Some jails across the Tampa Bay region, including in Pinellas County, did not evacuate ahead of Hurricane Milton. Other jails in Hernando, Pasco, Manatee and Sarasota counties also didn’t evacuate, according to WUFT.
Randy Warren with the Manatee County Sheriff's Office told Newsweek Thursday the Manatee County Jail "remained fully operational" during the storm, and except for a few people, no one was moved to the top floor of the two-story building. The jail was in evacuation Zone A.
Warren also said there wasn't flooding or damage to the facility, which used emergency generators to keep the power on, and there weren’t issues with drinking water or food.
A spokesperson for the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office also told The Appeal Thursday the Pinellas County Jail had power and no issues with water. They said there was no flooding in the facility, which was in mandatory evacuation Zone B.
Ahead of Milton making landfall, organizations on social media called on state and county officials to evacuate jails. The Florida Department of Corrections said on its website it relocated 5,950 people.
“As pointed out by Florida Prisoner Solidarity organizers, the vast majority of these evacuations are from work release camps, halfway houses, and other low-security facilities to ‘hardened facilities’ some of which are literally across the street,” an Instagram post from Fight Toxic Prisons said.
Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a prisoner-led organization, said on X (formerly Twitter) people in a Florida jail faced “inhumane treatment and psychological terror from being intentionally left in a locked boxes in evacuation zones.”
Power's out in here, and the COs are hiding in their offices while we’re left in the dark. We’re shouting for meds and updates, but no one’s listening. Just trying to hold on and hope this storm doesn’t swallow us whole. -- FL inside #HurricaneMilton
— Jailhouse Lawyers Speak - 👊🏿 🇸🇩 🇵🇸 🇨🇩 (@JailLawSpeak) October 10, 2024
Earlier in the week, a Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson told WUFT the county jail was a “secure building” where incarcerated people and employees would be safe.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in a media briefing Tuesday the average daily population in the jail is about 3,100 incarcerated people.
“We’re going to an all-hands-on-deck staffing model, it’s probably another 800 people that will be out there. The evacuation plan for the jail is a vertical evacuation plan, so we move everybody up. Again, with that number of inmates, it’s really not possible, feasible to evacuate people out of there, and it’s unnecessary, because we can go up, so everybody will be safe out there,” Gualtieri said in the briefing.
A Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson also told WUFT Orient Road Jail transported incarcerated people to Falkenburg Road Jail. Orient Road Jail was in mandatory evacuation Zone A, while Falkenburg Road Jail was in Zone E.
On Tuesday, a Manatee County Jail deputy told Newsweek the two-story facility had supplies and sandbags, and incarcerated people could be moved to the top floor of the building if there's flooding.
There are over 28,000 incarcerated people in Florida counties that were partially or completely under an evacuation order, according to an analysis by The Appeal.
