtained from detainees, and in those audio files, you can hear people saying that they could see fire ashes coming through the vents, but they can’t do anything about it. They don’t have the ability to leave.
Luckily, that facility never caught fire and there were no deaths that we know of, but that has the potential to be a traumatic experience for those youth. We recommend that disaster mitigation and evacuation protocols be very clear and explained to people who are housed in those facilities so they know what should happen.
Why is this an issue that the general public should care about?
There are many reasons. I think it’s our responsibility to ensure that incarcerated people are able to lead healthy and fulfilling lives once they’re released. If all we’ve done is make their health much worse by, say, exposing them to a ton of smoke and creating more trauma by having them see wildfires they can’t escape from — that will not help them be a better neighbor to you once they are released.
This system is also incredibly large with around two million individuals incarcerated in the United States on any given day. So, this is not a small population. It’s important to consider that incarceration impacts not just individuals, but also their family members and loved ones. Almost 45% of Americans are touched by the legal system — they’re a loved one or a family member.
Financially, it's incredibly expensive to pay for an incarcerated person’s medical care. If we’re increasing the medical issues that people are facing, that’s increasing costs to the state.
You mention a few different calls to action in the correspondence. What do you think are the next steps needed in terms of research and public policy?
On the research side, we still need more information on how wildfires are affecting incarcerated people, specifically looking at how it’s impacting people’s mental health and physical health quantitatively. We also need more work investigating how it's contributing to potentially excess morbidity and mortality or worsening of respiratory and mental health conditions.
In Colorado, we’re starting a project that is a collaboration between the CU Anschutz Medical Campus and CU Boulder to collaborate with people who were recently released from Colorado state prisons about their experiences with extreme heat and wildfires. We will separate interviewees into groups based on a prison that they spent at least five years of time in and have more in-depth conversations about the structure of the buildings and times that disasters happened. I think that will give us a deeper understanding of how these disasters affect people and how these buildings are built to withstand — or not — these fires. For example, having windows you can open makes a big difference.
Policy-wise, we need more robust policies for emergency management and disaster response from the prisons and the jails, and from the state and the federal governments. These facilities should collaborate with public health agencies and state agencies. We also need policies for decarceration (reducing the number of people in prisons) — a known public health solution, as these facilities simply are not set up to handle disasters.
Overall, what do you want people’s takeaways to be from your correspondence?
We have to improve evacuation plans in jails and prisons so that instances like what happened in LA are not happening across the country. Some facilities may claim that this is not a problem for them because there has never been a wildfire nearby. However, there are more wildfire and extreme heat events happening than there ever have been before, so all facilities need to be increasingly prepared for extreme weather events in many forms.
As more work on environmental hazards and climate change is conducted, I want the broader public health and medical community to recognize that incarcerated people are disproportionately impacted. I’m hopeful that the broader medical and public health community see incarceration as critical when we’re addressing climate change and climate hazards and health. People should not have to look so hard to find information on this issue. It should be really clear to all that it's a huge societal issue. These facilities house millions all across the nation and nowhere is immune to the effects of climate change.
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