New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters

Officers Deserted a Jail Building, Leaving Inmates Locked in Cells

As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city's jail, Human Rights Watch said today.

Inmates in Templeman III, one of several buildings in the Orleans Parish Prison compound, reported that as of Monday, August 29, there were no correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates [prisoners]. These inmates [prisoners], including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level.

"Of all the nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst," said Corinne Carey, researcher from Human Rights Watch. "Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling."

Human Rights Watch called on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the Orleans Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, and to establish the fate of the prisoners who had been locked in the jail. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, which oversaw the evacuation, and the Orleans Sheriff's Department should account for the 517 inmates who are missing from list of people evacuated from the jail.

Carey spent five days in Louisiana, conducting dozens of interviews with inmates evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, correctional officers, state officials, lawyers and their investigators who had interviewed more than 1,000 inmates evacuated from the prison.

The sheriff of Orleans Parish, Marlin N. Gusman, did not call for help in evacuating the prison until midnight on Monday, August 29, a state Department of Corrections and Public Safety spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. Other parish prisons, she said, had called for help on the previous Saturday and Sunday. The evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison was not completed until Friday, September 2.

According to officers who worked at two of the jail buildings, Templeman 1 and 2, they began to evacuate prisoners from those buildings on Tuesday, August 30, when the floodwaters reached chest level inside. These prisoners were taken by boat to the Broad Street overpass bridge, and ultimately transported to correctional facilities outside New Orleans.

But at Templeman III, which housed about 600 inmates, there was no prison staff to help the prisoners. Inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch varied about when they last remember seeing guards at the facility, but they all insisted that there were no correctional officers in the facility on Monday, August 29. A spokeswoman for the Orleans parish sheriff's department told Human Rights Watch she did not know whether the officers at Templeman III had left the building before the evacuation.

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmate's last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench.

"They left us to die there," Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation.

As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

"The water started rising, it was getting to here," said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. "We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one that I was cool with, he was saying 'I'm scared. I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was crying."

Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells.

Inmates broke jail windows to let air in. They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Apparently at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows.

"We started to see people in T3 hangin' shirts on fire out the windows," Brooke Moss, an Orleans Parish Prison officer told Human Rights Watch. "They were wavin' em. Then we saw them jumping out of the windows .... Later on, we saw a sign, I think somebody wrote `help' on it."

As of yesterday, signs reading "Help Us," and "One Man Down," could still be seen hanging from a window in the third floor of Templeman III.

Several corrections officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the prison, even though the facility had been evacuated during floods in the 1990s.

"It was complete chaos," said a corrections officer with more than 30 years of service at Orleans Parish Prison. When asked what he thought happened to the inmates in Templeman III, he shook his head and said: "Ain't no tellin' what happened to those people."

"At best, the inmates were left to fend for themselves," said Carey. "At worst, some may have died."

Human Rights Watch was not able to speak directly with Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gussman or the ranking official in charge of Templeman III. A spokeswoman for the sheriff's department told Human Rights Watch that search-and-rescue teams had gone to the prison and she insisted that "nobody drowned, nobody was left behind."

Human Rights Watch compared an official list of all inmates held at Orleans Parish Prison immediately prior to the hurricane with the most recent list of the evacuated inmates compiled by the state Department of Corrections and Public Safety (which was entitled, "All Offenders Evacuated"). However, the list did not include 517 inmates from the jail, including 130 from Templeman III.

Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

Human Rights Watch

Posted by Critical Resistance posted 27 September 05

© Copyright 2003, Human Rights Watch
350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA

*************************
MEMBERSHIP IS POWER

Become a dues-paying member of Critical Resistance! Every donation -
big and small - is vital to sustaining CR's fight to end the prison
industrial complex. Go to http://www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=Support-CR, or mail checks to Critical Resistance, 1904 Franklin Street, Suite 504, Oakland, CA 94612. Thank you for your contributions to this struggle.
***************************

Related:

Bush speech declares 'the War on Nature'
The Bush administration plans to use the disaster in the Gulf to push through a trojan horse containing all the right wing economic policies previously touted over the last five years by this regime. However, in order for the plan to succeed Americans must be willing to fight a superpower, with superior air power.

Held Behind Walls In Katrina's Wake
BOGALUSA, La. -- James Cox plunged his scarred, rough hands into the ice bucket to fish out two bottles of Gatorade and handed them to Tammey Duncan. A resident of devastated Washington Parish, she was waiting in line at the emergency-aid station in an industrial park here.

Hurricane Katrina: From people who were there
US: New Orleans: By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard.

How Bush sold New Orleans to Buy Iraq
George W Bush cut short his vacation by two days to go back to Washington, and play guitar. Doesn't look too worried about the utter destruction and desolation in New Orleans, does he? How about initiating a temporary withdrawal from Iraq so that there is enough National Guardsmen and equipment available in Louisiana?

In Praise of Looting
"The Iberville Housing Projects got pissed off because the police started to "shop" after they kicked out looters. Then they started shooting at cops. When the cops left, the looters looted everything. There's probably not a grocery left in this city."

The "Looting" in New Orleans: Not Insane in the Least
Some comments on recent events in New Orleans from an anarchist perspective. Despite the comment from the Philadelphia tourist, I can't find this insane.

Bush Expected to Visit Storm-Ravaged Areas
US: WACO, Texas - President Bush is expected to visit storm-ravaged areas of the Gulf Coast later this week, but first he is returning to Washington to oversee the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

LIFE SKILLS IN US PRISONS: SCA 8

California: On behalf of Senator John Vasconcellos, I am pleased to inform you he has authored and introduced Senate Constitutional Amendment (SCA) 8 pertaining to prisoners and asks for your support of this important legislation.

SCA 8 seeks to place a proposal on the ballot for the people of California to express themselves and make their own choice regarding how best to assure their public safety. This measure proposes to reform our corrections system to live up to its name, and to advance and assure the public safety of all Californians by attending to inmates in ways that hold the most promise for empowering them to cure, or at least curb, their dangerous ways upon their release from prison.

The primary purpose of the entire system of law enforcement and corrections should always be to promote the public safety of all Californians. However, our current system is profoundly failing - having a recidivism and failure rate of close to 70%.

Greater public safety will only be attainable when we better prepare our inmates to live constructive lives. Canada has in place a system which includes the provisions of this bill, and has a success rate of nearly 85% .Louisiana, Ohio, Minnesota, and Maryland have all implemented portions of what is prescribed by this bill, and are having similar success rates.

Maryland, Minnesota, and Ohio did a Tri-state longitudinal study on more than 3000 inmates who received curriculum to enhance their educational level (just one of the rehabilitative components of this legislation). There was a 23% reduction in recidivism with a showing that for every $1 spent on education, there was a $2 return in reduced prison costs.

SCA 8 would require, commencing January 1, 2005, the Director of the Department of Corrections to cause each person incarcerated in state prison, within 90 days of their entry, to be smartly evaluated with respect to his or her educational and vocational level of development and capacity, and with respect to his or her psychological level of development and ability to lead a constructive life.

Based on these evaluations, a program be prescribed and implemented for the inmate that addresses his or her deficient level of psychosocial, educational, and vocational development -- so as to better equip him or her to lead a constructive life upon release from prison so as to promote the public safety upon that person's release from prison. Please send your letters of support to our office for inclusion in upcoming committee hearings.

By Senator John Vasconcellos posted 29 April 03

Prison Rates Among Blacks Reach a Peak, Report Finds

An estimated 12 percent of African-American men ages 20 to 34 are in jail or prison, according to a report released yesterday by the Justice Department.

The proportion of young black men who are incarcerated has been rising in recent years, and this is the highest rate ever measured, said Allen J. Beck, the chief prison demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical arm of the Justice Department.

By comparison, 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group are incarcerated.

The report found that the number of people in United States jails and prisons exceeded 2 million for the first time last year, rising to 2,019,234.

That represented an increase of 0.3 percent in the number of people behind bars, in keeping with a slowdown in the prison boom since the late 1990's, Mr. Beck said. But the number of inmates is still four times what it was before the enormous increase in the prison population began in the mid-1970's.

The small growth in the overall prison population last year included larger changes in some states, the report found.

California, which has the largest state prison system, with 160,315 inmates, had a 2.2 percent decrease in its number of prisoners in 2002.

Texas, which has the second-largest state prison system, with 158,131 inmates, had a drop of 3.9 percent, the report said.

New York, with the fourth-largest state prison system, had a decline of 2.9 percent.

In California, much of the decline stemmed from a ballot referendum two years ago that mandated treatment rather than prison time for nonviolent drug crimes.

The drop in Texas was the result of efforts by state prison officials to save money by finding alternatives to imprisoning parole violators, Mr. Beck said.

In New York the decline was the result of the drop in crime, he said.

The report found that last year, for the first time, the size of the federal prison system surpassed that of any state's, with 161,681 inmates.

Some of this growth in the federal prison system was accounted for by the Federal Bureau of Prisons' takeover of prisons operated by the government of the District of Columbia. But it also is part of the expansion of the federal prison system in recent years as Congress has increased the number of federal offenses, including many drug crimes and gun possession cases.

The report found that the overall prison population was relatively stable last year, but there was a 5.4 percent increase in the number of people confined in local and county jails, with the number rising to 665,475. This was the largest growth in the jail population in five years.

Generally, people sent to jail are awaiting trial or serving sentences of a year or less.

Mr. Beck said the growth in the number of jail inmates could be a result of the increase in crime last year, especially property crimes like burglary, with more suspects now awaiting trial.

Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, said the report highlighted variations in the way states use prisons in their approach to reducing crime.

Louisiana, for instance, had an incarceration rate of 799 inmates per 100,000 of its population, the highest rate in the nation. But Maine, which had the lowest rate, incarcerated 137 inmates per 100,000 of its citizens.

Some of this disparity reflects a higher crime rate in Louisiana compared with Maine, Professor Blumstein said. "But the disparity goes way beyond that into differences in punitiveness," he said.

"People tend to think of us as one nation with one culture," Professor Blumstein said. "I don't think the disparities between states are widely appreciated."

Mr. Beck said that the 12 percent of black men in their 20's and early 30's in jail or prison was "a very dramatic number, very significant."

That is just the rate on a given day, Mr. Beck said. Over the course of a lifetime, the rates are much higher, he said. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has calculated that 28 percent of black men will be sent to jail or prison in their lifetime.

By Deaths In Custody posted 10 April 03

Related:

Justices question prison visitation policies
WASHINGTON: In a case that could affect the visitation rights of millions of prisoners, Supreme Court justices on Wednesday struggled with the question of whether inmates have a constitutional right to visits with friends and family.