Harvey cost prisons $8M
Damage to facilities more widespread than first reported
The cost of Hurricane Harvey’s wrath to the Texas prison system has crossed the $8 million mark, with damage more widespread than initially reported.
Five units evacuated, at least 25 more lost power and some suffered roof damage, including the facility in Rosharon, where the Ramsey Unit alone needed more than $600,000 in repairs.
The rising waters of the Brazos River forced the relocation of nearly 7,000 prisoners and parolees, requiring the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to shell out close to $2.7 million in overtime pay to move prisoners.
“Hurricane Harvey was a terrible natural disaster which presented the agency with a monumental challenge,” TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier wrote in an employee newsletter after the storm. “Only through the Herculean effort of our employees was success made possible.”
But three months later, there’s still dispute about what really happened during the storm, with the National Lawyers Guild taking preliminary steps toward a lawsuit after
some inmates described brutal conditions, as others — including TDCJ — offered less dire accounts.
A former union leader rebuffed prisoner reports of flooding inside the units but still alleged the same staffing shortages the department denied in September.
“There could have been a mass escape,” said Lance Lowry, then-president of the Texas Correctional Employees union in Huntsville. “A number of things could have gone wrong.” Rising to the challenge
The day before Harvey made landfall, TDCJ started staging transport buses and staff in Huntsville and Beeville in anticipation of possible evacuations. Prisoners in Garza East and West, Torres and Ferguson units made sandbags, according to a TDCJ cost survey report obtained through an open records request.
To move thousands of prisoners with such scant notice, TDCJ called in most of its transport fleet and packed prisoners onto 77 buses and other transport vans. They shipped emergency supplies, bottled water, ice and sandbags to impacted areas.
Early on, the department evacuated Stringfellow, Terrell and Ramsey prisons, and days later they cleared out the Jester III and Vance units as well.
The department also moved more than 5,700 heads of cattle, 629 swine and 54 horses to higher ground. Crops weren’t as easy to save, however, and the agribusiness division ended up losing some $500,000 in cotton alone, roughly 40 percent of the year’s yield. Another 300 acres of unharvested corn and other vegetables were also ruined by floodwaters.
A tractor in Navasota, water heaters in Beeville and a cotton gin in Brazoria County also fell prey to the storm.
Even though Harvey dumped far more rain than Hurricane Rita, it netted less damage to the prison system, according to TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark. The 2005 storm caused around $10 million in damages, primarily at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont.
Harvey totaled just over $800,000 in facility damages, primarily at the Ramsey Unit in Rosharon, where the maintenance shop required more than $400,000 in repairs. Garza East and West in Beeville had some minor roof damages, while Luther Unit in Navasota sustained minor ceiling damage. Terrell Unit in Rosharon lost two transformers to the storm, while the North Houston parole building needed roof and ceiling repairs along with tile replacements for the flooded floor.
Aside from damaged buildings, other associated costs of the Category 4 storm included more than $750,000 for food, $127,000 for equipment rentals and around $110,000 in gas needed to evacuate prisoners.
A broad category of “other operating expenses” totaled more than $4.2 million, which Clark said included $1.7 million in estimated losses from future crop production as well as damage to fences, bridges and roads. Flood of complaints
The costs of the storm could continue to rise, however, if any of the slew of inmate claims coalesce into credible legal cases. Although complaints of waterlogged cells and no water for inmates first surfaced in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, a growing number of similar claims have since flooded activist and legal groups tracking the post-storm conditions.
Because prisoners have to exhaust the internal grievance process before filing suit, it could be months before most Harvey-related litigation starts hitting federal docket, but the National Lawyers Guild’s Prisoners Legal Advocacy Network said it’s gathering complaints for possible legal action.
“I’ve heard from so many prisoners in Texas,” said PLAN attorney Stanley Holdorf. “I’ve never seen this volume of letters from inmates.”
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike in 2008, more than 130 Beaumont-area prisoners filed suits alleging that they should have been evacuated and that the post-storm living conditions violated their civil rights. Most of the suits appear to have been dismissed, according to Holdorf, who attributed it primarily to the lack of legal representation.
In September, the advocacy network posted online a strongly worded letter to TDCJ outlining inmate complaints. The stark claims include everything from mail service disruptions to lack of food to inmates living in their own waste without water in the Beaumont-area facilities that did not evacuate.
In addition to the more than 100 inmate letters collected by the NLG, the Austin Anarchist Black Cross has also fielded a slew of prisoner complaints, offering a similar stream of allegations.
“A striking pattern was the lack of water distribution in Stiles Unit,” said Marissa Levy with the Austin-based collective. “Some reported getting two water bottles a day. We even got reports of some people saying it was so bad they were vomiting.”
The reports came in response to roughly 100 surveys the activist group sent out to prisoners from Beaumont to Huntsville to Rosharon. About 30 responded.
“Absolutely NO sanitary drinking water until after about the 4th day,” Stiles Unit inmate David Schmidt wrote. “No shower whatsoever until several days went by.”
Inmates “rarely” had access to the portable toilets brought in to manage the crisis, he said.
“We had to urinate and defecate in our toilet with no way to flush it,” another prisoner at the Beaumont unit alleged.
Although some reported water flooding and pooling in their cells, others denied it.
“No flooding in my cell or unit to my knowledge,” one Stiles prisoner wrote. Looking ahead
Clark challenged the prisoners’ claims, pointing out that many of those who responded didn’t live on the ground floor where flooding would have occurred. Previously, Clark pushed back against claims about food and water shortages and insufficient toilet access.
“The allegations are completely false,” he said at the time, adding that the department brought in 5,000- and 6,000-gallon water tankers and roughly 270,000 bottles of water to address the crisis.
Lowry, the former union chief, concurred with Clark’s statements debunking unit flooding.
“I visited the Stiles Unit shortly afterward,” he said. “There may have been some leaky roofs and stuff like that, but actual floodwaters getting inside — that didn’t happen.”
Even so, Lowry said, prisoners should have been moved, given the unpredictable nature of storms and storm surge.
“The big cover-up is they didn’t have the staff to move them,” he said. In early September, Lowry told the Chronicle that several hundred officers were unable to make it into work at Beaumont-area facilities during the storm because of road flooding. A few absences, Lowry said, can create a dire situation at units that are already understaffed; Gist, Stiles and LeBlanc units all have at least 21 percent vacancy rates for correctional officers, according to October TDCJ data.
Right after the storm, Clark said Lowry’s estimate on the number of absences seemed inflated, pointing out that TDCJ shipped in more than 90 officers from across the state to help out. But Lowry insisted, citing Google Earth images showing nearly empty parking lots during the storm.
“We definitely need a better contingency plan in the future,” he said. “We’re playing Russian roulette. It’s just a matter of time till we have the right combination of events and have a catastrophe.”