Prisoners and Detainees in the Gulf Coast Are Particularly at Risk from Natural Disasters
The Gulf Coast of the United States stretches across five states in the Southeast. Within that region, more than 270,000 people are incarcerated in jails, prisons, and other detention facilities. For the prisoners and detainees who are locked up in at least 322 correctional facilities in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, the risk of suffering from extreme weather events such as flooding or hurricanes is especially high. Despite these threats, disaster preparedness plans that include incarcerated populations are few and far between.
These findings stem from a study conducted by Faith Taylor, a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of the Environment, which was recently published in the journal Southeast Geographer. Taylor looked at data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to reveal that: among other findings, about two-thirds of correctional facilities in the Gulf Coast are located in an area considered to have “very high” to “relatively moderate” risk of flooding from rivers; facilities that hold U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees and women are at a greater risk of floods; while 62% of Gulf Coast lockups are in a census tract that faces hurricane risk, Florida has the highest risk, with 66,553 detainees and prisoners vulnerable to a devastating storm; and extreme temperatures represent the greatest risk for all incarcerated individuals in the region.
On top of heightened danger from natural disasters, Taylor’s research also underscored that many Gulf Coast facilities are overcrowded and lack air conditioning. Worse still, a separate study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2022 concluded that only six states had emergency management plans that included protocols for prisoner safety and evacuation. Among a total of 40 states with publicly available plans, more than half mention prisoners exclusively in the context of using them as labor for disaster mitigation.
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