Assessing Natural Disaster Risks for Incarcerated Individuals in the Gulf Coast of the United States

In the United States, the aims of disaster preparedness have shifted over time. The relatively new conception of natural disasters as the focus of disaster preparedness efforts has led to increasing research regarding how sociodemographic characteristics increase vulnerability to natural disasters. Incarcerated individuals are hyper-vulnerable to natural disasters because many disaster preparedness and mitigation strategies are impractical and or infeasible in correctional settings. This paper aims to examine the level of natural disaster risk faced by incarcerated individuals in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. Furthermore, this paper also disaggregates data on correctional facilities to account for subgroups (women, juveniles, ICE detainees, degree of facility overcrowding) that are likely to increase susceptibility to the negative impacts of natural disasters in correctional settings. The primary sources of data for this project were National Risk Index (NRI) maps produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Heat and Heat-related Illness (HHI) maps published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network. The results of this research showed that overall extreme temperature is the greatest natural disaster risk for incarcerated individuals in the Gulf Coast region. Thirty-eight percent of all correctional facilities in the Gulf Coast region are in a county deemed “very high” risk for extreme temperatures, but importantly, these facilities house nearly half of all the region's detainees. Riverine flooding posed the second greatest risk in terms of the number of detainees and the number of facilities that could be impacted. The results from this research can be directly mobilized by emergency managers at the state, county, and correctional facility levels by highlighting actual risks faced by correctional facilities so that more detailed and targeted disaster preparedness plans can be developed in the future.