Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm — which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area — in the jail.
They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.
As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.
The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”
The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues.
The Florida Department of Corrections (DOC), which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.
The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm … timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.”
In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported.
Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.
“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”
Incarcerated people have few protections
Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.
Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.
“The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored … when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.”
Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.
“That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.
And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.
As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.
Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources — proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.
As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.)
The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.
“I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.