More than 6,600 offenders held by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice gave money from their commissary accounts for Hurricane Harvey aid.
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast 12 years ago, inmates in Texas prisons told their wardens that they wanted to help.
Specifically, they wanted to donate money to hurricane relief funds. So officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice developed a novel system: Inmates, they decided, could give away money saved in their commissary accounts; instead of spending their balances on snacks or sneakers, they would be allowed to give a few dollars to the American Red Cross.
Inmates ultimately cobbled together about $44,000 to help those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. So when Hurricane Harvey spun into Texas in August, some longtime inmates who remembered the previous efforts insisted that officials restart the program.
This time, the fund-raising was even more successful.
In about one month, officials say, 6,663 inmates donated $53,863 for Hurricane Harvey relief — an astonishing sum considering many of the offenders typically have less than $5 in their accounts.
Some of those who had saved gave more — hundreds of dollars, in some instances, a spokesman for the Criminal Justice Department said.
“There wasn’t a person within the prison system who didn’t know a hurricane was going on,” the spokesman, Jason Clark, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Texans are generous people.”
Millions of dollars of relief have poured in from celebrities as well as average Americans, moved by the scope and extent of the destruction caused by Harvey.
And every dollar counts. In early September, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas predicted that the recovery costs might exceed those of Hurricane Katrina, which caused more than $100 billion in damage.
Texas’ prison inmates were not exempt from the hurricane’s effects. Officials evacuated five prison units and temporarily moved about 6,000 offenders during the hurricane, Mr. Clark said. And throughout the storm, prison staff members continued suiting up and coming to work despite having lost their homes.
“These men and women, they have family and friends, too, that were affected,” Mr. Clark said of the inmates. “They saw the television reports and saw what was happening.”
“Straight away,” he added, they began “asking what they could do.”
