On Monday, October 8th, two days before Hurricane Michael reached the Florida coast, officials ordered more than a hundred and twenty thousand residents to evacuate their homes. Forecasters had been tracking the storm for nearly a week, and it was growing rapidly. But the Florida Department of Corrections, which oversees the incarceration of almost a hundred thousand people, chose not to evacuate several state prisons, even those that fell within the evacuation zone. On Tuesday, the F.D.C. announced that, “in an abundance of caution,” it had relocated people from six low-security facilities to larger state prisons. Yet some of those prisons were themselves in the path of the storm. One prisoner told his wife, Heather, that he was moved from a low-security facility with only a pillow and a blanket. He was placed in a dormitory at Gulf Correctional Institution, just thirty miles north of Mexico Beach.

On Wednesday morning, with the storm just off the coast, prisoner advocates began to call Florida officials en masse, urging them to change course and undertake a last-minute evacuation. They cited past storms, such as Hurricane Harvey, which flooded prisons and stranded people in cells without electricity, running water, or adequate food. An hour before Michael made landfall, a woman named Jessica heard from her husband, who was in a men’s dormitory at Gulf C.I. “He said that inmates are restless, and that there’s not a lot of staff,” Jessica told me. He described strong winds and power outages, and said the staff had not boarded the windows. Heather’s husband told her that he’d been placed in a dormitory that had been closed for a year. “He said that water was coming under the door,” she told me. (A state prison spokesperson said, “Inmates were housed in normal dormitories.”)

A woman who is incarcerated at Gadsden Correctional Institution, northwest of Tallahassee, called her daughter, Brittany Wallace. A correctional officer had addressed the large women’s dormitory where she’s housed. “If the roof starts to come off, grab your mat, get under the bed, and we’ll see you when it’s over,” the officer had said, according to Wallace. “It almost felt like she was saying bye, at the end of the phone call,” Wallace told me, her voice breaking. “She wants me to tell everybody—my sisters, her grandson, her husband, everybody that still talks to her—that she loves them.”

Hurricane Michael reached the Florida Panhandle just before 2 P.M. It was the most powerful storm to strike the U.S. in half a century. At 2:14 P.M., a woman named Melissa Haymon received a message from her son, who is incarcerated at Liberty Work Camp, a low-security facility that was in the path of the storm. “It sounds like a train is circling around the building,” he wrote, using JPay, a for-profit e-mail service for the incarcerated. “You can feel the wind coming in around the plumbing in the bathroom and all the floors are soaking wet.” When he looked outside, he saw pieces of the roof on the ground. He e-mailed again an hour later. “Water is pouring in from the windows still even though they are shut,” he wrote. “The entire dorm is flooding.”

A man at Gulf C.I. called his mother, Melinda Aronson, around the same time. He said that correctional officers had warned everyone that the roof might give way. “They told us to grab our mats and get under the bunk,” he said, according to Aronson. Minutes later, the roof had collapsed. “Mom, it’s really, really bad here,” he told her. Over the phone, she heard men yelling out the names and phone numbers of their loved ones, hoping that she could let them know that they were alive. Tanner Harden, a college student in Alabama, said his father, who works in maintenance at Gulf C.I., called his family. “He told us the prison’s roof was getting ripped off and that they were stuck in the maintenance building,” Harden wrote to me, in a direct message on Twitter. “He said they couldn’t open the doors because they knew the wind would just snatch it off the hinges if they did.” (A journalist for the Florida Times-Union, Ben Conarck, first reported damage at the prison.)

By Wednesday evening, the storm had passed over the Panhandle. At 7:59 P.M., the F.D.C. issued a press release on its Facebook page: “All Panhandle institutions have checked in and are secured; NO reported injuries to staff or inmates. All inmates have access to food and water. Facility by facility damage assessments are being conducted. Some facilities have sustained damage.” Families began to comment on the post, sharing news and asking about specific facilities. Later that night, after many frantic hours in front of her computer, a woman named Teresa Wray decided to create a Facebook group called “Florida Prisons affected by Hurricane Michael.” Her son had spent the storm inside Calhoun Correctional Institution, which also sustained damage, and she had not heard from him. “I was so tired and upset,” Wray wrote to me. “I had to do something.” More than three hundred people, mostly women, eventually joined the group. In thousands of comments, they shared official updates, posted links to news stories, and relayed accounts from loved ones.

Melissa Haymon was one of many mothers who did not hear from her son that night, or the next day. Growing desperate, she tried e-mailing a state prison official. “We have not heard from him since early evening yesterday,” she wrote. “Do they have adequate fresh water supplies? Do they have food to feed them? I can’t find out any information online about the facility. Please, I beg you to send people to help them.” The official did not respond. Haymon couldn’t understand why, in the days before the storm, her son had not been evacuated.

Earlier this year, in a fact sheet shared with state legislators, the F.D.C. warned that state prisons were “not adequately funded for the existing inmate population.” The Florida legislature had proposed deep funding cuts, which, the document said, would cause “a public safety issue” by preventing the F.D.C. from upgrading its fleet of vehicles. It also said that a reduced budget “would result in the Department’s inability to provide officer safety equipment, impact routine maintenance on aging infrastructures, and have a direct impact on clothing, hygiene items for inmates.” The legislature made the cuts anyway. Governor Rick Scott, who had argued for F.D.C.-funding increases, signed the budget on March 16th. The reductions took effect in June, and, in a second fact sheet on the approved budget, the prison system described severe $9.4 million cuts from “Expenses, Vehicles, Inmate/Food and Clothing, Electronic Monitoring, etc.”

The Governor’s office declined to answer questions about the budget cuts and the state’s emergency response, pointing me to the F.D.C. Then Michelle Glady, the F.D.C.’s director of communications, wrote me an e-mail. “The recent budget reductions did not have an impact [on] our hurricane preparedness,” she insisted. But she added that Julie Jones, the head of the state prison system, “is working tirelessly to mitigate the impacts of these cuts.” When I asked who had made the decision not to evacuate, she said, “FDC makes evacuation determinations in the best interest of public, staff, and inmate safety.”