Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Harvey, California wildfires.
The list goes on of natural disasters that are happening at a more frequent rate and getting stronger. All of these disasters directly impacted prisons. What's worse... many prisons don't have evacuation plans.
Evie Litwok, director of Witness to Mass Incarceration, an LGBTQ prisoner advocacy group, served time at a federal correctional facility in Florida. Litwok said that evacuations could put some prisoners at risk, medically. “If I need insulin, or if I have high blood pressure,” she said, “someone has to give me that pill on a daily basis. And there’s no way when they move 7,000 people that they have the medical records of those 7,000 people in the new prison.”
“Any natural disaster is a nightmare for us,” Litwok added.