Streisand Scholar Bharat Venkat co-authors new publication on climate injustice in California prisons

Congratulations to Streisand Scholar Bharat Venkat, who co-authored the new article, The Real Cost of Cooling: The Purchasing Power of California’s Incarcerated Workers as a Limit to Climate Adaptation, published in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law.

The study examines how incarcerated people in California must rely on extremely low prison wages to purchase basic cooling items—such as fans, water, and electrolytes—in facilities that often lack adequate air conditioning. By measuring the number of labor hours required to afford these necessities, the authors reveal how prison wage structures create an additional barrier to climate adaptation and argue that access to life-saving protections from extreme heat should never depend on meager earnings from incarcerated labor.

As a Barbra Streisand Fellows in Environmental Justice, Bharat Venkat’s research “Rising Temperatures and Rising Tempers: Race, Climatic Determinism, and the Political Physiology of Heat-Induced Violence” examines the widely accepted link between rising temperatures and increased violence, not by testing whether the relationship exists, but by investigating how and why it came to be understood as true.

Access The Real Cost of Cooling: The Purchasing Power of California’s Incarcerated Workers as a Limit to Climate Adaptation here: