Opinion: Life Inside a Toxic Pennsylvania Prison

On his second night at State Correctional Institution Fayette, Richard Mosley could not breathe.

He had just been locked back in his cell for the evening when his nose suddenly “started to close up” and clog. He’d always been healthy. Now, in a place he had been for barely forty-eight hours, he was struggling for air.

So he hit the call button. 

“I’m having trouble breathing,” he told the guard over the speaker. “My nose is stopped…for some reason, I’m having trouble breathing.”

The response came back: “Well, breathe out your mouth.”

That shrug — that flat refusal to take his body seriously — is the unofficial health policy at a toxic prison Pennsylvania does not want to talk about. SCI Fayette sits in LaBelle, Pennsylvania. 

As BP Lyles, director of the Toxic Prisons Campaign at the Human Rights Coalition, explains it, the prison “sits atop over 50,000,000 tons of toxic coal waste and coal ash” and is “less than a mile away” from what, until around 2015, was an active coal dumping site with “three slurry ponds” in full operation. Coal waste and coal ash, he notes, are carcinogens; there are “a lot of cancer-causing agents” in that material. From the beginning, people inside felt something was wrong.

Mosley arrived around 2007 and stayed five years. Within the first “day one or two,” his nose began to clog. Soon he was dealing with health problems he’d never had before, including gastrointestinal issues. He started paying attention to what others were doing. On commissary days, he noticed “everybody was getting allergy medicine,” because “everybody’s nose was dripping or running.” 

People tried to explain it away, maybe it was the weeds or plants in the area. “And it wasn’t,” Mosley said. When his symptoms worsened and he began filing paperwork, the prison brought Mosley into a meeting with the assistant warden, the head medical doctor, and the doctor’s assistant. Their explanation was that he just wasn’t used to the local environment. They even had a name for it: “They call it a ‘Pittsburgh nose,’” Mosley recalled — the idea that “you’re not used to this kind of environment, so that’s why it’s adversely affecting you.”

Mosley told me he got up and walked out. At that moment, he said, he knew he was going to be fighting. The head doctor had already told him, “you’re never going to our outside doctor.” After that meeting, Mosley never went back to medical.

“If I die here, I die here,” he told me, remembering thinking. “I’m just not gonna go down here and get some aspirin just to be humiliated.”

The patterns he describes line up with what Lyles has heard for years.

Inside Fayette, he says, several men developed rashes and discoloration on their skin — on their feet, legs, backs, faces, and chests. Over time, incarcerated people reported various types of cancers: stomach cancers, lung cancers, skin cancers, and gastrointestinal diseases that they’ve contracted while being in SCI Fayette. They wrote letters to the Human Rights Coalition. They told their families and friends. “The unofficial rate of self-reporting,” as BP Lyles puts it, kept climbing.

Even staff were affected. Lyles recalls “at least two or three” staff members who died from forms of cancer between about 2015 and 2020.

The state’s response has followed a familiar script: “denial…or silence.” Formally and informally, Lyles says, the Department of Corrections gives pretty much the exact same response. When advocates ask for test results on water or soil, DOC cites HIPAA and other rules and insists it does not have to release the information. Officials say their findings are “well within the limitations for operation” — that the levels of toxicity are acceptable under state standards for drinking water, washing clothes, and washing bodies .Meanwhile, inside the fence, people live with the consequences.

Mosley learned more only after he went home. A former cellmate sent him articles and materials from the Abolitionist Law Center in Pittsburgh, which had been surveying people at Fayette. That’s when he heard that it was the guards who “blew the whistle” — that staff, too, were “starting to get sick” and develop cancers. According to what was sent to him, guards and civilian staff fought to get bottled water. 

In the end, they won. 

In Mosley’s telling, “the guards, the civilian staff, and the guard dogs were getting bottled water while everybody else had to drink the contaminated” water.

Inside the prison, getting real medical care remains an uphill fight. Lyles describes an infirmary that often tells people their problems can be treated with things they can buy on commissary — even though, he stresses, those items don’t have wants needed for serious conditions. When people report discomfort, they are brushed off because there is a lack of belief that the complaints have legitimacy.

Lyles is blunt about what it would look like to treat the people at Fayette as if their health mattered. 

The first step, he says, “would be to change how medical complaints are handled.”

 “When a complaint comes in, the first thing that they should do is have real tests and real exams done,” Lyles says on exactly what most of us assume will happen when we go to a doctor on the outside. Then, he adds: “Whatever the findings are,” there should be “proper medical treatment and care,” a real plan to help people “either maintain” or “overcome whatever the sickness is.”

Mosley, for his part, has taken what happened to him and tried to turn it into collective protection. With Put People First PA, he says, they “fought for everyone” at Fayette — not just incarcerated people, but also guards and civilian staff — to be moved out of harm’s way. 

You don’t need any more evidence than that to understand what SCI Fayette reveals. When Pennsylvania builds a prison on top of coal waste, ignores years of self-reported sickness, shields its testing, and lets only the staff and dogs switch to bottled water, it is making a choice about whose lives count. The men at Fayette are telling the state exactly what that choice feels like, in their lungs, in their skin, in their stomachs. 

Why isn't anyone in power willing to believe them?