Nikki Thompson felt fearful for her son in Spruce Pine — a town in Avery County — when she learned the remnants of Hurricane Helene were set to barrel through western North Carolina.
She was particularly worried because her 23-year-old son had no choice in whether to evacuate or seek higher ground. That’s because he was locked in a cell at Mountain View Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison that houses up to 884 people.
“I was just so afraid that they were gonna abandon those guys like they were abandoned when Katrina hit,” she said, referring to an incident where New Orleans sheriffs evacuated their jail leaving prisoners locked in cells with no food or water for days, even as first floor cells had water reaching chest level.
“I was terrified, and I knew that if it hit really bad, we weren't gonna be able to get to them,” Thompson said.
Historic flooding and winds knocked out power and public water infrastructure, affecting conditions at four prisons in the region — Western Correctional Center for Women in Swannanoa, Craggy Correctional Institution in Asheville and Spruce Pine’s Mountain View Correctional Institution and Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution — as well as the Department of Adult Correction’s substance use treatment center for women in Black Mountain.
For days after the storm hit western North Carolina on Sept. 27, people remained at the facilities without contact with the outside world — in the dark about the devastation and filled with concern about how their families fared through the storm. Meanwhile, those families clamored for information, desperate to know if their loved ones were safe.
Thomspon said she spent four days calling every business in the town, hoping to talk to someone who knew anything about the prison. She couldn’t get through to anybody and said she was panicked.
The N.C. Department of Adult Correction announced on Sept. 30 that all offenders made it safely through Helene. But just as residents in the community did, incarcerated people endured challenging times without phone service, power, running water and flushing toilets.
Thompson’s son wrote in a text to NC Health News that water came into his cell floor. He urinated inside his sink and defecated in the toilet that wouldn’t flush until someone in the cell next to him gave him a trash bag to defecate inside. He said the bag of feces that he and many others had to keep in their cells filled the prison with a horrid smell, combined with the accumulating body odor from people going days without showers. The first two bottles of water he said he received on the 30th wasn’t nearly enough as he split it between drinking and washing himself.
Over these days, he said he and others at the prison were confined in their cells.
“I navigated it pretty bad because I hadn’t ever been through anything even close to that before. It was emotionally straining — the most traumatic thing I’ve ever experienced,” Thompson’s son wrote.
After getting predictions of long timeframes for water and power restoration, the prison system started to evacuate people from the storm-impacted facilities on Sept. 30. Over four days, corrections staff temporarily moved 2,190 people to other prisons across the state.
After a shackled bus ride, Thompson’s son made it to Pamlico Correctional Institution in eastern North Carolina. It’s a facility advocates say is now 137 percent overcapacity due to the influx of people temporarily housed from western North Carolina.
Thompson’s son said in a text that he’s relieved to be out of western North Carolina. He’s got his own cell, though he knows some others are double-bunked.
Prison spokesperson Brad Deen said the new placement decisions were based on custody levels, medical needs and space available at destination facilities. In many cases, he said, receiving facilities reopened idled housing units to accommodate the additional population.
The influx of prisoners from western North Carolina has caused overcrowding and inhumane conditions, nine human rights advocacy organizations alleged in a letter sent to the N.C. Department of Adult Correction on Oct. 31. The advocates made the same assertions at a news conference on Nov. 1 outside the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh, where many women from Western Correctional Center for Women in Swannanoa have been relocated.
The groups are calling on the N.C. Department of Adult Correction to release 400 incarcerated women and 1,500 incarcerated men to ease what they call “dangerous, inhumane overcrowding” caused by the temporary closure of the four prisons.
“What needs to happen in order to avoid unconstitutional conditions within our prisons in North Carolina is for people to be let out of cages,” said Dawn Blagrove, executive director of Emancipate NC, at the news conference. “That was necessary and true before the hurricane, but it's even more necessary today. The state is incapable of properly providing humane conditions and constitutional care for the people who are inside of prisons.”
“We already had overcrowding in multiple prisons,” she said. “We already had at least a 30 percent understaffing in prisons across the state. We have had to relocate those folks from those western prisons to prisons where they were already at capacity, where there wasn’t enough staff. And the conditions have only gotten worse.”
Overcrowded, understaffed
The advocate groups said overcrowded and understaffed prisons mean less time out of cell, limited access to health care and programming, and reduced opportunities for recreation and showering.
In the weeks since Helene inflicted record physical and financial damage to the state, prison advocacy groups said they have received many reports from incarcerated people about inhumane conditions — some of which they detail in their letter to prison officials.
For example, the coalition said in the letter that 126 women taken to Anson Correctional Institution were forced to sleep on the gym floor for days with inadequate toileting and bathing facilities, no access to a library or books, and limited to no opportunity to connect with loved ones or legal counsel. Incarcerated women have also reported reduced food rations and going without access to jobs, programs and the now-ubiquitous tablets that people use for education and entertainment, they said.
The advocacy groups said they’ve heard similar issues from incarcerated men.
Deen said in an emailed statement that many of the claims in the letter are “misinformed or grossly exaggerated,” though he did not provide any specifics. He also said that “staffing levels at all recipient facilities fall within acceptable levels, if not optimal.”
Push for release
Due to the strains on the prison system caused by Helene, advocates say the state should do what it did during the COVID-19 pandemic when prison officials in a six-month span sent nearly 4,500 people — out of more than 28,500 total incarcerated people — home early to decrease density to limit the virus’ spread.
“Given the emergency circumstances in which the state currently finds itself — facing a long and arduous recovery in the Western region — it is responsible and prudent administration to minimize the state prison population by once again applying these common sense principles to permit low-risk individuals to return home,” the advocate groups said in their letter to prison officials.
Amid the height of the pandemic in 2021, people were released through a variety of mechanisms, including parole, application of discretionary time credits, Extended Limits of Confinement authority and discretionary action by the Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission. Those same mechanisms could be used again, the groups argue.
“Thousands of people were released early to help create more healthy and humane conditions during COVID, and guess what? The sky didn’t fall. The streets weren’t run amok with crime,” Blagrove said.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice released a report in August examining the outcomes of this release effort and found no impact on public safety.
“We have evidence that we can bring people home safely, even before the end of their originally imposed sentence,” said Jake Sussman, interim chief counsel of Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s Justice System Reform team. “In response to a public health crisis or this sort of natural catastrophe, we can actually keep people safer — both inside and outside of prison — by bringing them home to their loved ones.”
Deen said prison officials have acknowledged the letter and will provide a detailed response to the advocates in the “near future.”
Elizabeth Simpson, an attorney and strategic director at Emancipate NC, said that while advocates hope an agreement can be reached if the prison system does not take action in the coming weeks, litigation is an option.
It took a lawsuit to secure the early release of people during the pandemic.
Still in limbo
Deen told NC Health News a timeline for when the western North Carolina prisons will be reoccupied remains uncertain, explaining that water and sewer services still need to be restored at the facilities.
He noted that it may be possible to reoccupy Craggy Correctional Center in the coming weeks, though the timeline for return to facilities in Spruce Pine and Swannanoa appear to be longer.
He also added that corrections staff are making plans for transfers of prisoners to other available non-affected prison housing areas in western North Carolina as soon as it is feasible to do so.
The relocations have been tough on incarcerated people like Pamela Stevens’ 46-year-old son who was at Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution when Helene hit. Days after the storm, he was evacuated to Harnett Correctional Institution where, she said, he slept for days on a gym floor with over 100 other men. Then he was transferred to Warren Correctional Institution in Manson, where he has been for weeks.
And he might be moved again.
“One day they say they're moving him,” Stevens said. “The next day they're not, and the next day they are. So it’s up in the air. He can't settle in anywhere because he doesn't know if he's gonna stay.”
Stevens said he’s not handling the loss of the routine he had developed at Avery-Mitchell Correctional well. Her son had worked in the kitchen and cleaned at night as well as helped another incarcerated person in a wheelchair, she said.
Now, Stevens said, she hears the stress and unease in her son’s voice when they talk on the phone daily. He doesn’t have those activities to occupy his time, and she said his placement on a top bunk bed in a housing unit with gang members is distressing.
“When I talk to him on the phone, I can hear the stress in his voice — the tension,” Stevens said. “He's totally preoccupied. He told me, ‘You just got to look over your shoulder at all times here.’ He's constantly paranoid. He said he’s not getting much sleep.”
Returning to a recovery zone
Brent Bailey, coordinator of the Buncombe County Reentry Council, helps people who have been released from prison navigate the challenges of reestablishing a life in the community. It’s a different environment helping people return home to a recovery zone after incarceration.
In the first weeks after the storm, Bailey said fewer people were returning to the area. The transitional houses where many newly released people first stay lacked power and water, so people were diverted to other locations.
But now people have resumed returning to the region and are finding an unintended positive from the storm, Bailey said.
Reentry is easier in the current moment because of the influx of aid to the area, Bailey explained. Shelters remain open for people needing a place to stay. People can go to Community Care Stations to clean off. Clothing and hot meals are offered at sites around the county. The Asheville city bus fare is free for the rest of the year.
These resources wouldn’t ordinarily be as readily available, Bailey said, but he is glad that barriers that justice-involved people frequently face related to transportation, food and clothing are at least temporarily lessened.
It’s the kind of community support Bailey wishes was always available to people rebuilding their lives after incarceration.
“Some of these things people need, especially as they first reenter, and they shouldn’t need a coinciding natural disaster to go along with it for it to be available.”
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
North Carolina Health News is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina. Visit NCHN at northcarolinahealthnews.org.
