CORCORAN, Calif. – Two years after a pair of Kings County prisons narrowly avoided catastrophic flooding, a state audit released last week now argues those prisons would not have been prepared to evacuate quickly.
In fact, the audit argued that most prisons – in addition to California State Prison, Corcoran, and the nearby Substance Abuse Treatment Facility – could not fully evacuate their incarcerated populations within three days.
The audit was conducted by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), an independent agency tasked with overseeing the state’s correctional system. In the face of fast-moving and potentially devastating natural disasters, the agency wrote “having a plan to evacuate a prison within 72 hours is not only reasonable, but necessary to ensure safety.”
“Without the ability to quickly evacuate prisons, it is likely that wildfires, floods, and earthquakes will result in loss of life within the incarcerated population,” the audit continues.
In a statement to KVPR, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) spokesperson Mary Xjimenez responded to say that her agency is coordinating its emergency response with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the state Office of Emergency Services.
“CDCR recognizes the Office of Inspector General’s continued partnership to continue providing robust emergency resiliency efforts,” CDCR spokesperson Mary Xjimenez wrote in a statement to KVPR. “CDCR has dedicated emergency management staff, conducts employee training and large-scale drills, and develops custom exercises based on specific local hazards, among other emergency resiliency work. Each institution also maintains a tailored Institutional Emergency Operations Plan.”
Audit reflects prior concerns
In 2023, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights published a report that warned that more than half of California’s state prisons are vulnerable to floods, wildfires or extreme heat.
The report, produced for the non-profit by graduate students at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, also found that many incarcerated individuals had never participated in evacuation drills, which are required quarterly by CDCR policy, and it raised concern about whether the corrections department had sufficient emergency protocols in place for natural disasters.
This was especially apropos in early 2023, when an unusually warm and wet spring sent melting snow rushing out of the Sierra Nevada and into the San Joaquin Valley. The floodwater submerged about 170 square miles of farmland in Kings and Tulare counties — refilling the lakebed of the long-dried-up Tulare Lake — and at its peak approached to within just a few hundred feet of two prisons in Corcoran.
At the time, KVPR found that some of CDCR’s planning documents were out of date, and questioned why the agency had denied access to any of its statewide or prison-specific emergency plans.
The audit concluded Corcoran’s prisons, with a combined population of roughly 8,000 incarcerated men, would not have been able to evacuate quickly if water had overtopped the levees protecting them.
“It is unlikely the department was prepared to evacuate 8,000 incarcerated people in response to an imminent threat, particularly within 72 hours,” it reads.
This week’s OIG audit “confirms what a lot of us already knew…that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is not ready for natural disasters if they were to occur,” said James King, Director of Programs at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
‘Detailed plans’ missing
The audit also concluded that most facilities’ emergency plans would be inadequate in the face of a natural disaster requiring relocation.
“While most of the site-specific emergency plans we reviewed included procedures to move the incarcerated population to and from locations within the prison, none included detailed plans to evacuate outside the prison gates,” it reads.
According to the audit, one of the limiting factors in evacuation speed is CDCR’s fleet of buses. Buses are kept at just three transportation hubs throughout California, some as far as hundreds of miles away from the state’s most far-flung prisons. And several buses in the fleet have logged more than 700,000 miles — despite an expected lifespan of roughly 500,000 miles.
Many prisons are also filled beyond capacity, and evacuations could drag on for days to weeks.
To address the shortcomings it noted in the audit, the OIG’s office recommended that CDCR update its prisons’ emergency plans to allow for moving inmates and staff within three days, including by setting up evacuation sites nearby.
The audit also recommends adding transportation hubs to keep buses accessible to more prisons, and also bolstering emergency training for prison employees.
“I think this ranks very high in our list of priorities that we as a state should be thinking about,” King, from the Ella Baker Center, said. “We have all of the information we need. Now it's time to act and develop a plan."
King said this is an opportunity for corrections officials to engage with law enforcement and communities across the state to improve their plans – especially since a prison evacuation would affect far more than the thousands of people incarcerated inside.
“This is not just going to affect the people in the prison,” King said. “This is also going to affect the people working in the prison. It's going to affect their families and ultimately spill over into all of the resources of the entire county.”
