It’s been raining almost constantly for days on end.
As Hurricane Florence unleashes its wrath from the skies, outside your prison window
you’ve seen puddles turn into a lake.
The bottom floor is no place to be right now, and it seems to you that this prolonged lockdown
could soon become a lockdown from hell.
What you don’t know is that as you watch the rain fall the prison governor is battling
with the baffling logistics of a possible evacuation, and that will mean thousands of
men – some of them inarguably dangerous – being shuttled onto buses and taken some
place safe.
The water is starting to seep into your cell and some inmates are panicking.
One of them shouts through the bars, “Tell my kids I love them.”
All you can think is, “Why aren’t they moving us!”
That story we just told you is something that happened in the state of South Carolina back
in 2018, and that bit about the inmate shouting, “Tell my kids I love them”, actually happened.
It was a hellish time for the governor of that state and he took a lot of flak for not
initiating a mass evacuation of prisons.
In some places inmates’ cells were flooding and as they watched the water rise inch-by-inch
they were still on lockdown.
There was a real worry in one jail that inmates could drown.
Some of those guys were screaming at the guards, asking, “Hey, when are you gonna get us
out of here.”
They received no reply and just watched in terror as the water in their cells rose.
Those guys were stuck, but in other jails in the state, hundreds of men were evacuated.
It was all about deciding which jails and which people were in the most danger.
That time the authorities almost got it right, but this hasn’t always been the case.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina led to a devastating natural disaster that would cause untold damage.
As the city of New Orleans flooded you might wonder what happened to men and women locked
inside cells.
Did they all get evacuated and rushed to a safer place with as much expediency as people
not serving time?
The answer is no, they didn’t, not all of them anyway.
As the evacuation of non-imprisoned people was happening, the sheriff responsible for
the welfare of those inmates said in a press conference, “We’re going to keep our prisoners
where they belong.”
This guy was confident that with loyal prison staff and hardworking generators those inmates
wouldn’t be in any kind of serious trouble.
For some men locked in cells at Orleans Parish Prison that wasn’t the case and they certainly
didn’t feel that they were in safe hands.
Water in their cells rose from their ankles to their waists.
Some thought the guards had just abandoned them.
It was a desperate time, and a bunch of scared prisoners started trying to smash their way
through cinder block walls.
It actually took days to get thousands of prisoners evacuated, and inmates would later
tell investigators that they felt like they’d just been left to die.
The water in some cells was chest high, and for days they waited without food or clean
water to drink.
It didn’t help matters that the generators were down and they were left in the dark,
and things you might say were worsened when the backed-up toilets let out a disgusting
stench.
Did any prisoners die or escape, you might wonder, and that’s not easy to answer.
Some inmates that were caught up in all that would later say that they witnessed deaths,
although that sheriff we mentioned had this to say about that, “None of it was true...
Don't rely on crackheads, cowards and criminals to say what the story is.”
Maybe he wasn’t telling the truth himself because his office issued fourteen arrest
warrants for fugitives from that prison.
So, you could say the Orleans Prison evacuation was a bit of a mess, but given the circumstances,
it was never going to be easy.
Prison evacuations are a logistical nightmare, and even though the authorities are morally
and legally obliged to fend for prisoners during these times, their delayed actions
have been criticized.
Flooding seems to be about the worst thing that can happen, and when it looks like prisons
might get flooded the authorities have to make that hard decision.
That is, is this flood going to get bad enough that we risk moving perhaps thousands of potentially
dangerous people?
In 2017, when hurricane Harvey wreaked havoc in the U.S. about 6,000 inmates in Texas prisons
were evacuated.
This was some operation because you have to bear in mind that other prisons where they
could be re-housed were already bursting at the seams with prisoners.
Then there’s that risk of people escaping and also the business of giving them food
and water.
That’s why evacuation is the last thing that authorities want to do.
In one Texas prison during that hurricane in 2017 it’s what they didn’t do.
They said, “Hey guys, you’re gonna ride this one out.”
At that prison the inmates were on lockdown and they knew something bad was happening.
Things got a lot worse when there was no running water in their cells, because that meant what
went into the toilet bowl stayed in the toilet bowl.
This is how one inmate put it, “They left us locked in an 8 by 12 foot cell for several
days with feces and urine piling up in our toilets.”
Yep, YUCK, is all you can say to that.
It didn’t help matters that some of the inmates’ cells were flooding and they were
unsure if the water would rise to the extent of them drowning.
Prisons of course have lots of contingency plans for when disasters strike, but things
can just get out of hand.
You have to remember that when flooding happens, staff might not be able to get to work at
places that are already understaffed.
At a time when more help is needed, a prison might find it has less help.
It’s a kind of double whammy.
Fewer staff can mean less control over the prison, and with tensions already high during
a flood, this can lead to fights.
In 2016 in Texas, this is exactly what happened at one prison.
First the generators stopped working, and in the dark prisoners started to lose it a
bit.
The next thing that took place was a riot and correctional officers found themselves
beating back prisoners in the dark.
So, that’s what happens during flooding and that’s what happens in the USA, but
you might be wondering what goes down during a particularly bad earthquake.
We can’t find any instances in the U.S. when tectonic shifts caused a big enough problem
that prisons were badly affected, but we can find instances of when earthquakes in other
countries caused utter mayhem.
In 2018, the country of Indonesia was rocked by an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami.
This caused severe damage to certain regions of the country and some of that damage was
to prisons.
About 1,200 inmates from three different prisons escaped, but you can understand why they wanted
to get out.
After the quake, water just flooded the yard and the prisoners were incredibly panicked
by this.
When they saw that prison walls had collapsed they just ran past shocked guards and got
out of there.
This was hardly a planned escape since those prisoners really thought if they stayed they
were going to die.
They certainly weren’t keen on the idea of waiting the event out in their cells.
That was the case in some joints, although in another Indonesian prison inmates went
crazy, setting fires to the place before they bid it farewell.
One warden described the scene as total anarchy inside his prison, and rather than inmates
going absolutely crazy he just demanded the doors be opened.
He said he had to think about his officers, who were no doubt under threat from the panicked
prisoners.
Believe it or not, though, about one quarter of prisoners in one lockup returned.
They left because they were so scared, but had no intention of breaking out for good.
One of those prisoners said, “I want to obey the law.
With a clear conscience, and without pressure from anyone, I will report here.”
Of course that’s what all of you guys listening would do, but we wonder how many hardened
criminals would return to the place of their confinement.
Back to the USA and a natural disaster that people don’t usually fear that much is one
when the sun starts baking people like gingerbread men in an oven.
When temperatures soar, people can become affected by heat stroke…and heat stroke
can kill.
One of the worst things about a stay in a prison when the sun is doing its best to bake
people is the fact prisoners can’t just grab the AC remote and turn the dial to “Freeze
me please.”
One summer at a prison in St. Louis some prisoners were so hot they could be heard screaming
out of windows, “Help us!”
Prisoners don’t usually live in an air-conditioned environment and so when it’s cooking outside
they start to feel like they are cooking inside.
Still, in the words of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and many others that think alike, if U.S.
soldiers have to deal with the blistering heat of the deserts in the Middle East and
beyond, why should prisoners get AC?
The argument against this, is that soldiers have ways of adapting to heat but prisoners
kind of have to sit in their pseudo-sauna.
The question authorities might ask is are there enough prisoners dying of heat stroke
to justify changing things.
In 2011, during a heat wave Texas a total of ten prisoners died from heat stroke, but
the Texan authorities said, this was “an extremely unusual and unexpected heat event
which is likely not to be repeated.”
The other thing is what scientists have been telling us for a long time and what you guys
listening have likely experienced, and that’s the fact that things are kind of getting hot
down here on planet Earth.
Global warming is a natural disaster that is literally cooking some inmates.
But the prison authorities do seem to be taking rising temperatures seriously these days and
in Texas lately millions of dollars have been spent on ensuring prisoners don’t die from
heatstroke.
Those authorities might also be tired of facing legal action when inmates have accused the
system of cruel and unusual punishment.
The upshot has been Texas developing what it calls new “heat protocols” for prisons.
So, we already know that prisons in the U.S. can be flooded and we know that the heat can
take lives and make people sick, but is there any risk of a much bigger natural calamity
happening where prisons are located?
Well, the answer to that is “San Quentin” and something called the “San Andreas Fault.”
If the earth should move in the U.S. it might well move where that massive California prison
is.
And listen to this, another famous prison in California is one called, “Pelican Bay.”
That prison is located in a place called Crescent City, and some of you might not know that
lots of small tsunamis have hit there.
On top of that, the most destructive recorded tsunami ever to hit the United States Pacific
Coast landed on Crescent City.
That was back in 1964, but who’s to say a bigger tsunami won’t smash against this
place one day in the future and Pelican Bay Prison might feel the effects?
That’s exactly why some people want to educate non-violent prisoners on disaster protocols.
In the event of a disaster those prisoners might not only be useful in the prison, but
can help people in the community.
There are people that believe prisoners don’t deserve the same rights as people on the outside,
even though in jails a lot of people are fighting their innocence.
Then there are people that say prisoners are just expendable, and c’mon, they are the
last folks you’d save when the ship goes down.
One particularly controversial case was back in 2014 when Escambia County Central Booking
and Detention Center in Florida was flooded after heavy rains and those rains led to a
natural gas explosion that killed two prisoners.
Some of the jail was destroyed, too.
Activists later asked why the place was rebuilt in the same area that was prone to flooding.
The reason, those activists said, is because the authorities don’t care about the welfare
of prisoners.
So, now you know what happens when all hell breaks loose in prisons after natural disasters,
and now we’ll offer up some videos on when all hell just breaks loose.
Take a look at one of these, “Worst Natural Disasters in Human History” or “The Sinking
of USS Indianapolis - What Happened to the Men on Board?”