Black mold covered the showers at Mission Unit, and the carpets were so thick with mold spores that a musty smell rose whenever anybody moved.
THE MISSION CREEK Corrections Center for Women (MCCCW) sits on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula, a little over an hour’s drive west of Tacoma. The three units that comprise it are nestled in a forest between adventure resorts and off-road vehicle parks. Last winter, snow blanketed the rugged terrain and temperatures dropped to freezing, turning the roads slick with ice.
The countryside around the prison is beautiful, Tiffany Doll, a 51-year-old woman incarcerated there, told High Country News and Type Investigations. Tall trees surround it, and people inside often see deer and rabbits. Doll has a lot of time to observe the environment: She’s one of a handful of incarcerated women working on a project by Evergreen State College to raise, breed and release the endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly. All year long, Doll meticulously monitors the conditions the larvae need to complete their cycle from egg to butterfly. In spring, she feeds them wildflower leaves and plantains grown on-site, and during winter, when they’re locked in a hibernation-like state called a diapause, she monitors the humidity of the terracotta containers they’re kept in. It’s a delicate balance; if the larvae get too hot or too cold, the environmental conditions too wet or too dry, they die.
Doll sees the irony of the contrast between the care she gives to the butterfly larvae and her own environmental conditions. She was transferred to MCCCW in September 2021, and throughout that first fall and winter, the boiler was continuously breaking. Staff allowed the women just one extra blanket and permitted them to wear hats in the dayroom, but the building was freezing. “This is the facility where we are getting released from,” she said. “It’s supposed to prepare women for the outside world.”
One of the original units — Mission Unit — was built over half a century ago and the age shows itself in the omnipresent smell of mold. Melinda Barrera, a 43-year-old woman incarcerated at MCCCW, lived in Mission for several months in 2022. Black mold covered the showers, she said, and the carpets were so thick with mold spores that a musty smell rose whenever anybody moved. A 2020 survey of incarcerated women by the Washington Office of the Corrections Ombuds, a state watchdog agency for the Department of Corrections, noted a host of similar problems.
Those surveyed reported shocking conditions: the roof in Mission unit caving in from the air conditioning, leaky ceilings and light fixtures, black mildew in the showers, ventilation units full of dust and hair, termites in the cupboards. Women developed scalp fungus or their hair fell out in clumps from chemicals and fecal contaminants in the water. One survey response, echoed by several of the five women we spoke to, said that Mission Unit was in such disrepair that it “needs to be condemned.”
Mission Creek isn’t the only prison struggling to keep its residents safe in an increasingly unpredictable environment. Many of Washington’s 12 prisons — including Washington Corrections Center, where Chris Blackwell, one of this investigation’s authors, is incarcerated — have been pushed to the brink by public health crises and years of neglected maintenance. Climate change could send them over the edge.
“We are locked into 1.5 degrees of warming,” Meade Krosby, the senior scientist with the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group, told HCN and Type. For Washington, that means a growing number of very hot days, higher chances of both increased flooding and drought, and larger and more frequent wildfires on both sides of the Cascades.
The climate is warming at such an unprecedented pace that, unless we
