Parolees sue prison in Harvey flooding ‘disaster’
More than 200 former inmates are suing a private prison contractor who they say “utterly failed” them during Hurricane Harvey, allegedly leaving the men in a flooded halfway house in Houston surrounded by toxic waste and without food, clean water or medical care.
Despite the “barbaric” conditions, according to the lawsuit, the men couldn’t leave the premises because officials told them it would be a violation of their parole.
“It was a total disaster,” said Henry Thigpen, one of about 500 parolees who weathered the storm at the Southeast Texas Transitional Center before officials sent them all back to prison. “They left us there to fend for ourselves.”
Attorneys for GEO Group, the private prison contractor that runs the eastern Harris County facility, denied the allegations in court filings.
“Plaintiffs no doubt experienced inconveniences during Hurricane Harvey flooding, just like the STTC staff and nearly every resident of Harris County and southeast Texas,” the company’s lawyers wrote.
But, the lawyers said, the flooding never reached over calfheight, the staff never abandoned the facility and there was always adequate food and water on hand.
The parolees who were there begged to differ.
“They don’t know,” said Everett Crawford, 63, from Bexar County. “They abandoned us.”
The facility on Beaumont Highway is a former Bible college that contracts with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to house parolees fresh out of prison as they work to get back on their feet. The men there — some of whom are sex offenders with ankle monitors — are allowed to have cellphones and jobs and they don’t have to wear prison uniforms. But there’s still a gate and they’re not free to come and go as they please, according to the conditions of their parole.
After the storm hit Houston on a Friday — Aug. 25, 2017 — parts of the campus started taking on water. Most of the staff allegedly abandoned their posts as the flooding rose to waist-deep in some places, according to the lawsuit.
Men began moving their belongings up to the second floor, retreating from the foul-smelling water. Some read or listened to the radio, while others sang gospel music or prayed as they tried to figure out what to do.
“There was no clean water,” said Houston attorney Scott Arnold, one of the lawyers who is representing the men in court. “You’d turn on the faucet, and you’d get brown stuff coming up.”
Some of the men raided the kitchen for scraps of food, he said, while others went hungry. At one point, according to Thigpen, a few of the guys waded through miles of floodwater to the nearest store, a process that
took hours.
In the end, the men were “nearly starved, were dehydrated and incurred rashes, infections and other injuries from the toxic flood waters,” the suit alleges. In part, that’s because the facility sits between a former Superfund site, a landfill and a waste processing plant.
Many of the men had medical and mental health conditions that required monitoring and medication, “none of which was available,” according to the lawsuit.
Instead, the parolees said they took care of their comrades themselves.
“It still haunts me today,” said Thigpen. “I’d never been in a situation like that where I had to take care of mentally ill and handicapped people. We had to physically hold them down so they wouldn’t go out there and drown.”
GEO Group offered a different narrative of the hurricane conditions, writing that the floodwaters peaked around 18 inches, below the bottom of first-floor bunk beds.
“Affected parolees and their bedding were temporarily moved to the second floor of their dorms,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “The facility staff stayed on-site around the clock to mitigate the flooding, to maintain essential functions like the kitchen and the medication room, and to conduct rounds, roll calls, and counts.”
The halfway house staff was not only “fully present” throughout the storm and weathering the “exact same conditions” as the parolees, according to GEO Group’s response filing, but there were actually more employees there than usual and the claims that they abandoned their posts is “baseless.”
One thing that both sides agree on is that on Aug. 29 — four days into it — the floodwaters subsided enough for prison staff to come pick up the men.
That night, the men said, they were all loaded onto Texas Department of Criminal Justice buses at gunpoint and shipped to various state prisons. In the process they were forced to abandon all their belongings, and some said they found their things missing weeks later when they returned to the facility.
In the nearly two years since the storm, some of the men — including Thigpen and Crawford — moved out on their own. They’re both still on parole.