Mass Death Looms: Florida Refuses to Evacuate Prisons & Jails Ahead of Hurricane Milton
As Hurricane Milton barrels towards Florida, thousands of incarcerated individuals are left to face a death sentence. With no evacuation plan, Florida's incarcerated are abandoned in the storm’s path. The post Mass Death Looms: Florida Refuses to Evacuate Prisons & Jails Ahead of Hurricane Milton appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.
As you read this, a violent, unprecedented storm rips across Florida—Hurricane Milton, a monstrous, life-annihilating catastrophe. A storm that officials are warning comes “once in a century,” and that you don’t survive if you’re in its path.
A storm with surges expected up to 15 feet, and a storm that Florida is knowingly leaving thousands of incarcerated individuals to face.
“Helene was a wake-up call, this is literally catastrophic and I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned.
The Appeal’s analysis reveals that over 21,000 people are incarcerated in counties where mandatory evacuation orders cover all or part of the municipality.
Yet, incarcerated people have been issued no order to evacuate at all. They have been given no choice. They have been sentenced to what is effectively a death sentence.
Just weeks ago, during Hurricane Helene, prisoners in North Carolina were left locked in their cells, ankle-deep in water and feces, without power, clean water, or adequate food. “We thought we were going to die there,” one man recalled. He described the moment he “realized his single-occupancy cell in the state prison had begun to flood. Then he realized that his toilet no longer flushed,” documents The Intercept.
“For the next five days, more than 550 men incarcerated at Mountain View suffered in cells without lights or running water, according to conversations with the family members of four men serving sentences at the facility, as well as one currently incarcerated man. Until they were transferred to different facilities, the prisoners lost all contact with the outside world.”
As nearby residents sought refuge from the storm, the men were stuck in prison — by definition, without the freedom to leave — in close quarters with their own excrement for nearly a week from September 27 until October 2.
Loved ones of men incarcerated at Mountain View claimed food rations were scarce, amounting to four crackers for breakfast, a cup of juice or milk, and two pieces of bread with peanut butter for lunch and dinner. Potable drinking water did not arrive for several days.”
It was only once their mental and physical health deteriorated beyond the brink that authorities made the too-late decision to evacuate.
Florida now echoes this same refusal to act. During Hurricane Milton, incarcerated individuals in Sarasota, Hernando, Pasco, Charlotte, Lee, and Manatee County jails will remain trapped, unmoved, unprotected, in their cells—some in Zone A evacuation areas, the very zones that officials have explicitly marked as dangerous enough to be “coffins” for those who remain behind.
These people, the ones the state deems less than human, are experiencing nothing less than torture. They are not sentenced to die, but their fate is an impending burial within prison walls, forgotten, drowned, and abandoned.
Julie Reimer, whose son is trapped in a Florida jail, spoke out, painfully stating to The Intercept, “When my son was sentenced, he was not given a death sentence”. Yet, for the imprisoned in Milton’s path, that is exactly what has happened.
Far-right, fascist Governor Ron DeSantis is preparing for “the largest search and rescue operation in Florida history,” trucks running 24 hours a day to clear debris left by Hurricane Helene—and debris that could now become deadly projectiles as Hurricane Milton hits.
While those preparations have been prioritized for those fortunate enough to be outside the bars, there is no similar urgency for the incarcerated, who are left like expendable commodities.
As noted last year in a Scalawag piece titled, Florida’s Jails Put Incarcerated People’s Lives at Risk During Hurricane Season, hurricane after hurricane, we see the same pattern—refusal to evacuate, refusal to value the lives of Black, Brown, poor, and incarcerated people. These individuals aren’t statistics or mere bodies—they are sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, and community members. They deserve safety, dignity, and the ability to survive this “storm of the century.”
This is climate change at its most explicit—and at its most unjust.
This is the clearest, most explicit example of how climate change disproporationately impacts the most vulnerable among us. And if or when there are deaths resulting from this, the blood will be on the hands of the officials, the prison officials, and the politicians who sanctioned this.
This is why we need abolition. We cannot wait until after the storm, when the bodies have been counted, when the headlines are written, and the officials make their empty statements of “unfortunate losses.”
We must abolish the cages, the concentration camps, and the mechanisms of state violence that deem any life disposable.
What kind of country are we, if we let this happen? Surely, we are not a civilized one. We are watching state-sanctioned torture. We are watching state-sanctioned mass death.
Our only response to this barbarity must be to fight for the abolition of the entire carceral system, and for the freedom and dignity of all of our comrades and every human being.
The post Mass Death Looms: Florida Refuses to Evacuate Prisons & Jails Ahead of Hurricane Milton appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.