The communities surrounding the Mississippi Delta are facing challenges produced by pervasive injustices. Slavery, both historic and modern, has long been a premise underlying the Delta’s mutually reinforcing systems of industrial agriculture, fossil fuel, and incarceration. As such, the region has some of the highest poverty rates in the country. Residents increasingly experience extreme storms, flooding, and compromised air and water quality. In this context, imprisonment has mistakenly been used as a vehicle for economic development. Each of these systems intensify the ways in which vulnerable communities, typically low-income, Black or African American, and/or Indigenous, are impacted by climate change.

Despite rhetoric cloaked in ideologies of nationalism and market fundamentalism that portray the fossil fuel industry as providing “energy independence” for Americans or “great union jobs” for workers, the U.S. fossil fuel industry is a product of historical and ongoing direct and indirect subsidies that have privileged oil and gas over renewable energy; relegated entire regions of the country (and the world) to the status of “sacrifice zones”; and funneled wealth and natural resources out of those regions and into a shrinking number of multinational firms and investors. The U.S. United States provides direct and indirect subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to encourage domestic energy production.

Oil and gas (O&G) production in the Mississippi Delta region steadily increased from the first well drilled in Louisiana in 1901 to its peak in 1970. Most of the wetland loss in the Delta region can be attributed to O&G activities through the alteration of surface hydrology, fluid removal and fault activation, and toxic stress due to spilled oil.

The International Monetary Fund found that direct and indirect subsidies for domestic coal, oil and gas reached $649 billion in 2015—exceeding Pentagon spending of $599 billion that same year.These subsidies have made investing in fossil fuels artificially lucrative. That is, the incentives to enter into fossil fuel production or investment have been propped up by the government since the industry’s early beginnings. Growth and hegemony of fossil fuel ultimately comes at the expense of funding and consideration for renewable energy sources.

Due to the prolific O&G production in Louisiana, the labor of many incarcerated people is exploited to maintain the premise of “profitable” operations. The Lafourche Parish Work Release program — a convict-leasing system by another name — assigns participants to employment at local companies, half of which are in the O&G business. Many incarcerated people are bused to offshore drilling rigs, work a twelve-hour shift, and bused back to the Lafourche Correctional facility. Participants in this program work in dangerous conditions, including cleaning oil and toxic dispersant after the BP Oil Spill in 2010. The map below displays the locations of the fossil fuel work placements of Lafourche inmates. The concentration of their exploited labor follows the concentration of power plants, crude oil lines, and offshore oil rigs.

The carceral system in the United States began to take its modern form following the passage of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution which prohibited slavery except in cases where a person has been convicted of a crime. This exception is commonly referred to as the 13th Amendment Loophole.

Following the abolition of slavery, white supremacists exploited the 13th Amendment Loophole to strip away the rights of African Americans who were formerly enslaved. States, beginning with Mississippi, passed laws known as “Black Codes” in order to criminalize African Americans so they could be forced back into new forms of slavery.  The convict-leasing system had private business owners, and often plantation owners, pay a fee to the state government in order to “lease” convicted people who would be forced to labor without compensation or rights.

Louisiana and Mississippi have the highest incarceration rates in the country, and would have the highest in the world if the states were individual countries. In Louisiana, the Department of Corrections annual operating budget is more than $600,000,000. The Mississippi Department of Corrections employs approximately 2,000 people and manages more than 30 carceral facilities. In 2019, the Mississippi Department of Corrections received $479,520 in electricity subsidies alone.

We can visualize the foundation propping up the prison system as a series of deliberately constructed funding sources. Mississippi and Louisiana alone receive $678 million dollars annually in direct funding for the carceral system, both from the state and Federal governments.

A less visible but incredibly relevant piece of prison funding is the operational revenue these sites generate using prison labor. In the case of LA and MS, revenue from exploited labor is almost $47 million annually.

On top of that, there is physical infrastructure critical to the functioning of these isolated facilities that is maintained through public funding. We estimate that for LA and MS, these indirect sources total to over 30 million annually, and include electrical grid and levee maintenance, as well as transportation infrastructure. For example, Parchman, one of the sites we’re examining in this field guide exclusively uses 6 miles of highway that is maintained by the state of Mississippi.

The Lafourche Parish Work Release program — a convict-leasing system by another name — assigns participants to employment at local companies, half of which are in the O&G business. Many incarcerated people are bused to offshore drilling rigs, work a twelve-hour shift, and bused back to the Lafourche Correctional facility. Participants in this program work in dangerous conditions, including cleaning oil and toxic dispersant after the BP Oil Spill in 2010. The map below displays the locations of the fossil fuel work placements of Lafourche inmates. The concentration of their exploited labor follows the concentration of power plants, crude oil lines, and offshore oil rigs.

The federal government provides loans and grants to develop prisons in rural areas as a form of rural economic development. Carceral projects have been used as a tool for creating employment opportunities, particularly in agriculture communities that have struggled with declining agricultural industries since the 1980s. The US Department of Agriculture offers grants and low-interest loans to develop jails, prisons, and police stations in rural areas. The USDA allocates larger grants for those carceral projects that are sited in rural areas with populations that are smaller and lower-income. However, there is no evidence that prisons effectively spur economic growth or have fixed the economic downturn for Mississippi Delta communities. To the contrary, prisons in rural areas have proven to be socially and economically harmful to the communities over time.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) subsidizes farms, agribusiness, and agricultural organizations to supplement their income and influence the cost and supply of food and fiber commodities. A majority of subsidies support wheat, grain (oat, barley, sorghum), oilseed (soybean, flaxseed, sunflower seed), corn, cotton, sugar, and dairy. A significantly smaller portion goes toward meat. Most fruits and vegetables are ineligible.

Subsidies come in several forms: direct payments to farms and agricultural landowners; price supports; regulations controlling prices by location, end use, or some other criteria; subsidies for items such as crop insurance, disaster response, and irrigation water; export subsidies; and import barriers in the form of quotas, tariffs, or regulations. The USDA also more generally provides subsidized grants for rural economic development.