Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, including its prisons. Yet rather than evacuate incarcerated people, the state left prisoners locked up in their cells without running water or light to survive the storm on their own. Schuyler Mitchell, who recently covered this story for The Intercept, speaks to Rattling the Bars about this manmade disaster and its consequences.
Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Imagine you are told that a major storm is coming your way, a hurricane of Katrina proportion is coming your way, and you’re told to evacuate. Would you evacuate or would you remain where you at? But more importantly, imagine that you cannot evacuate because you are incarcerated, because you are a prisoner in the prison industrial complex, in a carceral system that has no evacuation plans for the people that are incarcerated, or are imprisoned, or on the plantation. Joining me today is Schuyler Mitchell, who wrote an article called Hurricane-Struck North Carolina Prisoners Were Locked in Cells With Their Own Feces For Nearly a Week. Welcome, Schuyler.
Schuyler Mitchell:
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Mansa Musa:
All right, and tell our audience a little bit about yourself, Schuyler.
Schuyler Mitchell:
Yeah, so I’m an independent investigative journalist. I am a columnist at Truthout, and then I also report for places including The Intercept, which is where I wrote this investigation. I report on a lot of different things, but lots of different instances of power, corruption, cases where the people in power, or powerful corporations, or whatever it is, aren’t treating people with dignity or kind of doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So I do some reporting and research on the prison industrial complex. So yeah, I started working on this story after Hurricane Helene.
Mansa Musa:
Right, and I’m going to open up by saying, well, it’s a quote that you had in your article, say, “We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.” Did anybody come back for them, or if they did come back, how did they come back?
Schuyler Mitchell:
Yeah, so for context, so Hurricane Helene hit in the middle of the night, late Thursday night, early morning hours, Friday, September 27th. And at this one institution called Mountain View in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, from late that night until Wednesday, October 2nd, nearly a week, they didn’t think anybody was going to come back for them. They had no running water, no potable water. There was a shipment of potable drinking water that came several days in. But before that, they were drinking from the sinks is what family members told me, not knowing that what they were essentially drinking was sewer water, because it was non-potable water after the hurricane hit.
They didn’t have lights in their cells, there were some emergency lights that a generator supplied in common areas. And the generator supplied, I heard, power to the prison guards’ laptops or computers, but they didn’t have power in the cell. So yeah, so for five days, thinking about being in darkness, some people reported having water in their cells from flooding if you were on the bottom floor of the facility. Very few food rations. You know, crackers for breakfast or a piece of bread with peanut butter for dinner, and the response was slow.
So there were several facilities throughout Western North Carolina that were eventually evacuated. It was very disorganized is what family members told me, right, where in the case of Mountain View, it’s less than half a mile away from another facility called Avery-Mitchell. And Avery-Mitchell also, their power went out, their water lines were busted, but they got evacuated 24 hours before Mountain View did.
And when you’re in those conditions, 24 hours, and you don’t know if anybody’s going to come save you, that’s a long time, when they’re right next to each other. So the family members were saying they didn’t understand why one facility got evacuated first, and even that one, they had a multi-day delay. And there was a period of many days where family members were trying to get information about what was happening at these facilities, but prisons are by design a black box. It’s really hard [inaudible 00:04:37]-
Mansa Musa:
Right, right.
Schuyler Mitchell:
… information about what’s going on.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, let’s talk about this, then. Okay, how did you become involved? Somebody reached out to you and asked that you could possibly intervene or make some noise about their conditions? That’s how you initially got involved, or was you just doing your due diligence?
Schuyler Mitchell:
Yeah, so it’s actually the second. I knew that Western… I’m originally from North Carolina, I’m not from the mountains, but I know, I grew up going there a lot, I spent a lot of time there, I knew that there were lots of facilities that were in the path of the hurricane. And so I just started doing some research to see if I had seen any other reporting about what happened at those prisons. And there was actually a press release on the morning of October 2nd from the North Carolina Department of Corrections that said that they’d evacuated a certain number of facilities. [inaudible 00:05:33]-
Mansa Musa:
Yeah.
Schuyler Mitchell:
… was five. And so then, what I did was I actually took the names of the different facilities from that press release, and I put them on Facebook, because after the hurricane, Facebook was still a big place for where people were exchanging information. There were all these different Facebook groups, like Hurricane Helene Safety Check-In, where people were posting, trying to find their loved ones. It was a horrible situation across the western part of the state. But what I saw when I put in the name Mountain View or Avery-Mitchell were posts for days of people posting in these groups, commenting on the Department of Corrections Facebook page, saying, “What’s going on? Do you have any information for me?”
And then, finally, after several days, on October 2nd, there were a couple posts from people who said, “I finally heard from my loved one, he gave me a call. He’s been evacuated, but for days, they were in horrible conditions.” And people were posting that, and so I just reached out to them and I spoke to… There were at least five people I spoke to that had direct knowledge of what happened at Mountain View, but then I also spoke to like five or four more family members as well from other facilities.
And everybody had the same story about lack of communication and just utter panic for nearly a week, just not knowing what was going on. And then, specifically in the case of Mountain View, everybody told me the exact same things about their loved ones calling them, finally, after nearly a week and saying, “I’m okay. I’m now on the eastern part of the state, but the things that I saw in Mountain [inaudible 00:07:11] for nearly a week were just horrible.” And having to defecate in plastic bags because the toilets are full.
You know, I went to the Department of for comment. Obviously as a journalist, it’s something that you have to go to them for comment. And what the spokesperson said to me, they acknowledged that this had happened, and they were like, “That was a solution that they devised on their own,” and were kind of dismissive, which is interesting, because the question is, “Well, why did they have to devise that solution?” So yeah, I actually found the story just from looking on Facebook and reaching out to people who had been impacted.
Mansa Musa:
And in terms of the information, and you definitely was able to capture what was going on in real time. Talk about the… Because you just mentioned about the Department of Corrections or the Division of Corrections response, and they sanitized it in certain quotes. You know, “No, no, we had water,” plausible denial. But talk about, in your investigation, was you ever able to discern from them, do they have evacuation plans for these type of events?
Schuyler Mitchell:
I mean, they said they did. Again, it’s like a black box, so it’s really hard to know. I think what we do know from what happened is that there was not a proactive response. If they’d had a proactive plan in place, there wouldn’t have been a five-day period where people weren’t knowing when their next meal was coming, or not knowing if they would have enough water. One of the things that I heard was people making decisions about, “Should I use this water to bathe myself or drink it?” You know, because there were limited rations.
So I don’t know what the plan was. Eventually, they did follow through on a plan, because they did evacuate certain facilities. But who’s to say what if things went according to their plan that they already had in place, that either way, the outcome was not what it should have been. And I did see that there is actually a petition circulating, asking the federal system… And so I should clarify, these were state prisons, but the federal DOJ, they also have a Bureau of Prisons. And yeah, there was a petition circulating, asking the government to have a clear evacuation plan in place. And I think we saw this happen then again in Florida, right, with Hurricane [inaudible 00:09:53]-
Mansa Musa:
Right, right, talk about that.
Schuyler Mitchell:
… after. Yeah, so less than, what, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton was barreling towards Florida, and there were state correctional facilities that were in the mandatory evacuation zones that were not evacuated. Ultimately, I didn’t see any reporting after that said… There was a lot of coverage of Florida before that happened I think because of the situation had just happened in North Carolina. I think people were more attuned to the fact that this was something that they needed to keep an eye on, the fact that incarcerated people just are often overlooked and [inaudible 00:10:30]-
Mansa Musa:
Right, right.
Schuyler Mitchell:
So there was definitely a lot more pressure on the State Department of Corrections in advance of Hurricane Milton to evacuate facilities. I don’t believe they did, but it’s just another example of different state systems also have different policies and respond in different ways. And one of the things that the family members I spoke with fed again and again was just people, they feel overlooked, they feel like nobody cares. And obviously, lots of people are really hurting across Western North Carolina from [inaudible 00:11:07] hurricane, but people often just don’t think about people who didn’t have any choice to evacuate or any choice of what they were going to do when the storm hit.
And we know there were lots of people that were missing after the hurricane, but these are all people that are in the state’s care, right? It’s the state’s responsibility to ensure their well-being. There should have never been a period where people didn’t know where their loved ones were. They knew, they were in the state system. Yeah, and it’s just going to be an issue that’s going to continue.
The Intercept actually did a project several years ago called Climate and Punishment, where they mapped DHS data about prisons across the country, with different information about wildfire, heat, and flood [inaudible 00:11:54]-
Mansa Musa:
Right, right, right.
Schuyler Mitchell:
And they did this in-depth investigation about the impact of the climate crisis on prisons. But whether it’s flooding, or severe heat, or wildfires, this is just an issue that’s not going away. And I think it’s right to call for more transparency about what the plan is in these.
Mansa Musa:
And I want to unpack some of you say for the benefit of our audience. Like you say, a mandatory evacuation site, a lot of the plantations in the prison industrial complex is in areas that will be evacuated, because of any type of climate situation, or be it, like you say, fires, or hurricanes, or rain, or inclement weather, like frigid weather. A lot of these prisons or a lot of these plantations are in these areas that they designate. They designate this as an evacuation zone, “This is a mandatory evacuation.”
So the reality is that they could look at it and say, “Okay, this is a mandatory evacuation zone. Oh, we got four facilities that house anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 people collectively, or more.” And in terms of, all right, you recognize that the population that need to be evacuated, but when you start making an assessment of evacuation, they don’t even include them in the conversation. They’re not even included in the conversation in the sense of, “Okay, they’re in the path of Hurricane Helene. We know it’s coming, we telling people to get out of town. What is our plan for this population right here?”
They don’t have no plan, because that’s by the design. It’s by design. You know, according to the 13th Amendment, we are slaves under the system of the 13th Amendment. So therefore, the value that’s associated with our lives is not. Was you able to glean this from your research, or from this particular article, or your study in general?
Schuyler Mitchell:
Yeah, I mean, so the interesting thing in Western North Carolina was there weren’t the same mandatory evacuation orders, just because I think that region is not used to seeing these types of hurricanes. So I think it just really walloped the area. And it did take people by surprise, even though there were warnings and forecastings. But unlike in the case of Florida, where there were absolutely mandatory evacuation zones, where they’ve made the explicit choice not to evacuate those prisons…
I think, yeah, I mean, but in reporting on the prison system, you see this time and time again, where it’s incredibly hard, for example, for incarcerated people to win cases that they bring against prisons or prison guards for mistreatment, or for instances where their human rights have been violated. The bar for winning those lawsuits and getting any sort of justice is intentionally set really high. One of the women that I spoke with for my article, her husband was one of the people at Mountain View. They have three kids, a teenager and two young kids. And she said to me that she herself has also been in prison before. And she said, “When he was telling me about some of his experiences in the past, I didn’t really believe it could be that bad. But then, I actually was on the inside and I saw it myself.”
And that’s something that didn’t even make its way into the piece, but she was saying… But she was the one who said, actually at the end of the story, “When you’re in there, you’re treated less than a human. You’re treated like a rabid dog,” and that was an exact quote. And so yeah, once you start talking to people, lots of people have similar stories, and I think the climate crisis really exacerbates these existing inequalities, and really reveals how neglected people can be. And when I went for comment to the Department of Corrections, they said, “Well, lots of people in Western North Carolina have it way worse.” That was almost exactly what the response was. And even just in the official statement, there wasn’t a full, of course, acknowledgement of what people had said that they had gone through.
One of the other things that was interesting to me about Mountain View was actually a day before the hurricane hit, somebody committed suicide at that facility. And what one of the women said to me, she was asking questions about, “What was it like there, that he decided that he needed… That was his only way out?” And Mountain View, it’s single cells, so people are locked in their cells for most of the hours of the day, and they’re allowed to do their job for the lunch hour. But it was pretty high, it was a medium-security facility, but there wasn’t a lot of freedom of movement at that facility.
And it’s not the exact same thing as solitary, but everybody I spoke to… I spoke to somebody also who was incarcerated and who lived through everything that happened at Mountain View. His partner was able to connect me with him through the Department of Corrections phone system. And I spoke to him, and they all say that it’s a pretty… Even when there’s not a hurricane, it’s not a great place to be. I guess nobody expects prisons to be great or anything like [inaudible 00:17:58]-
Mansa Musa:
Right. No, I understand. [inaudible 00:17:58]-
Schuyler Mitchell:
… learn about it. It’s quite bad, the conditions that people have to-
Mansa Musa:
And the crazy part about that is, like you say, it’s medium security, and the security paradigm, you have max, medium, minimum, and pre-release. So in the case of Mountain View, most of these individuals are transitioning out. So it’s not like they’re having served significant time. But more importantly, the reality is that the system in North Carolina or throughout this country is really designed to dehumanize us, to ignore our humanity.
And when, like you say, global warming, climate crisis that’s developing in the world, people that’s incarcerated or on the plantation, we got it bad, because we’re not considered human to begin with. We’re considered slaves. And in terms of the monies that’s going to be invested in trying to get us out of a situation that’s a natural disaster, is not priority for the state. But answer this question, have you ever been able to glean, like is it a FEMA response that could be used for this type of situation, in hindsight?
Schuyler Mitchell:
I’m not sure about how the FEMA response would overlap with the State Department of Corrections, unfortunately. Yeah, I think that again, what we do now is that this is a population of people that are always an afterthought, and yeah, whatever resources that can be made available to prevent this from happening again, clearly, there’s a need for that. But yeah, I don’t know about FEMA specifically in this case.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, and in terms, as we get ready to close out, because you talk to the family members, and tell our audience how your sense coming from them, their anxiety and their stress, as it relates to this type of situation? Because really, we need people to understand that, okay, “You saying that I did something to go to prison, got that. You’re saying that I’m serving a sentence, got that. You’re saying that I’m going to be confined to a prison, got that. But you’re also saying, according to the Constitution of the United States, I can’t be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. I got to be treated like a human being at some junction. But at the same token, my family is not locked up, my family is not sentenced to a certain time, and my family is my family, and taxpayers, and have a right to know what’s going on with me.” Talk about the family members or your conversation. What did you take away from them?
Schuyler Mitchell:
Yeah, I mean, my conversations with family members were incredibly moving. And I spoke to people who… This was an all-men’s prison, so it was people’s sons, partners, husbands, yeah, siblings, whatever that were in there. And one of the things that someone said to me, she was like, “Nobody cares or pays attention to this until someone like you, a journalist starts looking into it.” That was one sentiment that I heard. There was another woman where her 26-year-old son was one of the people in the prison, and she was saying, “He might be 26, but he’s still my son. And I called around and I got a voicemail for somebody who works in the prison system, and the voicemail said, ‘Please only leave messages in the case of emergency. Don’t leave a message if you’re asking about the whereabouts of a certain inmate’,” was the voicemail. And she said to me, she was like, “How dare he say that? Because it is an emergency if I don’t know where my son is.”
And another person said, “My Sammy, my loved one, he did something bad. He deserves to serve his time, but he’s still a person [inaudible 00:22:18]-“
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Schuyler Mitchell:
“… and he’s still very much loved.” And that was, of course, the message over, and over, and over again was like, these are people, people love them. They knew they were going to prison. They didn’t sign up for being cruel and unusual punishment, days of not being evacuated. And yeah, I think if everybody could have the conversations that I had… I mean, I was very grateful to these people for opening up to me and trusting me with their stories. I think there’s so much more coverage that needs to be done on this issue.
I mean, there’s just no end to the amount of abuses that take place across the federal and state prison system. I mean, this wasn’t even a private prison, so that’s a whole other layer. But yeah, everybody just really was saying that they felt like no one cared and they felt unheard. And I think one of the things that is good about doing this work is you do see how many people do care and want to talk about this issue. And I think as many people that can to spread important information about the prison system, like what you’re doing on the show, and report on the issue, it’s so important, and people really, really value that.
Mansa Musa:
And as we close out, I want to make sure that I always understand what we’re talking about, because if this same situation took place in a foreign country, that United States citizens was being held in captivity, that a national disaster came through there, and it came back to this country that they were standing in their feces, they was drinking sewer water, they didn’t know whether they were going to live or die, they was given food that was not nutritional, we would be up in arms and an uproar, protesting, everybody, the four winds, talking about taking any funding we giving this country, stopping everything.
We are coming short in sending a [inaudible 00:24:21] courier over there to take our people out there or take their citizen out. We’re talking about right here in the United States of America, and where we don’t have the common decency as a state to recognize that we are dealing with human beings, no matter what they did, that this is human beings that we’re dealing with. As we close out, what do you want our audience to take away from this article, Ms. Mitchell?
Schuyler Mitchell:
Yeah, I mean, I think what you just said is a really great point. I think yeah, what I want people to take away from this article is this is one specific prison, one specific case after one specific hurricane. I mean, think about it on a national scale, think about how many people we have in this country that are incarcerated. We have a massive prison industrial complex. Yeah, and I think just as we are all increasingly impacted by natural disasters and are able to make choices about what we do in those situations, this is a massive population of people that has, by definition, had choice taken away from them. And they don’t [inaudible 00:25:37]-
Mansa Musa:
Exactly.
Schuyler Mitchell:
They don’t have a say, and they don’t have a voice, and it’s really hard to get information in and out. So yeah, it’s just many layers of problems that are piled on top of each other. And yeah, that’s I think my biggest takeaway. And what you said is so important. If this happened anywhere else, people would be able to, I think, kind of see it for what it was. But it’s hard to see it when it’s in your own country, for a lot of the time.
Mansa Musa:
And if our audience, and the viewers, and listeners want to follow your work, how can they stay in touch with you or track your work?
Schuyler Mitchell:
Yeah, I am on Twitter. It’s my first name, Schuyler, with an underscore in between the Y and the L. And I think my email should be on my website, but if people actually have any insights, have anybody that they know that’s in a prison or anything that they want me to look into or cover, I’m super passionate about this issue, and I love to do investigations. So if you need somebody to dig deep, I’m your girl. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me with any tips as well.
Mansa Musa:
There you have it. Real News, Rattling the Bars. Schuyler, you rallied the bars today. You brought to the attention to raise the national consciousness about how do we treat people as human beings. How do we treat people? Should we treat them as human beings or should we treat them as numbers? It stands to reason that the state of North Carolina is looking at people as numbers, and in both sense, a number in terms of how much money they can make off of them, and a number in the sense of when they don’t have to do nothing for them, they just write them off.
We want our audience to understand, and we want our listeners to be mindful of this here, we’re talking about human beings. This is a humane issue. This is not an issue that’s dealing with whether a person did something or didn’t do something. They are wards of the state, and when you say you’re a ward of the state, the state is obligated to provide for your safety, and your safety is important, and your safety should be not compromised by virtue of you not having an evacuation plan in effect, for you not having the necessary infrastructure to ensure that people that are under your custody that’s coming home, it wasn’t like they not coming, they coming home at one time or another, and that you treat them less than human. Schuyler, we appreciate you. We appreciate your advocacy, and we look forward to staying in touch with you. Thank you very much.
Schuyler Mitchell:
Thank you so much.
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