This week, as Hurricane Florence brought heavy rains, storm surges, and winds of more than a hundred miles per hour to the Carolinas, the governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, issued a mandatory evacuation order along the coast. “We do not want to risk one South Carolina life in this hurricane,” he said at a press conference on Monday. More than a million people—including many who would not normally evacuate, such as hospitalized patients and the staff of military bases—fled the region.
But thousands of people were never given a chance to leave, because they were locked inside prison cells across South Carolina. Bryan Stirling, the director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, or S.C.D.C., chose not to evacuate several prisons—including Ridgeland, MacDougall, and Lieber Correctional Institutions—in counties that over the past week fell within the mandatory evacuation zone. (North Carolina and Virginia evacuated numerous prisons and jails along the coast.) On Monday, the official S.C.D.C. Twitter account posted a photograph of incarcerated men shovelling sand into bags. “In the past, it’s been safer to leave them there,” Dexter Lee, a S.C.D.C. spokesperson, told the State. A county jail that houses more than a thousand people just a few miles from the coast in Charleston also declined to evacuate. “The people of SC who you’re responsible for include those who are incarcerated, Gov. McMaster,” the A.C.L.U. wrote on Twitter. “You can’t leave them in harm’s way.”
On Friday morning, a source inside a South Carolina maximum-security prison who asked me to call him Albert said that the storm had not yet reached him. “No winds that I can see,” he said. “Not even rain.” For the past several days, Albert has barely left his cell. “We’re all locked down until after the storm,” he wrote in a text message, sent from a contraband cell phone. Correctional officers are refusing to let prisoners store extra water, he said. “Not allowed bottles or buckets,” he wrote. “They call it contraband.” He said the building seemed secure but warned that if heavy rains fell, they could be dangerous for men on the lowest level. “I can remember one flood to where the water came knee high,” he wrote. “Those guys are going to drown if it rains enough.”
Stirling, reached by phone on Thursday evening, told me that a prison evacuation would have created logistical challenges and public-safety concerns. “We would have a thousand prisoners on buses, on potentially very congested routes. It’s not safe for anybody,” he told me. He confirmed that prisoners were not allowed to store water in bottles and said that even if prisons had been evacuated earlier this week, the storm might have changed course. “We would be playing hopscotch,” he said. South Carolina prisons are known to be understaffed and overcrowded; earlier this year, state correctional officers took hours to intervene in a riot that killed seven men.
Another incarcerated man, who asked me to call him Mike, told me that he spent a past storm locked in a flooding cell at Lieber Correctional Institution, thirty miles inland from Charleston. (Both Albert and Mike shared their real names with The New Yorker but spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from prison officials.) Over the phone, Mike described the terror he felt, unable to see outside as the water rose. “It actually was past your ankles,” he said, of the past storm. “We were yelling for the guards—you know, ‘Hey! Open the doors! They flooding!’ ” He said that correctional officers didn’t let them out until men started to yell out, “Tell my kids I love them.” When asked about past flooding at Lieber, Stirling asserted that storms had not caused floods there in decades.
In the week leading up to Hurricane Florence, members of the public struggled to obtain basic information about the prison system’s plans. As of Friday, no information about the hurricane had been posted to the S.C.D.C. Web site. Amina P. Stephens, a Myrtle Beach resident whose husband is incarcerated, said she had to call S.C.D.C. officials roughly fifteen times over the course of a week to confirm that state prisons would not be evacuated. (One minimum-security S.C.D.C. facility, which housed two hundred and sixty-six people, was evacuated.) On Tuesday, after numerous calls and e-mailed questions, Dexter Lee sent me a short statement. “We will continue to monitor this hurricane,” he wrote. “Due to security reasons we do not announce advanced inmate movements.” On Thursday, he sent me a slightly longer statement, adding, “All SCDC institutions have food, water, and other essential supplies for the storm duration. All institutions have generators with the ability to operate for 10 days without refueling.”
Past hurricanes have devastated prisons across the country. During Hurricane Katrina, people were trapped in flooded cells with nothing to eat or drink. Last year, after Hurricane Harvey, prisoners reported flooding in cells; a man in a Texas prison told me that he lost access to functioning toilets and running water. Kathy Morse, who served four years in New York state prisons for embezzling money from a law firm, said she was evacuated from a prison in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea for Hurricane Sandy. “It’s pouring rain out, the winds are blowing—you could look out your window, and there’s nobody out there,” Morse recalled, adding that most other people downtown had already left. She said that a prison staff member later told her that her building had flooded up to the third floor.
When Hurricane Florence made landfall in North Carolina, on Friday, storm surges caused serious flooding, and hundreds of thousands of people lost power. The storm is expected to move southwest slowly, weakening as it dumps many inches of rain across the region. Parts of South Carolina currently face tropical-storm conditions, with winds around fifty miles per hour and a forecast of several consecutive days of rain. On Thursday night, Albert said the mood in his prison was sombre. “Everyone’s quiet,” he wrote. Mike feared the worst, saying, “The storm that we experienced was nowhere near comparison to what’s on the way.” Amina Stephens said that she was worried about her husband and disappointed in Governor McMaster. “I just want him to imagine himself on the other side,” she said. “Because it could be him. At any given moment, it could be any of us.”
