“Complete Neglect”: Thousands Were Not Evacuated from Florida Jails & Prisons Ahead of Hurricane Milton

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

As many as 28,000 people incarcerated in Florida jails and prisons were in the mandatory evacuation zone for Hurricane Milton, but many officials refused to relocate the prisoners and insisted their facilities were safe. Meanwhile, an incarcerated person who was evacuated to a Florida maximum-security prison shared their experience last night on social media, quote, “Power’s out in here, and the [correctional officers] are hiding in their offices while we’re left in the dark. We’re shouting for meds and updates, but no one’s listening. Just trying to hold on and hope this storm doesn’t swallow us whole,” unquote.

For more, we’re joined by Jordan Martinez, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons and the group’s Hurricane and Disaster Response Team. They helped organize pressure campaigns for officials to evacuate incarcerated people during this storm as they have for many others.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Jordan, explain what the situation has been now in Florida for prisoners.

JORDAN MARTINEZ: Yeah, the ongoing situation, Amy, in Florida has been one of almost complete neglect and fiction writing by the Florida Department of Corrections and various county sheriff’s offices, jails, etc., claiming that incarcerated people are in fact being evacuated. The Florida Department of Corrections claims 5,600, almost, incarcerated people were evacuated, but in the list of facilities that they released, the vast majority of those evacuated were from work camps, halfway houses, work release centers. And in many cases, they were evacuated to, quote-unquote, “hardened facilities” literally across the street. For example, Lowell Work Camp, which is part of the Lowell Correctional Institution women’s prison, that organizers in Florida with Change Comes Now have been fighting around various conditions, Lowell Work Camp evacuated dozens of yards away to Lowell Correctional. And so, we’re seeing this fiction being raised by FDOC, as well as the county sheriffs.

We attempted to help force evacuations in multiple mandatory evacuation zones along the west coast, and we were able to achieve one evacuation of the Orient Road Jail in Hillsborough County. But Manatee County, Lee County, Pinellas County, as well as St. Johns County on the eastern coast, all left prisoners in mandatory evacuation zones in the jails.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jordan, you mentioned Pinellas County. The sheriff there stated that, quote, “It’s really not possible to evacuate the jail because of the number of inmates,” and he instead moved people to higher floors. Can you talk about that?

JORDAN MARTINEZ: I think this is, again, part of the fiction that the sheriffs and officials in Florida like to spin to project a sense of confidence in the face of conditions that are entirely unpredictable in hurricane situations. For the vast majority of hurricanes that we’ve organized around, the actually most dangerous portions of the hurricanes are not the immediate storm surges that might flood the first floor of a prison, jail or detention center. It’s actually the aftermath in the days and weeks following, in which water is cut off, access to food is cut off, power is cut off, medical supplies are cut off. And so, evacuating people to higher floors when the bottom floor is completely destroyed that houses the majority of those facilities that keep the entire system running within the prison, that people need to survive, their basic living necessities, it can create conditions in which, as has been reported on Democracy Now! before, people are forced to drink water from the toilet because they have no other access. And we see this again and again and again in disaster situations.

And the fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones, I think, goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes. And I think we can all agree, if we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside, that are themselves organizing on the inside to fight for better conditions and quite often being forced during hurricanes to prepare to protect their communities via forced slave labor with sandbags or in cleanup in the aftermath.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Jay, The Intercept reports prisoners in North Carolina were left in their cells without running water or power for nearly a week, cut off from communication with the outside world and forced to keep their waste in plastic bags in their cells, from Helene. Your final comments on what needs to be done?

JORDAN MARTINEZ: Well, I think the final comments on what needs to done is there needs to be mandatory, in-place rules and regulations during evacuations when a certain category of hurricane is coming in, that require and force state and local county officials to have evacuation plans in preparation, in advance.

And lastly, I want to close with a quote from inside that we have with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, who are the folks that reported those inside conditions. And we believe it’s very important that incarcerated people are allowed to speak for themselves in these conditions. So, this is coming out of the Florida Department of Corrections itself.

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak says, “We urge the public to understand our plight as people in jails and prisons. We suffer during natural disasters in locked, dark cells, not knowing if we will survive or not. This is not just a logistical failure, it’s a profound moral failing. While entire towns are evacuated and communities band together to seek safety, we remain locked within these walls, treated as less than human. It is heartbreaking to think that while the world prepares for survival during a pending natural disaster such as Hurricane Milton, we are still treated as if we don’t matter, as if our lives can be tossed aside in the name of protocol. We must end this normalized routine. We beg the public to pay attention and have a heart of compassion.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us, Jay, or Jordan Martinez, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, the group’s Hurricane and Disaster Response Team.