THE FLOODING IN Dixie County, Florida, began in July, brought on by Tropical Storm Elsa. Then the rains kept falling. By August, the ground was saturated, and the semirural county was underwater.
At the Cross City Correctional Institution, the prison administration repeatedly canceled visitation hours throughout July. As August progressed, the yard between buildings filled with water. Classes and religious services were scrapped.
On the main unit, fetid water started coming up through the drains, said DaRon Jones, who is incarcerated at Cross City. Guards told all the prisoners to pack what they could into a pillowcase and prepare to evacuate, but Jones spent hours locked in his cell with the filth. “The water was close to ankle-deep, with human waste floating by as we were fed in our cells,” he said. “The smell was unlike anything I have ever encountered.”
When they were finally led outside, Jones waded through knee-deep water. “There were snakes and bugs swimming in the water as we made our way to the bus,” he recalled.
The rising waters were predictable, according to an Intercept analysis that cross-referenced flood risk data from the First Street Foundation with the locations of more than 6,500 carceral facilities across the U.S. Cross City was at a severe risk of flooding.
FIERCER HURRICANES, rising seas, profuse rainfalls: The climate crisis is causing more flooding across the nation. And while federal and state institutions are generally lagging when it comes to climate resilience, the carceral system is in particular peril. Many jails and prisons were built as the war on drugs ramped up and have since been all but neglected. Worsening disasters will test the deteriorating buildings.
“Most of the infrastructure we have now was built in 1980s and 1990s,” said Molly Gill, vice president of policy for FAMM, an organization focused on sentencing reform. “We built all these prisons when we passed mandatory sentencing laws and had our prison booms and embarked on mass incarceration,” she said. “All those chickens are coming home to roost.”
Florida is in especially bad shape. Cross City is one of 52 jails, prisons, and detention centers in the state that face major to extreme flood risks over the next 30 years, according to The Intercept’s analysis. Half of those facilities, including Cross City, are run by the state of Florida, under the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The state is responsible for more carceral institutions with elevated chances of flooding than any other government authority, local or national.
The DeSantis administration seems ill-prepared for the next rounds of flooding. There is a huge maintenance backlog, little evidence of robust disaster planning, and resistance to policy changes that would leave fewer people in prison. For state leaders, staffing woes overshadow all those issues: Some 5,500 low-paying prison guard positions are currently unfilled, out of a workforce of 18,000.
Authorities with the DeSantis administration said the prison system is addressing problems like flooding. “Planning and preparing for natural disasters such as flooding is an integral part of our operations. We will continue to work with local emergency management officials in an effort to identify aggravators associated with the rise in flood waters,” Molly Best, deputy communications director for the Florida Department of Corrections, said in an email. She defended the department’s response to the Dixie County flooding: “Inmates at Cross City CI did not wait weeks for evacuation. Cross City CI was evacuated immediately at the onset of the flooding incident.”
Prisoners, as wards of the state, can’t make decisions about leaving flood zones. For the most part, they must rely on their custodians — policymakers and politicians — to protect them. DeSantis has persistently refused to pursue reforms that would meaningfully improve conditions, and in the state government, there is little will to hold him to account. Incarcerated populations tend to be low priorities in the halls of power.
“Most legislators would much rather focus on jobs and education in Florida than they would trying to fix the most difficult public policy area in the state, which is a collapsing prison system, because there’s no credit to be gotten from that,” said Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes. “We are on a completely unsustainable trajectory.”
IN ORDER TO get an idea of which carceral facilities could suffer from floods, The Intercept mapped a flood risk database against the Department of Homeland Security’s 2020 register of jails, prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facilities, and juvenile detention centers.
The flood risk data was drawn from the First Street Foundation’s flood model, which was developed as an alternative to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s outdated and incomplete flood zone maps. First Street’s property-specific flood risk assessments, or “Flood Factors,” take into account flooding due to rivers, tides, precipitation, and storm surges. The Flood Factors also incorporate the impacts of the next 30 years of the climate crisis. Though First Street’s model has limitations for assessing risk to prison campuses, it can also illuminate which facilities deserve scrutiny.
According to The Intercept’s analysis, 621 facilities across the U.S. have major to extreme flood risk. Not all of the high-risk facilities are in places where one might expect to find them, like the Gulf Coast; many are located instead in landlocked states like Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Several of the most imperiled locations identified in The Intercept’s analysis have already experienced flooding. When a surge from Superstorm Sandy hit the tidal waterways around New York City, nurses at the Hudson County Correctional Facility were forced to wade through hallways of knee-deep water to attend to panicking prisoners. The Franklin County Corrections Center II in Columbus, Ohio, has been forced repeatedly over the past decade to ferry staff to work in boats.
HURRICANE KATRINA WAS America’s introduction to the horrors wrought by the climate crisis behind bars. As the storm approached New Orleans, mandatory evacuation orders went out for the city, but more than 6,000 people held at the Orleans Parish Prison were left behind.
A promised emergency plan, insofar as one was put in action, fell short. When the facility’s generators failed, lights, ventilation, and toilets stopped working. Days went by with little to no food or medication. In some areas, the waters reached chest level. Violence broke out. Five hundred-seventeen people on the prison roster were never accounted for.
The Orleans Parish Prison, though, doesn’t carry an extreme flood risk. The contradiction points to the unpredictable nature of flooding in a climate-impacted world. It also shows how other factors — in New Orleans, the hurricane-strength wind, infrastructure failures, and gaps in political will — exacerbate catastrophes. The failing levees weren’t a natural disaster, but rather one born out of manmade neglect.
Where floods will occur depends on far more than topography or location. A detention facility’s position on a hill, for instance, won’t protect it in heavy rains if the windows are broken and the roof leaks. Conditions affecting nearby roads and power supplies can sow chaos even at prisons that appear to be low risk.
Plumbing and sewage systems that aren’t properly maintained can also create flooding hazards. A prison in South Carolina and a jail in Pennsylvania with minimal flood risks, according to The Intercept’s analysis, have both experienced sewage floods owing to infrastructure failures.
“A lot of prison flooding issues have more to do with sewage and old water pipes than they do with storms,” said FAMM’s Gill. “Every hurricane season, our families get very frightened for their loved ones who are in facilities in places like Louisiana and Alabama and coastal Florida. They worry not just about the flooding, but they also worry about the integrity of the building.”
WHEN HURRICANE HARVEY struck in 2017, more than 2,000 people at the U.S. Penitentiary at Beaumont, one of four federal prisons situated around a traffic circle in Beaumont, Texas, were never evacuated. The city frequently lies in the paths of hurricanes — making the prison there one of the most notorious in the U.S. for its history of flooding.
The stories from Beaumont — which is located in an area with some of the highest flood risks in the country — are indicative of the outsize role the federal government plays in flood-prone detention. The Intercept’s analysis identified 25 facilities under federal authority that are in areas with major to extreme flood risk.
After Harvey landed, people incarcerated at Beaumont Penitentiary recounted dire conditions: no air conditioning; toilets shutting down; problems accessing food, water, and medications; and restricted access to phones and email. Complaints, the detainees said, were met with retaliation.
Comentários