East LA Prison & Vernon Incinerator

Proposed East LA Prison: Nearest address is 1600 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los Angeles 90021 (cross street with E. Olympic Blvd.). (Vernon). The prison would have occupied this entire block.
Proposed Vernon Incinerator: 3961 Bandini Blvd., Vernon 90058 (between S. Downey Rd. and S. Indiana St.)

1) Proposed site of the East LA prison, 2008. Photo by Wendy Cheng

2) Graphic developed by Mothers of East L.A. in opposition to the proposed prison, circa 1988.

In the late 1980s, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) sought to build a Reception Center (a.k.a. prison) in East Los Angeles in order to house its ever-expanding prison population. A group of women from Resurrection Catholic Church joined together to fight the CDC, because they felt that the city’s poor and minority communities were already burdened with their share of dangerous and undesirable land uses. This group, which eventually became the Mothers of East L.A. (MELA), waged a David and Goliath-type struggle against the CDC, challenging a grossly inadequate Environmental Impact Report (EIR), the CDC’s refusal to provide appropriate translation, and a host of racist assumptions, including the comment made by one public official that the Mexican American women should be thankful the prison would be located nearby because their children were the ones most likely to be incarcerated so it would be easier for them to visit. The Mothers, who were joined in their suit by the City of LA, won a major victory when then-Governor Deukmejian decided he would no longer consider this site as a possibility.
This particular struggle was one of the first to mark the start of California’s unprecedented prison expansion project. Over the past several decades California has built the largest prison system on the globe. Critics have argued that prisons are California’s (and increasingly the US’s) way of addressing complex social and economic problems. California’s prison budget now exceeds the entire public education budget for the state. You heard me right – that’s K-12 PLUS the Community College System, the California State University System, and the University of California System!
MELA was soon called upon to mobilize again when California Thermal Treatment Service (CTTS) sought to build a hazardous waste incinerator in the City of Vernon. This plan was partly a response to southern California’s massive trash problem. City officials in Vernon welcomed the incinerator, despite the fact that it was expected to burn many thousands of tons of hazardous waste annually, and thus would add to the region’s acute air pollution. Amazingly, the local regulatory agencies did not require an EIR for the incinerator project. Both the failure to require a full EIR as well as the plan to site such a facility adjacent to the Latino Eastside were seen as blatant acts of environmental racism. MELA, in conjunction with the Natural Resources Defense Council, successfully blocked the project.
These two struggles – resistance to the prison and the incinerator – plus the effort by women in South Central Los Angeles to block another incinerator, the LANCER project, were all key events in the development of the environmental justice movement in Los Angeles [see Alameda Boulevard-South Central Farm entry].

For More Information
Mary Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists (Temple University Press, 1998)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California, 2007)