Blog

By Annie Lo

A recent summer day in Manhattan’s Chinatown naturally led me to Columbus Park, where lush trees shade the benches lining one of the neighborhood’s few parks. I sat and ate my baozi as a pickup soccer game fanned out across the playing field in front of me. But despite the peaceful atmosphere, looking up at the sky above the park also gave me a sense of foreboding. I couldn’t help but picture the 300-foot megajail that will soon loom over one of the scant green spaces in the neighborhood.

The megajail’s presence is already palpable in Chinatown, though construction is delayed and won’t even be completed until at least 2027. The demolition process is well underway, however, and has already damaged the walls of an adjoining property, filling the Chung Pak senior housing center with dust and debris. Resistance to the jail’s construction is also deep-seated in the community, and rightfully so. Chinatown has long borne the brunt of environmental hazards, whether through the siting of city facilities or its disproportionate exposure to diesel pollution. In the 1980s, thousands of Chinatown residents protested the construction of a jail at the very same site. And in the wake of 9/11, air quality in Chinatown only worsened, leaving residents particularly susceptible to respiratory illnesses like asthma and lung cancer.

Against this backdrop, development in Chinatown has been allowed to flourish at the expense of small business owners and local residents, largely low-income people of color. The city’s decisions to site additional large-scale developments in Chinatown instead of near its whiter, more affluent neighbors therefore become a form of environmental racism.

The specific environmental harm brought by the megajail is really two-fold, implicating not only the health of Chinatown residents, but also the health of the people it will incarcerate. Incarcerating people increases the risk they will develop chronic health problems and can severely damage mental health. People in jails and prisons have little access to healthcare, and in New York City’s jail system, are routinely denied access to medical appointments due to mismanagement and understaffing. Moreover, jails and prisons are often sited on or near land with toxic waste and areas with poor air quality. Rikers Island facilities were built on a landfill, exposing incarcerated people to methane fumes and an unstable foundation. And there is no question that the people held in jails and prisons are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.

Abolitionist resistance to the megajail thus feels closely intertwined with Chinatown’s long struggle against environmental racism. Scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of abolition geography invites us to interrogate the way that people, land, and resources are organized and to imagine new arrangements that combat the forces of racial and carceral capitalism. This type of organizing is well underway in Chinatown, where community members have long engaged in crafting solutions to the threats of gentrification, displacement, and environmental racism. The Chinatown Working Group Plan, for example, a community-designed rezoning proposal, would set important limits on future development and ensure a supply of housing that is truly affordable for Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

The plan underscores how community members are best at identifying needs and envisioning the future of their neighborhoods. For a place as dynamic and vibrant as Chinatown—where a sunny day in Columbus Park brings together soccer players, elderly musicians, and chess lovers—resisting the megajail is one way of shaping that future to ensure a safe and healthy environment for generations to come.