10 States Fund Carceral Facilities and Programs Using Stolen Indigenous Lands

Steven Amos feels hopeful for once. He’s finishing a drug and alcohol treatment program, living in a halfway house, and working a new job, doing carpentry. “I love anything outdoors,” he said. “I’m happy I’m not locked up.”

A member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, Amos, age 53, grew up with the snow-capped Rocky Mountains set like a painting behind his childhood home in Ethete, Wyoming, on the Wind River reservation. He loved hunting and fishing along the Little Wind River, but his family — as well as many Wind River neighbors — had no running water, sometimes no electricity, or enough to eat.

The reservation’s stunning landscape conceals more than a century of theft and neglect by the United States, whose officials stole Arapaho land, then doled it out to ranchers, real estate moguls, miners, and public institutions, while forcing the tribal nation to scrape together a future any way it could.

One of Amos’s most searing childhood memories is watching police beat up his father. “They call it generational trauma,” he said, “It keeps going and going and going, and people don’t want to confront that. They want to sweep it under the rug.” He received his first prison sentence when he was 19 years old, and drifted in and out of jails and prisons for decades after that.

Some of the carceral facilities where Amos was sent are paid for, in part, with Arapaho land and resources, through activities like oil and gas extraction and cattle grazing.

To build America, the U.S. government enacted laws to redistribute Indigenous lands they had taken. Some land was given to individuals and corporations to build homes or private empires, through laws like the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act, while the Morrill Act offered up freshly seized land as capital for states to establish what became known as land grant universities.

Separately, the legislation that transformed frontier territories into states — known as Enabling Acts — contained handouts of land that state governments could use to pay for public institutions. Those offerings are generally called state trust lands and continue to be used to fund public institutions, mostly K-12 schools, but also universities, hospitals, and penitentiaries.

Last year, in Wyoming alone, nearly 409,000 acres of former and current Arapaho, Shoshone, Goshute, Bannock, Crow, Cheyenne, and Sioux land now held by the state as state trust lands, produced at least $8 million in revenue for the Department of Corrections. At least 200 acres of land inside the boundaries of the Wind River Reservation are also earmarked to provide revenue for corrections.

Grist has identified nearly 2 million acres of state trust lands — an area larger than the state of Delaware and broken into more than 20,000 surface and subsurface parcels scattered across the western U.S. — that are reserved for state prison systems in 10 states. In 2024, those state trust lands disbursed an estimated $33 million in funding to carceral facilities and programs. In reality, the figure is likely higher, as officials in Wyoming and Utah did not respond to requests for updated financial data for this story. North Dakota, Utah, Montana, and Idaho all use trust lands to fund detention facilities and systems for children. The land was taken from 57 Indigenous nations, through 71 land cessions, some of which are still contested to this day.

To acquire those lands, the U.S. paid less than $1.5 million to tribes through legal treaty agreements. However, more than a third of the lands were taken through military action with no reimbursement to Indigenous nations for their stolen territories.

“There’s a direct link between incarceration and the history of land theft our communities have endured,” said Sunny Red Bear, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and associate director of organizing for NDN Collective. “Our ancestral lands were taken, disrupting our traditional ways of life and governance. Displacement led to economic hardship and social challenges that have made our communities more vulnerable to the criminal justice system.”

Across the U.S., Indigenous people are incarcerated at a rate four times higher than white people, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit research organization dedicated to addressing over-criminalization. In South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana, about a quarter or more of the state prison population is Indigenous, even though Native people make up less than a tenth of each state’s population. Nationally, Native youth are incarcerated at a higher rate than Hispanic, Asian, and white people combined.

“The priorities are not to build treatment centers; they’re not to help with the healing our communities are needing,” said Red Bear, who has helped lead efforts to pressure officials in Rapid City, South Dakota to address discriminatory policing. “The redirecting of these funds could be used for so many different things including affordable housing, or substance abuse programs, or mental health programs, or youth programs, or restorative justice programs or reentry programs.”

South Dakota Corrections spokesperson Michael Winder said that the department already remits the trust-land disbursements to the state general fund.

A spokesperson for the Wyoming Department of Corrections indicated the agency is not responsible for the over-representation of Native people among its prisoners. “Regardless of one’s ethnicity, the Wyoming Department of Corrections does not arrest, commit or release any citizens,” wrote Stephanie Dack in an email.

Although funds coming from state trust lands make up a fraction of corrections department budgets that range in the hundreds of millions, for resource-strapped tribal governments, they represent significant sums. Most tribal governments have their own justice systems — yet the money generated from trust lands only benefits state-run institutions, which are outside of tribal control.

Where a crime is committed defines where an Indigenous person will be sent to serve a jail or prison sentence. In some states, like Wyoming and South Dakota, courts send tribal citizens to state prisons when their crimes are committed off-reservation. If committed on reservation, that person can end up in a tribal or federal detention center. In other words, the justice systems that send tribal citizens to state prisons operate with little influence from tribal nations.

“There’s so many people on this reservation afflicted by addiction and trauma that’s caused by the government coming in and taking our land,” said Terri Smith, who is in charge of the new Northern Arapaho Reentry Agency, which works with Northern Arapaho peoples who are reestablishing their lives after incarceration. The agency began accepting clients, including Steven Amos, in August. “If money is being generated off those lands, it should go back to those original tribes and help them become healthier people.”

Smith, who was formerly incarcerated herself, said Amos’s experience isn’t unique. Most people from Wind River who are released from prison end up going back. Sometimes it’s a matter of access to basic resources, like transportation or gas money to traverse Wind River’s vast approximately 3,500-square mile expanse. Smith said, “80 percent of my job is giving people rides.”

Leading up to the 20th century, the federal government used threats of military violence, starvation and kidnapping to coerce and steal land from Indigenous nations. Native people were initially thrown into U.S. prisons as punishment for fighting that theft.

Land grabs and imprisonment often went hand-in-hand, while treaties and Indian policy at times included language bringing tribal members under the jurisdiction of the U.S. or states’ criminal law. Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies in the 1830s, for example, were fulfilled in part by the Georgia militia, who rounded up and imprisoned Cherokee people who refused to abandon their land.

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The Arapaho peoples once lived across a wide territory that included what is currently Wyoming, South Dakota, and Colorado. In the 1860s, officials pressured some tribal members into signing away swaths of their land in order to accommodate an influx of gold miners and to make way for Colorado to be established as a territory and Kansas as a state. In the 1870s, 74 Arapaho, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Caddo people, including several who survived the Sand Creek Massacre, were imprisoned at Fort Marion in Florida, as punishment for their rebellion during the Red River War, which was fought to repel U.S. forces from the Southern Plains. The Northern Arapaho were eventually pushed onto the Wind River reservation in present-day Wyoming, occupied already by the Eastern Shoshone, with whom they had recently been at war.

“One way to think about these kinds of transitions in containment is as part of a continuum of war on Indigenous people to remove them from land,” said Shiri Pasternak, an associate professor in criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University , who helped develop an Indigenous Abolitionist Study Guide for the Yellowhead Institute, an ​​Indigenous-led research and education center.

Laws designed to forcibly contain Indigenous peoples continued to evolve. For nearly a century, being an Indigenous person essentially became illegal. With the passage of the Indian Religious Crimes Code in 1883, Indigenous people faced incarceration if they practiced their religions. The first Indian Boarding School, Carlisle, was founded after Lieutenant Richard Pratt experimented with using militarized education to assimilate the prisoners of war at Fort Marion. The prison provided a model for the network of schools built to strip children of their language, culture, and family connections. Those boarding schools have become the subject of investigation and scrutiny in both the United States and Canada in recent years.

“You get to the horizon and you see the result, the impact, the outcome of centuries of state violence reflected in the prison population,” said Pasternak.

About 172,000 acres of Northern Arapaho land is now earmarked for carceral beneficiaries across Wyoming, South Dakota, and Colorado. In Colorado, some of the Northern Arapaho acreage that makes up the state’s Penitentiary Trust is physically occupied by two prisons: Limon and Sterling. In Wyoming, it accounts for a portion of the trust land funds that go to state prisons — the rest was taken from the Crow, Goshute, Shoshone, Bannock, Cheyenne, and Sioux nations.

States generate revenue on these trust lands by leasing acreage out to extractive industries like oil and gas projects, mining, grazing, timber harvesting, renewable energy development. Over half of the trust land that funds prisons, a total of over 1.1 million acres, are used for subsurface activities, including fossil fuel extraction, accelerating climate change and its impacts.

At the same time, the unequal representation of Native people in prisons means that tribal citizens will be disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. People in prisons tend to be particularly vulnerable to extreme weather. During storms and wildfires, prisoners are often left behind as communities evacuate. Flooding can create fetid conditions, while wildfire smoke exacerbates asthma. Power outages at times leave people trapped in cells with overflowing toilets, poor ventilation, and a lack of food and water.

Idaho has one of the highest numbers of state-run carceral facilities facing extreme wildfire risk, according to a 2022 analysis by the Intercept. Its prisoners are even sent to fight the fires for at most $1.50 per hour. In 2024, trust lands provided over $5 million to Idaho’s prisons.

Heat is the most pervasive climate risk factor for prisoners, who disproportionately experience health conditions or take medications that make them sensitive to high temperatures. None of the states that receive trust land funds have fully air conditioned prisons, according to a 2022 analysis by USA Today, though some use a combination of air conditioning and swamp coolers, which don’t work well in humid weather. That means that when temperatures spike, people die. A two-day heat wave in the west means a mortality increase of 8.6 percent in prisons, according to a recent academic paper.

Of the state corrections departments that use trust land to pay for prisons, only Arizona, which took in $2.3 million in trust revenue last year, has facilities located in places that experience 50 or more days annually of heat indexes over 90 degrees. By 2100, with slow action on climate, state detention facilities in South Dakota, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico will see similar levels of heat.

To address worsening heat, deteriorating buildings, and other issues like overcrowding, some state governments are making major investments in detention facility infrastructure. “Instead of looking deeper into root causes of why our mothers and aunties and grandmothers are being incarcerated, what they’re doing is building more prisons and expanding our jails,” said Red Bear from NDN Collective.

Pasternak, the criminology professor, pointed out that prisons do more than put people away. “Prisons are a highly productive form of revenue for states because they bring in funding and jobs. Criminalization empowers a whole network of actors within society,” she said. However, there are alternatives. She added, “If the state, instead of collecting that rent to pay for prisons, was doing something different, in a way where those revenues could be shared back to Indigenous people, we’d have a different economy.”

During Steven Amos’s time in South Dakota’s state penitentiary, known as The Hill, violence reigned, and the summers were so hot he’d sleep on the floor.

Amos’ time at The Hill began with an arrest in Rapid City, South Dakota, where the Oglala Sioux Tribe recently demanded a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into discriminatory policing. State prison sentences often begin in reservation border towns and nearby communities with reputations for discriminatory policing. Amos was also arrested in Riverton, Wyoming, which sits in the middle of the Wind River Reservation but is not tribal land due to court rulings that have removed the town from tribal control.

Terri Smith, with the Northern Arapaho Reentry Agency, said most of her clients on Wind River who spent time in state prison, including Amos, were arrested in border towns like Riverton.

“I see the effects that these forced policies on Natives have caused — putting us on these reservations, genocide, assimilation policies,” she said. Returning Arapaho resources to the nation, she continued, would be a better use of the funds currently paying to incarcerate its members.

For now, Amos is doing his best to focus on stability. Smith’s reentry program helped him get tools needed for his job. He plans to build a home for his daughter one day.

“Sometimes you get stuck in a hopeless situation, and it’s hard to get out if you don’t have support and something to look forward to,” he said. For now, though, he feels strong.

“I look forward to every day.”

This article originally appeared in Grist.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org