Friend,

Wakulla County Florida was under an emergency evacuation order.

Hurricane Helene was on the way, due to plow into the Florida coastline and later grind its way up through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Residents in this low-lying, coastal county south of Tallahassee heeded the warnings and got out. But some people got left behind on purpose.

Prison officials made the conscious decision to leave 3,000 incarcerated citizens held in the Wakulla Correctional Institution, directly in the path of this deadly storm.

Their families were so desperate for information, they resorted to leaving comments on local news reports:

While Wakulla County wasn’t hit quite as hard as some other areas, the question remains: If an emergency evacuation order was put in place to preserve human life, why weren’t incarcerated people part of that evacuation?

We know the answer, because we’ve seen this movie before. 19 years ago, as Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, THOUSANDS of inmates were left behind despite mandatory evacuations.

Pointedly, the sheriff there said he was leaving the inmates “where they belong."

Some of those prisoners were juveniles as young as 10 years old. Some were in jail for minor offenses like public intoxication, waiting for a hearing because they couldn’t afford bail.

Long after the waters receded from that devastating storm, there is still no official death toll of the people left behind in cages, trapped by rising floodwaters. We do know that a subsequent Human Rights Watch report concluded nearly 600 incarcerated Americans were listed as “unaccounted for.”

These are the obvious outcomes of a criminal legal system designed to humiliate and dehumanize people. It has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety.

While Donald Trump plots mass deportations and concentration camps for immigrants and political enemies alike, and Kamala Harris boasts about her work as California’s “Top Cop” – even keeping inmates incarcerated for longer to protect their “prison labor pool – I am the only candidate in this race with a path to the White House and a comprehensive, transformational reform plan for prisons and policing.

If you believe, as I do, that our current incarceration system is as inhumane as it is fundamentally unsustainable, please join me with a donation to our campaign to bring our call for justice to the ballot box.

Our platform recognizes that public safety and justice can only be achieved by preserving human dignity and safeguarding human rights.

We will dismantle the prison industrial complex and end mass incarceration as we know it. My administration will guarantee as a human right a restorative criminal justice system that treats every one of the over 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails with respect, dignity and compassion.

As long as America maintains the current system, we will continue to see the barbarity, the total disregard for human life, and the immeasurable cruelty expand to impact more people.

It must end, and under my administration, it will.

In solidarity and gratitude,

Jill