American prisons are often built near or on environmentally hazardous lands. Not only do prison locations affect prisoners’ health and well-being, but deteriorating confinement conditions exacerbate such safety and wellness risks. In seeking justice for these environmental violations, prison litigants often choose to raise claims under the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. However, the Clause requires litigants to meet an extremely high—indeed, near-impossible—bar to succeed on their claims. Environmental justice advocates have proposed an alternative remedy which calls on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate environmental injustices in prisons. This Comment analyzes the difficulties of raising an environmental claim under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause and explores the momentum, or lack thereof, for the inclusion of prisoners’ rights in EPA regulations.

Many people agree that the United States carceral system is flawed. However, it can be difficult to discuss alternative ways to address violence that do not involve incarceration. Aside from the carceral system, there are other pathways to accountability and healing. Exploring these pathways for perpetrators of heinous crimes, such as sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), is an overwhelming and under-reviewed endeavor. This Comment seeks to broaden perspectives about how society can hold people accountable for committing acts of SGBV by surveying progressive prosecution, restorative justice, and transformative justice as potential alternatives to the current carceral system. Part I provides context, highlighting how mainstream feminist movements have partnered with the carceral system to address SGBV. Part II explains the shortfalls of the carceral system for both SGBV survivors and offenders, laying the foundation for why alternative pathways to accountability and healing are important. Part III surveys alternative strategies to address SGBV, specifically progressive prosecution and restorative justice. Part IV analyzes the merits of abolishing the carceral system and implementing transformative justice practices to heal harms caused by SGBV. Finally, Part V discusses critiques that transformative justice practices threaten the safety of survivors, inadequately hold offenders accountable, and are too impractical to be realistic alternatives to incarceration.

Common accounts of police and prosecutorial nonenforcement discretion tend to valorize individual declination choices as demonstrations of mercy and resource constraint. Simultaneously, these accounts critique blanket nonenforcement policies as being outside the bounds of executive authority. Both accounts fail to consider the origins and implications of nonenforcement decisions made by police officers and prosecutors in individual cases that, when taken together, amount to significant underenforcement of an otherwise valid law. This Article fills the gap between these differing perspectives by empirically examining the hidden and habitual underenforcement of technically valid drug-free-zone (DFZ) laws in one Southern county. Data matching the locations of felony drug arrests with residential, school, and commercial drug-free zones shows chronic underenforcement of DFZ laws during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Interviews with police and prosecutors in this county expose their reasons for nonenforcement. These reasons predominately include ignorance, benign neglect, institutional mistrust of other system actors’ motives and competence, and pessimism about the ability of the laws to effect deterrence. Finally, interviews with active drug offenders within the county reveal their limited understanding of the nature of DFZ laws, the terms of liability, and the consequences of being charged with a violation. While chronic underenforcement of DFZ laws is surely preferable to widespread application of an overly punitive drug policy, these laws can stigmatize the underclass even if not meaningfully enforced. Moreover, if enforcement were to be reinvigorated, the zone locations would likely create considerable disparities in criminal legal processing. Only structural legal change can mitigate these concerns.