As someone who was born and raised in Ohio, I have no idea what’s it like to be at the mercy of the sea, to crowd around the TV during hurricane season wondering where the next big storm will strike and to be told the storm of the century is constantly around the corner. When hearing the reports about Hurricane Florence I was struck by the tenacity of the people they interviewed and bewildered by this American spirit of believing one is indomitable against the fiercest storms.
This is not to say that everyone who stayed behind truly believed they were invincible. As an article in the Scientific American pointed out, being able to evacuate is a sign of privilege; being able to afford the gas, loss of pay the food and the supplies to leave one’s residence may not be within someone’s carefully budgeted month. The fear of losing one’s home or not being able to bring pets wherever they’re going are two other major concerns. It’s truly heartbreaking when people die from storms they would’ve survived had they been able or willing to leave, but it’s also equally heartbreaking when people are not allowed to evacuate during mandatory evacuation.
South Carolina’s MacDougall, Ridgeland and Lieber Correctional Institutions, ranging from minimal to maximum security, were in the mandatory evacuation zone but were not allowed to evacuate. The governor stated that, “We do not want to risk one South Carolina life in this hurricane” but deigned to evacuate the inmates because, “In the past, it’s been safer to leave them there,” according to Dexter Lee, a South Carolina Department of Correction (S.C.D.C) spokesperson. In contrast, North Carolina evacuated the prisons within their mandatory evacuation zone. Lee also stated that the prison were well-equipped and stocked, and that if the situation worsened they would reconsider. Frustratingly, this information was slowly released to the public. Amina Stephens, wife of one inmate, had to call the S.C.D.C fifteen times in one week for information regarding evacuations. The New Yorker reported that inmates at Ridgeland and Lieber were doing fine but were not allowed to store extra water. An incarcerated man at Lieber stated that the prison had flooded in the past but this was refuted by the S.C.D.C Director.
This decision was unfortunately not all unprecedented. In Hurricane Harvey, flooding in the cells, and lack of access to toilets, medications, running water, and electricity were reported in prisons in Texas. Most disturbingly, Hurricane Katrina had an egregious oversight involving inmates. With the news that South Carolina would not evacuate it’s correctional institutions, a tweet by @bedouralagraa went viral stating that “almost 1000 inmates were left to die in Orleans Prison parish during hurricane Katrina” and that “517 were never found”.
Snopes investigated this tweet and found that there was truth to it. The information from this tweet came from the American Civil Liberties Union’s and Human Rights Watch’s reports regarding this event because there was never an official report. The Orleans Prison Parish was in a mandatory evacuation zone but officials elected to keep prisoners “where they belong,” and the prison even took in other inmates.
The prison lost power and the first floor flooded on August 29, and the prison was not evacuated until September 2. Two buildings were evacuated on the 30th after toxic waters rose to chest level, but the third building was not evacuated until September 1. These 600 inmates did not have prison staff to help them as of August 29 when the generators died plunging them into darkness and backing up toilets. They also were without food, water and circulating air. Prisoners in four buildings reported water up to their chests and even in some cases six feet high. The prisoners reported being abandoned by staff and unable to communicate and breathe. The amount of fear and stress they were under is also unimaginable. Even for the prisoners who did evacuate, there are mixed reports as to what happened to them. They were moved to the Interstate 10 overpass and were threatened with guns and mace to not move or run. Some inmates reported being maced, passing out from dehydration and seeing prisoners floating by who had been shot dead.
The 517 number came from the list of prisoners before and after Hurricane Katrina; it is unknown if they ran away, were deceased, or their information was simply misplaced. Prison authorities deny these reports. Sheriff Gusman even stated that “None of it was true… Don’t rely on crackheads, cowards and criminals to say what the story is.” Interestingly, the “majority of OPP’s roughly 6,800 prisoners hadn’t been convicted of a serious crime.”
People who have been incarcerated are people too, and they deserve the fullest protections of the law. This is just another instance of how they are often treated as below-second class citizens and their lives are disregarded, especially if they are people of color or part of the LGBTQ+ community. In the words of Amina Stephens, “I just want him [the Governor of South Carolina] to imagine himself on the other side. Because it could be him. At any given moment, it could be any of us.”