YOU THINK YOU HAVE IT BAD
FMC Carswell, the system’s only woman’s medical center, avoided the power outages that affected Fort Worth and the rest of Texas in the recent winter storm. But the weather left the prison – and the 1,066 women confined there – without heat or hot water when the outside temperature fell to 5 degrees.
The inmates “are trapped in there with feces, with water up to their ankles. They do not have anywhere to defecate at. There’s no cleaning supplies. There’s no water made available,” Cynthia Simons, the women’s fellow at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, told Filter.
Emery Nelson of the BOP’s public affairs division disputed the inmates’ complaints. “Inmates were given advance warning of the planned water shut-off and were provided additional water during the repair period, which lasted approximately four hours,” Nelson said in an email. “Please note, FMC Carswell did not experience a sewage leak and at no time was there sewage inside the housing unit,” he wrote.
Yup, those doggone women inmates made it all up, the parts about “being unable to flush the toilets, which quickly filled with feces and urine. Women defecated into trash bags, which began to pile up, but lacked running water to wash their hands,” as well as reports that women inmates were fishing feces from overflowing toilets with their hands.
The San Francisco Bay View reported, “seven hours after the water had stopped, prison staff allowed some of the women to walk to the prison’s hospital building with five-gallon buckets. At the hospital, which had not lost water, women filled the buckets with water, then schlepped them across the snow to the housing unit, and bucket-flushed the toilets. But, with over 500 women from both units using them, the toilets soon filled with human waste again.”
In case you’re pondering who to believe, this is the same BOP that denied any problems at MDC Brooklyn while inmates were freezing in the dark. And (last June) that COVID was under control. And that all employees were following CDC guidelines for wearing personal protective equipment… You don’t have to look too hard for examples. There’s kind of a trend.
San Francisco Bay View, Unprepared for COVID, Texas women’s prison was equally unprepared for Uri (February 27, 2021)
Filter magazine, In Texas Prisons, Horror Stories Emerge From Catastrophic Blackout (February 23, 2021)
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Women, some sick with COVID-19, left ‘freezing’ without heat at Fort Worth medical prison (Februry 16, 2021)
– Thomas L. Root
