When
hurricane Katrina hit, there was no evacuation plan for 7,000 prisoners
in the New Orleans city jail, generally known as Orleans Parish Prison (OPP),
or the approximate 1,500 prisoners in nearby jails. According to
first-hand accounts gathered by advocates, prisoners were abandoned in
their cells while the water was rising around them. They were subjected
to a heavily armed “rescue” by state prison guards that involved
beatings, mace and being left in the sun with no water or food for
several days, followed by a transfer to state maximum security prisons.
Although their treatment brought national attention to the condition of
prisoners in Louisiana, and comparison to prison abuse scandals from
Attica to Abu Ghraib, local government officials have attempted to dodge
accountability and continue with business as usual.
Raphael Schwartz, a
26-year-old Missouri man arrested and imprisoned for public intoxication
in New Orleans on August 27, was sprayed with mace and abandoned by
officers in a locked cell with seven other prisoners. According to
papers filed by the ACLU of Louisiana, the man had no ventilation and
nothing to eat or drink for four days.
Quintano Williams, a 31-year-old office manager picked up on marijuana
charges just before the storm hit, testified in ACLU papers to being
abandoned for days and then relocated to Hunts Correction Facility, a
rural Louisiana maximum security prison, where he was left with
thousands of detainees on a football field. There, he witnessed
stabbings, but, he said, prison staff “did not interfere with anything
that was going on as long as people did not try to get out of the
area.”
Rachel Francois was arrested in mid-August, and as far as her family was
able to discover never had charges filed against her. “We tried to bail
her out,” her mother, Althea Francois, said. “It was the day before
Katrina, and the bail bonds places were all closed. If they had been
open, she would have been released that day. Instead, we could not get
her released until two months later.” Francois, a prisoner-rights
advocate, searched for two weeks before she found out where her daughter
was being held.
Rachel and other women were taken to Hunts and then Angola, an all-male
prison. “When I found out she was at Angola prison, just the idea really
broke my heart,” her mother said. “She didn’t have a bed until the last
few days she was there. She had no food for four days. She saw them
throw food at the men like they were animals, but even then they didn’t
give the women anything. The women were having panic attacks and were in
fear for their lives.”
Most of the people trapped in this brutal web of governmental abuse and
neglect would have been released within a few weeks even if convicted.
However, as of this writing several months later, many remain locked in
maximum security prisons such as Angola, Louisiana’s notorious former
slave plantation.
The flooding of New Orleans showed vividly the results of local, state
and federal governments’ misplaced priorities, as well as the
privatizing and militarizing of relief. In the months after the
disaster, while the people of New Orleans wanted to return and rebuild
their city, what they got instead was “security.” Hundreds of National
Guard troops, as well as police forces from across the U.S. and private
security forces including Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli company
called Instinctive Shooting International began patrolling the nearly
empty city.
Long before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was hit by hurricanes of
disinvestment, deindustrialization, corruption and neglect. Louisiana
has the highest rate of incarceration in the country -- 816 sentenced
prisoners per 100,000 state residents. By comparison, Texas comes in a
distant second place with 694 per 100,000. Although Blacks make up 32
percent of Louisiana’s population, they constitute 72 percent of the
state’s prison population. Pre-Katrina, New Orleans industry had already
left, and most remaining work involved low-paying, transient, insecure
jobs in the service economy.
Orleans Parish Prison was the eighth largest jail in the country, made
up of several buildings located in Midcity New Orleans. The population
of the jail was predominantly people from the city’s many low-income
communities and communities of color. The jail also rented out cells to
the federal government to house immigration detainees and other federal
prisoners. However, most of the prisoners left behind as the jail
flooded had not been convicted of any crime, but were being held
pre-sentencing. Lawyers and researchers working on behalf of the
prisoners say that most were accused of misdemeanors, such as minor drug
possession, parking violations and public drunkenness.
Mary Howell is a civil rights lawyer who has been active in defense of
prisoners from OPP for years. “Last year, 80,000 people came into OPP as
arrestees,” she said. “Very few were eligible for rehabilitation
programs. This prison has mostly been warehousing people. We’ve suffered
under a policy where the city builds a huge jail that is then required
to be filled with human beings, or else it's a waste of money.”
“Being a sheriff in Louisiana is one of the most powerful positions in
the state,” adds Howell.
“There's virtually no
oversight. At the time of the hurricane they had about 1,200 employees
under the Sheriff in Orleans Parish. Those employees, under state law
can also be used by the sheriff for political campaigns. That adds up
to a political empire and a patronage empire.”
Ursula Price is a staff investigator for A Fighting Chance, a nonprofit
organization that works for indigent defense in Louisiana, as well as a
part of Safe Streets Strong Communities, a coalition dedicated to
transforming New Orleans' criminal justice system. She has been working
around the clock since the hurricane hit, despite losing everything she
owned in the flooding of New Orleans. “Investigating what happened to
these prisoners and where they are is not supposed to be our job. This
should be the city’s concern,” she said.
Initial reports gathered from testimony of both inmates and guards put
the number of inmates unaccounted for anywhere between a dozen and
several hundred. Sheriff Marlin Gusman has been sticking with an
official statement that, "all inmates housed in Orleans Parish were
safely evacuated from our 10 facilities by boat and transported to state
and parish facilities by bus." He also suggested to media that reports
of abuse come from “disgruntled” inmates who “lie.” Human Rights Watch
and ACLU responded that these reports are consistent from many different
prisoners and also match with reports from interviews with guards at OPP.
In late November, Gusman’s office quietly put out arrest warrants for 14
inmates, while still denying that any were missing, other than two who
had been recaptured.
The defense of these prisoners has been managed by just a few
organizations and individuals. Phyllis Mann, a lawyer from rural
Alexandria, Louisiana, found that many of the OPP prisoners had been
moved to a prison near her, and she started visiting them. According to
Price, Mann dropped everything in her private practice to dedicate
herself to their legal defense -- and had 12 former prisoners living in
her house.
Official negligence is just the beginning of the obstacles advocates
have faced. “Immediately after the flooding, the governor issued an
order suspending the clock on court proceedings,” Price said. The state
no longer had a time limit -- formerly 60 days -- under which to present
charges or release prisoners. “It's stopped due process,” Price
continued. “Almost all of the public defenders have been laid off. There
are only seven left in Orleans Parish. Meanwhile, in trying to defend
these folks, we have massive travel costs and almost no funding.”
For the prisoners, there are other hardships. “These are Katrina
survivors, but they’re not getting their FEMA money or Red Cross aid or
food stamps,” said Price. “They’ve lost contact with their families;
many have children and they don’t know where they are.”
Ross Angle, who has since been released, told Human Rights Watch,
“Picture waking up everyday in a prison somewhere -- you don't even know
where you are -- knowing you were supposed to be free, not knowing how
long they were going to keep you there. Not knowing if it would ever
end. After they moved me, I kept asking for someone to look at my case,
and they just kept telling me, ‘We're waiting on the DOC guys, we don't
know anything.' If my lady wasn't seven months pregnant, calling them
everyday and yelling, then I would probably still be there … It made me
feel worthless.”
After the hurricane, the incarceration of suspected “looters” was the
first city function to restart. Due process and civil liberties were
almost nonexistent for new arrestees, who were put in cages in a
makeshift prison at a Greyhound bus station, with no access to phones or
lawyers. When ACLU attorney Katie Schwartzmann went to observe
proceedings, a sheriff’s deputy at first refused her access, as well as
taking and reading her notepad.
According to advocates and recently released prisoners, new arrestees
are offered a choice -- either plead guilty and be put to work on city
cleanup crews, or plead not guilty and face months in Angola prison with
no access to a lawyer.
From the initial images broadcast around the world, demonizing the
people of New Orleans as “looters,” and criminals, there have been two
very different visions struggling for the future of the city. One
vision is a vision of “security,” exemplified by Governor Blanco
bringing in National Guard troops with the words, “They have M-16s and
they are locked and loaded ...These troops know how to shoot and kill,
and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they
will.” This is a vision of corporate security and restructuring, handing
the city over to Blackwater Security’s armed guards and Halliburton’s
disaster profiteers, while “redeveloping” Black neighborhoods into golf
courses and luxury housing.
The other vision is of justice and human rights. This vision involves
restoring jobs, health care and housing for New Orleans, rather than
offering minimum wage dead-end jobs, crumbling infrastructure and more
prisons. It is a vision supported by the work of countless activists
and organizers from around the US, as well as the overwhelming majority
of the people of New Orleans.
“Despite all of the horror we are seeing daily, my hope is this is an
opportunity for change,” Price said. “OPP corruption is being laid bare
-- people being held past their time is nothing new in this system, it’s
just more extreme now. This is something to organize around and fight
against.”
(This article has been slightly altered from the version appearing in
Colorlines Magazine)
Tamika Middleton is the Southern
Regional Coordinator for Critical Resistance and a member of the
People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition.
Jordan Flaherty is a resident of New
Orleans, an organizer with New Orleans Network and an editor of Left
Turn Magazine. His previous articles from New Orleans are at
www.leftturn.org/articles/SpecialCollections/katrina.aspx.
GRASSROOTS, PEOPLE OF COLOR-LED GULF COAST ORGANIZATIONS TO DONATE
TO: www.leftturn.org/Articles/Viewer.aspx?id=689&type=W
Other Resources for information and action
* Reconstruction Watch
* Common Ground
* People's Hurricane Fund
* Justice for New Orleans
*
Black
Commentator
* New Orleans
Network
*
Families and Friends of
Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
* Four Directions
Solidarity Network
* Color Of Change
*
Critical Resistance: Comprehensive info and action related to
prisoners in New Orleans
Other Articles by Jordan
Flaherty
*
Privatizing
New Orleans
*
Loss
and Displacement at the Calliope with Jennifer Vitry