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With the passing of Hurricane Florence, South Carolina officials this week ordered evacuations in parts of the state, including Dorchester County. But some people are left behind, especially at least 650 inmates at the MacDougall Correctional Facility.
Dexter Lee, spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Corrections, told Vice News: "Previously, it was safer to stay in place with detainees than to move elsewhere.
Another prison in Jasper County, the Ridgeland Correctional Facility, was also not evacuated despite an evacuation order in the area, according to the state, a South Carolina newspaper. But the county's evacuation order was later lifted due to changes in hurricane forecasts, easing fears of leaving inmates in jail.
The National Hurricane Center said that hurricane Florence, which is expected to touch the ground on Friday, could put its life at risk. In his response, the Governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, said at a press conference: Play with the lives of the people of South Carolina. Not one. "
However, South Carolina has not evacuated prisons in response to hurricanes since 1999, reported Post and Courier last year. A prison spokesman told The Post and Courier at the time: "In most cases, the public, officers and inmates of an SCDC facility are safer than transferred and detained in a secondary place.
Meanwhile, Virginia and North Carolina, also on their way to the storm, evacuated inmates in state prisons as Hurricane Florence approached. But some local jails in Virginia leave detainees in place.
The evacuations in the prisons can be very expensive and create risks of escape for the prisoners. But not to evacuate leads to its own major risks: aggravate conditions that may already be bad in prisons. As Tess Owen explains for vice:
Inmates abandoned in a federal prison near Houston following Hurricane Harvey in August 2017 reported food shortages, lack of clean water and floods. Many inmates resisted the storm, still locked in their cells. And as Puerto Rico was devastated by the devastating consequences of Hurricane Maria, the US Bureau of Prisons began evacuating detainees from its easternmost facility in Rio Grande due to persistent power outages. During the chaos of the resettlement process after the hurricane, 13 inmates escaped.
The news of the evacuation from South Carolina's prisons follows national strikes and protests by detainees demanding the end of forced labor in prisons and often inhumane conditions in US jails.
These protests actually began in response to reported problems in South Carolina jails. Earlier this year, state officials described a riot in Lee, South Carolina, as "massive casualties," following the deaths of seven inmates and at least 17 wounded. According to the Associated Press, it was the worst jail riot in a quarter century.
State officials attributed these struggles to personal and gang-related disputes, as well as access to smuggling as well as mobile phones, which allowed litigation to spread more widely.
But advocates and experts also drew attention to poor prison conditions, including a problem of understaffing of guards – a problem that the director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, Bryan Stirling, had acknowledged. previously. As detainees told AP and other media outlets, the situation in Lee seemed to get out of hand, with guards failing to respond appropriately to conflict and violence.
Violence is part of a growing problem. A survey conducted by John Monk for the state revealed that the number of prisoners killed in state prisons "more than doubled in 2017 compared to the previous year and quadrupled compared to two years ago."
For detainees, the lack of attention to these problems, even if they worsened, was enough to get them to protest from last month. The fact that detainees are now left on the road to a potentially fatal hurricane is unlikely to reduce their concerns and grievances about the prison system.
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