Flood Risks are getting worse because of degrading prisons

The flooding inDixie County, Florida was established in July by Tropical Storm Elsa. The rains continued to fall. The ground was saturated by August and the semirural county was under water.

The Cross City Correctional Institution repeatedly cancelled visitation hours throughout July. As August progressed water began to fill the yard between buildings. Classes and religious services were canceled.

DaRon, who is currently incarcerated at Cross City, stated that fetid water started to rise through the drains on the main unit. All the prisoners were told by guards that they should pack everything into a pillowcase, and then prepare to evacuate. But Jones spent hours in his cell covered in 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.”

Jones wade through knee-deep water when they were finally led out. “There were snakes and bugs swimming in the water as we made our way to the bus,” he recalled.

According to Intercept, the rising waters were predicted. AnalyseFlood risk data cross-referenced to the First Street FoundationCross City was at high risk of flooding due to the presence of over 6,500 carceral facilities.

Fiercer hurricanesClimate crisis: Rising seas and heavy rainfalls More floodingAll across the nation. The federal and state institutions are generally behind when it comes climate resilience, but the carceral system faces particular danger. Many jails and prisons were constructed during the war on drugs and have been neglected since then. Worsening natural disasters will put a strain on the 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 a particularly bad state. 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 Analyse. Half of these facilities, including Cross City are managed by the state of Florida under the administration Gov. Ron DeSantis. The state is responsible more carceral institutions that are at higher risk of flooding than any other government agency, national or local.

The DeSantis administration seems unprepared for the next round of flooding. There is a huge Maintenance backlogThere is little evidence of robust disaster planning and resistance to policy changes that would result in fewer people being sent to prison. Staffing issues are the most important issue for state leaders. low-payingPrison guard positions are available currently unfilledOut of 18,000.

According to the DeSantis administration, the prison system is dealing with flooding issues. “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 refused to implement reforms that would improve conditions in a meaningful way. There is very little support from the state government to hold him accountable. The priority of inmates is often low in the halls that are responsible for their treatment.

“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.”

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. Flood Factors also take into account the future climate crisis impacts over the next 30 years. Though First Street’s model has There are limitationsIt can also be used to determine which facilities are worthy of scrutiny in order to assess the risk to prison campuses.

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 Superstorm Sandy caused a surge in the tidal waters around New York City. Nurses at Hudson County Correctional Facility were forced into the hallways by the floodwaters. knee-deepWater to drink Panicking prisoners. The Franklin County Corrections Center II, Columbus, Ohio has been closed. Several timesIn the last decade, we have used this method to transport staff to work in Boats.

Hurricane Katrina America’s introduction to the HorrorsClimate crisis behind bars. Mandatory evacuation orders were issued as the storm approached New Orleans. But, more than 6000 people were still held at Orleans Parish Prison.

The promised emergency plan failed to materialize, as far as it was actually implemented. When the facility’s generators failed, lights, ventilation, and toilets stopped working. There was little or no food or medication for days. Some areas were at chest-level. Violence broke out. Five hundred-seventeen prisoners were on the prison roster. Never accounted for.

The Orleans Parish Prison, though, doesn’t carry an extreme flood risk. This contradiction demonstrates the unpredictable nature floods in a climate-impacted planet. 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.

The location and topography of floods can have a significant impact on where they occur. 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. Even in prisons that seem to be at low risk, conditions can cause chaos on nearby roads and power supplies.

Plumbing and sewage systems that aren’t properly maintained can also create flooding hazards. A prison South CarolinaAnd a jail 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 struckMore than 2,000 people were injured at the U.S. Penitentiary Beaumont in 2017. It is one of four federal jails located around Beaumont’s traffic circle. 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.

Beaumont Penitentiary was flooded with Harvey debris, and Beaumont Penitentiary residents recalled the dire conditions they were in. No air conditioning, no toilets open, no access to food, water or medication, and limited access for email and phones. Complaints, the detainees said, were met with retaliation.

One prisoner, Sergio Alberto Rosales, described the situation as “low water rations and living in our own defication [sic] which would ferment from the extreme heat.” In a message sent to the Prisoners Legal Advocacy Network, he said, “i felt i was going to die because the water was not enough to sustain a 6’2 235lb body . when i passed out the first time my celly called the officer to ask for help and we were met with aggression and ‘your just faking be a man and suck it up.’”

The Prisoners Legal Advocacy Network sent Rosales’s and other prisoners’ distressing testimony to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons, which runs the facility, describing the conditions as “Constantly unconstitutional.”

The federal government was well aware of the potential dangers. FEMA had identified the area in 2014 as prone to flooding. It had happened before. Hurricane RitaBeaumont residents were left with similar conditions to Harvey in 2005. They described days without food and weeks filled with heat, punctuated by boiling toilets.

It is expected that flooding will only get worse. According to the First Street Foundation’s flood model, under today’s climate conditions, the parcel of land where Beaumont sits faces significant flooding in rare 500-year flood events. By 2050, those odds will shift dramatically, with the area likely to be inundated even in the type of flood that occurs every five years.

Since 2017,The Bureau of Prisons has not taken any action to prepare for flooding at federal facilities, which will only increase as the climate warms. Extremes storms.

There were signs of progress before Harvey struck. President Barack Obama issuedexecutive OrdersThis required federal agencies to prepare climate adaptation plans.

The Justice Department’s initial Plan2014 identified flooding and severe storms as the greatest threats to its infrastructure, which included prisons. The report called on the Bureau of Prisons to take action to identify high risk facilities and plan for climate impact. (The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to The Intercept’s request that the agency provide its evaluations, share a list of facilities facing dangers, or send the criteria used to make such determinations.)

Obama’s effort, however, was scuttled by Donald Trump when he became president. Now, President Joe Biden has taken up the torch from Obama with a pair of executive orders. A new Justice Department climate adaptation ReportThis July 2021 document states that the department will begin to reevaluate climate dangers facilities and will place environmental justice at the forefront of its climate adaptation plans.

It’s not clear whether the health and safety of incarcerated populations will again fall to the wayside: The report’s plan to identify “disadvantaged” communities includes an Environmental Protection Agency ToolThat does not account for incarcerated population. A Second systemThese will be used for project assessments. This is still in the planning stages.

What is clear is that governments are falling short on providing protections for incarcerated people, said LaTricea Adams, the head of Black Millennials for Flint and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, who declined to comment specifically on the new assessment tool. “The Department of Justice and EPA, just to name a few have turned a blind eye to the racially motivated actions (and inactions) that take place in prisons that house majority Black and Latinx people,” she said in an email. “The entire country should develop local, state and federal climate resiliency plans which includes close attention to our most vulnerable populations including (but certainly not limited to) our individuals who are incarcerated.”

Members of CongressThey are also calling for better accounting of how disasters are managed by the Bureau of Prisons. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D.Ill., introduced a legislation for the second year in a row. billThis would require the bureau submit detailed annual damage reporting detailing how federal prisons, and the people within, fared during major catastrophes. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted against the bill. It would have encouraged corrections officers to consider home confinement and early release to manage carceral disasters.

This provision speaks to the magnitude of the problem. Mass incarceration is a way for hundreds of thousands to be held behind bars while climate disasters unfold. Although reducing prison populations would reduce climate harms, there are no prospects for large-scale reforms in the criminal justice system.

The National Institute of Corrections was established in 2014. Recommended that prisons move toward a “green corrections” system, which would include rooftop gardens, solar energy, and wastewater recycling. These reforms, according to advocates, would not be enough for incarcerated people to feel safe.

“Decades of research has demonstrated how bad these systems are at doing what they’re designed to do, especially in terms of rehabilitation,” said Nick Shapiro, who leads the Carceral EcologiesUCLA team. “You’re pulling the most vulnerable people and putting them in the most vulnerable situation, and that’s a recipe for disaster.”

Experts are increasingly arguing for prison abolition as the most effective climate disaster mitigation strategy. Although few federal leaders have adopted the approach, there is a debate in state capitols.

Florida has a growing population of RepublicansThey are calling for both infrastructure investment and sentencing reforms. Brandes, a senator from the state, joined Dianne Hart, a Democrat in calling to bring back parole. The state has effectively ended parole. Abandoned1983 was the year to get more people out of prison. Wilton Simpson (Fla. Senate President), while focusing less upon systemic reform has vocally advocated. Close old prisonsBuilding larger, air-conditioned, and more spacious buildings disaster-ready facilities. As a start, the state Senate’s proposed budget this year includes $1.3 billionFor two new prisons.

About 100 miles away from the senators’ offices, in Cross City, officials are toying with both approaches. After the floods, officials considered closing Cross City permanently. Community members opposed the move because they depend on Cross City economically. DeSantis reacted to the objections and recently Announcement hundreds of thousands of dollars in flood control projects for Dixie County’s prison.