Planetary Health and Criminal Justice: Are the Prescientific Assumptions Underpinning Retributive Punishment Harmful to Persons, Places, and Planet?

Planetary health is a transdisciplinary enterprise that seeks to dissolve the artificial boundaries between personal and community health, and the natural systems that sustain life. It was conceived as an “inquiry into our total world,” including the power structures, value systems, and institutions that otherwise shape human flourishing. Yet, criminal justice systems—despite their profound influence on health, inequality, and environmental exposures—have remained largely peripheral to planetary health discourse. Incarceration disproportionately affects marginalized populations and concentrates social disadvantage. Carceral systems are characterized by overcrowding, chronic disease burdens, environmental degradation, climate vulnerability, and carbon-intensive infrastructures. Important features of contemporary retributive criminal justice remain grounded in assumptions about agency and moral desert; these may insufficiently account for the roles of developmental adversity, structural poverty, environmental toxicants, and climate instability in shaping behavior. Such assumptions reflect broader value systems that naturalize hierarchy and disposability—logics that also underpin extractive relationships with human and ecological systems. Drawing on advances in neuroscience, behavioral science, and exposome research, we examine how contemporary evidence challenges simplified narratives of individual blame. We briefly introduce the public health quarantine model as a non-retributive framework. Justice is not external to planetary health; it is constitutive of it.