For Incarcerated Individuals, a Natural Disaster Could Mean a Death Sentence

Photo credit: Staff Sgt. James L. Harper Jr. / Wikimedia Commons

Your small town is about to be hit by a hurricane, and you’re in the middle of an evacuation zone. With only days’ notice, your family is packing up their belongings and getting ready to flee the area for safety.

You’re told that if you don’t leave, you’ll die — but as your friends and loved ones go, you remain in place. As an inmate, you cannot make that decision for yourself.

When the storm hits, you’re alone in your cell. For days, you’re trapped, without electricity, running water, or working toilets.

As a prisoner, you’re often forgotten — your livelihood is determined by your correctional institution’s ability to plan ahead. But not to worry: Even though you couldn’t evacuate on time, you’ll be first on the scene to clean up the mess.

Incarcerated individuals are too often the victims of neglect and exploitation. Their most basic human rights have been taken away, so it’s the government’s job to keep them safe. Yet correctional institutions nationwide have repeatedly failed to create comprehensive and preventative evacuation protocols to address these situations.

This past September, Hurricane Helene ravaged the Southeastern United States. At the Mountain View Correctional Institution in North Carolina, over 550 men were trapped for almost a week, from September 27 to October 2. Nick, an inmate whose story was told by a relative in an interview with The Intercept, woke up surrounded by flooded, dirty water. Trapped alone in his single-occupancy cell, he wondered when help was coming, or if it was coming at all.

“We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us,” Nick relayed to his wife.

“My husband told me this morning he’s going to have to go see a therapist because of the things that happened in there,” she added.

Instances of prisoner neglect are far from new. During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Orleans Parish Prison in Louisiana refused to evacuate inmates. Instead, the facility served as an evacuation site for surrounding areas, holding eight thousand people past capacity. Under lockdown, chaos ensued as rainwater and sewage flooded cells and deputies abandoned their posts due to the unsafe conditions. Without proper disaster protocols in place, inmates were not provided medical care, food rations, or safe drinking water for twenty-one hours. When they finally were evacuated, it was to an overpass. Inmates were forced to sit for days in the heat without access to bathrooms or menstrual products.

These circumstances are further amplified because incarcerated individuals are at high risk of being exposed to environmental harm. According to a California study, of the correctional institutions in the United States that hold more than one thousand people, fifty-four are above the 95th percentile for wildfire risk. Because of this, incarcerated individuals face higher adverse health effects and mortality rates. During the Dixie fire in 2021, prisons in Susanville, California were completely unequipped as wildfire smoke filled the facility. Given California’s wildfire history, it was a foreseeable event — but inmates were forced to live without power for a month.

Nevertheless, inmate labor is often the primary source of disaster relief. During Hurricane Helene, while some inmates were trapped, others were put to work. In states like Virginia and Florida, inmates from the state’s Department of Corrections were tasked with debris removal for minimal pay. According to a press release from Virginia’s Department of Corrections, one chainsaw crew even witnessed a large tree fall onto a vehicle. Though all parties remained safe, inmate labor is often dangerous work.

For only fourteen to sixteen cents an hour, inmate labor is instituted solely for the financial benefit of state governments. During hurricane Helene, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, even admitted this, stating, “We’re utilizing our resources… they’re out there cleaning up in the debris, which would cost us way more money if you had to do that through some of these private contractors.”

But by only prioritizing fiscal conservancy, the experiences of those put to work are invalidated. Dyjuan Tatro, the Government Affairs officer of the Bard Prison Initiative, was formerly incarcerated. In an opinion piece he wrote for The Guardian, he reflected on his experiences with prison labor. “No matter how many hours I worked, I couldn’t afford toilet paper, soap, or toothpaste,” he wrote. “I was only paid ten cents an hour.”

What Rights Do Inmates Have?

Incarcerated individuals do have legal protections, but their efficacy is highly dependent on access to legal resources. Starting with the 8th Amendment, prisoners are protected from any form of cruel and unusual punishment. The Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980 expands this, allowing the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to investigate state-run facilities for unconstitutional confinement upon reports or complaints. This law also protects prisoners from any retaliations from correctional facilities.

Several court cases also expanded inmates’ rights, including Deshaney v. Winnebago (1989), which extended incarcerated individuals’ entitlement to adequate food, clothing, medical assistance, and shelter as they depended on government entities for subsistence. Additionally, Estelle v. Gamble (1976)  established comprehensive safety standards for inmates.

Yet, the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA) works against these laws by restricting inmates’ abilities to file for civil suits that protest the conditions of their confinement. Under the law’s Exhaustion Requirement, inmates must administratively exhaust their claims before filing. This means inmates must follow all available grievance procedures within their correctional facility before they can appeal to state or federal courts.

While this is logical in theory, failure to do so results in immediate dismissal, which only creates further barriers to justice. Many fail to fully “exhaust their claims” because of time restraints for reporting issues and insufficient accessibility of legal information. Additionally, this law greatly limits courts’ abilities to enforce “prospective relief,” or settlements that include policy and procedure changes.

Though incarcerated individuals technically have avenues to ensure their rights, these efforts are ineffective when put into action. Ideally, the PLRA should be repealed, as it does more harm than good. Other options to amend this law would be to change the exhaustion requirement to a “good faith attempt at exhaustion” and to rescind language regarding prospective relief.

Prison Management

To ensure fair treatment during natural disasters, correctional institutions and states also need comprehensive emergency plans. Because there is no unified federal plan for oversight or relief during climate disasters, state protocols vary in delegating responsibilities to local departments and NGOs. Because of this, requirements in every facility look different.

In a 2022 study comparing evacuation plans across the country, out of the thirty states that mentioned the Department of Corrections, only six included safety and evacuation protocols for inmates. In contrast, twenty-four included DOC labor for disaster mitigation. In most cases, these gaps in legal protections allow states to reduce inmates to their commodified values.

This has proven to cause major issues, as we saw at Mountain View Correctional and the Orleans Parish Prison. During Hurricane Ike in 2008, inmates at the Galveston County Jail in Texas spent weeks living without running water. During the storm, medical staff were not present and inmates with chronic conditions such as diabetes were left on their own. Federal requirements for emergency protocols are needed to ensure the safety of incarcerated individuals. These plans should have mandatory evacuation, training, and food and medical distribution protocols.

It’s also important to acknowledge the role that mass incarceration plays in prisons’ ability to function properly, as overcrowding is undoubtedly one of the largest problems prisons face. Last month, the Castaic jail complex in Los Angeles county held 4,700 incarcerated individuals. When the Hughes fire hit, the jail was in a mandatory evacuation zone, yet remained sheltered in place due to a shortage in transport buses. Despite having eighty-two buses within the county, only twenty were operational. Almost five thousand lives were put at risk by this shortage.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Vanessa Rosenkild spoke on her incarcerated brother’s behalf.

“Yes, they have been put there because of their choices,” she remarked, “but that doesn’t mean they deserve to die. They are still humans, and they still have family members who love them.”

Although federal prison populations have decreased since 2020 under the CARES Act, according to the Bureau of Prisons, in 2022, they remained 7,196 people past capacity. While this problem does call for larger institutional change, it is an essential goal for prisons to function in safe and rehabilitative manners. Overcrowding is a major deterrent to institutional corrections when deciding if and when to evacuate.

Fair Pay for Labor or None At All

Despite the financial benefits prison labor may bring to states, inmates are not guaranteed the same legal work protections that other citizens receive. To ensure safe working conditions, inmates should be included in Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protections and guaranteed higher wages.

Additionally, for state prisons, inmate labor is funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) public assistance programs that provide financial incentives for states to use incarcerated workers. However, as explored earlier, the pay for inmate labor is often minuscule and sometimes nonexistent. A recent study by the University of Chicago found that up to 80 percent of inmates’ paychecks are withheld for court costs, taxes, and “room and board” expenses.

And in many cases, this disaster relief labor is not always voluntary. Due to a loophole in the 13th Amendment, involuntary servitude is allowed “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Consequently, on top of lacking workplace protections, incarcerated individuals may also face harsh punishments such as a loss of privileges or solitary confinement for refusing to work.

Though some states have banned these practices, we still have a long way to go. In the United States, incarcerated individuals remain one of the most underprotected groups. Because those who are incarcerated lack the most basic protections during natural disasters, their forced labor during these events is both hypocritical and immoral. If we want to uphold the values of justice and human dignity, we must address the deep inequalities within our justice system.