After a coalition press conference demanding prison releases due to overcrowding caused by Hurricane Helene, Emancipate NC joined Disability Rights NC, the ACLU of North Carolina, and six other human rights advocacy groups in a call for action. Emancipate NC was featured in numerous press articles spotlighting the issue. Despite these efforts, conditions in North Carolina prisons remain dire, with no progress reported in negotiations with the State regarding prisoner releases.
“What needs to happen in order to avoid unconstitutional conditions within our prisons in North Carolina is for people to be let out of cages,” said Dawn Blagrove, executive director of Emancipate NC, at the news conference. “That was necessary and true before the hurricane, but it’s even more necessary today. The state is incapable of properly providing humane conditions and constitutional care for the people who are inside of prisons.”
“We already had overcrowding in multiple prisons,” she said. “We already had at least a 30 percent understaffing in prisons across the state. We have had to relocate those folks from those western prisons to prisons where they were already at capacity, where there wasn’t enough staff. And the conditions have only gotten worse.”
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