A water vapor-enhanced satellite image shows Hurricane Francine as of just before 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024. The storm is approaching the New Orleans metropolitan area after making landfall in the afternoon. (NOAA image)
Sheriffs in three Louisiana parishes evacuated state prisoners and local detainees ahead of Hurricane Francine coming ashore as a Category 2 storm with 100 mph winds Wednesday.
Almost 150 incarcerated people —104 men and 43 women — were evacuated to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola from a temporary lockup holding overflow detainees in New Orleans, said Ken Pastorick, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.
The men and women sent to Angola from New Orleans will be kept separate from each other and apart from the maximum security prison’s general population, Pastorick said.
Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson also freed other people who were being held for low-level crimes ahead of Hurricane Francine, according to The Times-Picayune .
Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre also moved approximately 60 state prisoners in a transitional work program to the St. Charles Parish jail to ride Hurricane Francine.
Cameron Parish, which is under a mandatory evacuation order, transferred 23 incarcerated men from its local jail to a Catahoula Parish jail in the northeastern part of the state, Pastorick said.
While Webre evacuated the men in his transitional work program, he has not moved any detainees from Lafourche’s main jail. Opened in 2019, his new detention center was constructed to withstand a Category 4 hurricane and held up during Hurricane Ida in 2021, he said.
“When we built this jail … it cost us some extra money,” Webre said. “We are redundant with emergency generators and other systems.”
“It’s a lot safer to keep people there than put people on the highway,” Webre said.
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State inmates in the transitional work release program live in a separate building from the fortified jail. The work release facility is temporary because the permanent workforce center was damaged during Hurricane Ida. Three years later, Webre said he still hasn’t received enough money from the federal government to rebuild or repair the original building yet.
Prisoners in work release problems typically hold supervised, private sector jobs for six months to two years immediately before their release, Webre said.
Webre said his temporary workforce center is well constructed but a generator hasn’t been attached to the building yet. Without an independent power source, the sheriff didn’t think he could keep state inmates in the building through the hurricane.
“We have the generator. We just don’t have the switch. We’re not able to find one for this particular generator,” Webre said.
Ahead of Hurricane Francine, state prisoners filled more than 16,000 sandbags for distribution in the community, Pastorick said. Most of that work takes place at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel. The sandbags are then moved to the Louisiana National Guard’s Gillis Long Center in Carville.
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