Several county jails along Florida’s coast within the path of Hurricane Milton are choosing not to evacuate hundreds of incarcerated individuals as the storm makes landfall on Wednesday.
I’ve tried a few times to write a thoughtful comment in response to this news, and I can’t. What the heck, Florida.
it’s hard to thoughtfully discuss thoughtless decisions
Gotta rtfa to get the full context.
Even so, at least three county jails in Florida that sit within mandatory evacuation areas have decided that detainees will ride out the storm. These jails — Pinellas, Manatee, and St. Johns counties — have a combined incarcerated population of more than 4,000 people. Recent analysis from The Appeal found that more than 21,000 people are locked up at facilities in areas with evacuation orders ahead of Milton. An earlier investigation by The Intercept found that across Florida, 52 jails, prisons and detention centers face major to extreme flood risks over the next 30 years as such climate-driven storms intensify, the most among any state.
Florida has among the largest populations of incarcerated people in the country, more than 84,000, according to federal data — exceeding the jailed populations of entire countries, such as France, Germany, Malaysia, or Venezuela.
“With that number of inmates it’s not really possible, feasible to evacuate people out of there, and it’s unnecessary because we can go up,” said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri on Wednesday during a press conference. He said the Pinellas County Jail, which has a population of about 3,100 people, is prepared to move people from the first floor cells to the second floor in the event of flooding.
“We have plenty of staff there, everything’s safe, it’s under control and I’m not concerned about it,” he said, adding that around 800 deputies and jail staff would be on hand. The jail sits within an area deemed Zone A, the most severe tier among evacuation areas, and is located next to a waterway that spills into Tampa Bay.
There are still systemic problems here, but it’s not like they just locked everyone on the ground floor and peaced-out, as the headline made me think.
Edit: I just want to add that the rest of the article goes even deeper in, in my opinion, undoing my outrage induced from the headline. It talks about facilities being weather-ready and built on higher ground, it mentions procedures for ones that aren’t, it consults a former FEMA official…
“Plenty of staff” I’m calling bullshit right there. I don’t work corrections but I used to work forensic psych and they were the only part of that institutional system with worse staffing than us.
There was an article just days or a week ago about prisoners who were stuck in cells that were flooded and toilets that didn’t work and backed up into their cells for days following Helene.
They do have hurricane resistant buildings - shelters, hospitals, zoos, emergency management offices, etc. i would assume jails are the same. Police don’t all evacuate.
Break resistant glass with bars or wire and concrete or cinder block walls do make for a sturdy building that can handle a fair amount of hurricane.
The concern is flooding going to the worst-case scenario and the jail’s elevation being low enough to drown inmates in their cells.
Exactly this. It becomes possible that inmates who are incarcerated for minor infractions face a death penalty due to prison mismanagement.
