It took 14-year-old Eddie Fenceroy three agonizing weeks to be reunited with his mother. Eddie and about 150 other incarcerated children had just survived an unprecedented horror: Hurricane Katrina.
For days, the children, alongside 7,000 adults, had nothing to eat and drink. Some drank wastewater. They scrambled onto top bunks, trying not to drown. Then came the evacuation to “safety.”
Lightheaded and dehydrated, the children saw corpses floating in the water. Most guards had long since fled with their families. The remaining guard kept an assault rifle pointed at them. Eddie described how children were shackled but adults weren’t. “[I]t was like they thought we were much faster and could run away,” he said. “Where would we have run? I was hoping to … not die.”
In the past, when hurricanes struck plantations, the owners abandoned the Black people who kept them running. Ships carrying the enslaved sank or crashed onto the shore. And when 2024 brought Hurricanes Helene and Milton, incarcerated people suffered again. Twenty-eight thousand incarcerated Floridians were left in evacuation zones. More than 2,000 were abandoned in North Carolina's locked cells.
The state has dismissed our lost lives as incidental for centuries. Collective punishment. Lost cargo. But none of us, whether trapped in prison or stranded on roofs, are disposable.