'Thank God For AFSCME!'
As Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flooded parts of Louisiana and Texas, corrections officers who belong to AFSCME faced a little-publicized but near-horrific set of imperatives: cut the bars to cells whose automatic doors had no electric power; transfer prisoners via long bus trips without food or bathroom facilities; guard violent inmates without access to weapons; even dodge bullets on an interstate highway.
All belong to one of the following locals: 3056, 3686 (Louisiana Council 17); 3114, 3807, 3921 (Texas Council 7).
At Louisiana's Angola prison, COs had to take in 2,000 prisoners evacuated from other state facilities. The inmates arrived wet, filthy and disoriented. "It was a dangerous situation," Angola Warden Burl Cain says. "They were hot; some evacuated fast might have been armed; mosquitoes were biting; conditions were primitive and disgusting. But the COs didn't complain. They were efficient and professional, and they reflected well on your union." Moreover, most of the Louisiana COs working those dangerous 20- and 30-hour shifts did so not knowing how their own homes and families were faring during the disaster.
"Our AFSCME COs evacuated 7,200 inmates," says Angola's Major Shirley Coody. "Tag teams worked around the clock using blowtorches to cut bars because power was down, taking prisoner histories with pen and paper, and boating them to exits on the interstate, where buses could pick them up and bring them here. As our people guarded the waiting prisoners, they got shot at by Orleans Parish gangs that had looted gun and ammunition shops and were shooting at helicopters and other 'targets.'"
NON-STOP DISTRESS. Some bus rides for transfers covered 600 miles. Because they were short staffed, COs didn't dare stop at restrooms or for food. So prisoners arriving at Angola had to be given showers, fresh clothes and meals, then mats for sleeping in the chapel and gym. In addition, massive rearrangement of cell assignments had to be made. As 2,000 inmates came in, COs were preparing to remove thousands of others elsewhere for better control or centralized medical care; for example, pregnant women were bused to another facility.
"COs pulled together to save lives — that's what they do," Coody says. "They were stressed, exhausted. Our COs even set up a temporary jail at an old Greyhound station, putting up barbed wire and putting down more mattresses."
"It was a long five weeks. AFSCME people worked many hours to determine the status of each prisoner, even though they had lost track of their own families."
THE WRATH OF RITA. Just a few weeks later, Rita impacted still more AFSCME COs, this time in east Texas. Four hundred twenty of them in Beaumont alone saw prison roofs torn off, power knocked out and food dwindle down to rations sufficient only for the inmates in their care. Many COs were stranded without enough gas to get home and back between shifts.
"Inside Beaumont, the gates had closed behind us," says CO Ray Stewart. "We were there with no homes to go back to, no cell phones working and no food. We were scrambling to get prisoners out of the damaged unit.
"We were locked in with prisoners but without weapons, only a few ounces of pepper spray, no way to lock down without electricity, and no lights. We'd set up a few portable toilets. It was stifling, bad smelling. People couldn't bathe for four days or more. Tempers were short.
"On top of that, we ran out of food for the COs. Thank God for AFSCME! Council 7 came with barbecue, sodas, baked beans and potato salad. They fed us for four days. Without them, we'd have had no hot meals — in fact, no food at all."
PREGNANT & PITCHING IN. About 4,000 prisoners were evacuated from Beaumont. Some COs then returned to the damaged prison to protect against the looting of equipment. COs worked overtime for weeks despite a Texas law that forces workers to bank their first 240 hours of overtime, unpaid, until they retire. CO Staci Roberts, 25 and pregnant, put in banked overtime hours working in the highly charged Beaumont situation.
"The prisoners knew we were understaffed and exhausted and that our response time to their acting out might be slower than normal," Roberts recalls. "To add to the problems, they also had no recreation to relieve their stress, and it was terribly hot. On the second day, I learned there'd be no food for COs. Fortunately, AFSCME came with a big truck filledwith food and cooked us chicken, sausage and burgers. They made sure we had plenty to eat."
Adds Stewart, "With twice as many offenders on a unit as normal, and half the officers, that food tasted mighty good." —Joyce Winslow
