Left to Die

Billy Sothern
posted December 14, 2005
(January 2, 2006 issue)


If, as Dostoyevsky claimed, the degree of civilization of a society can be measured by the treatment of its prisoners, we are in even deeper trouble in New Orleans than many realize. In this city, under the radar of most media, the biggest prison crisis since Attica is unfolding. And no one seems to care, because despite Hurricane Katrina's having "exposed" American poverty and racism, mass incarceration of poor black Americans remains an accepted, if overlooked, fact of modern life. After all, the thinking goes, they did the crime, now they have to do the time. However, like everything else in New Orleans, it's not so simple.

The New Orleans jail complex sits behind the old gothic Orleans Parish Criminal Court and backs up to Interstate 10 in a run-down area of the city. On the days following Katrina, the entire complex sat beneath feet of water. At that time the jails housed more than 8,000 prisoners, the majority of whom were pretrial detainees, people with the fundamental presumption of innocence but without the funds for bail or a lawyer to get them out before trial. There was a larger than usual population of pretrial inmates when the storm came because before it arrived the police had conducted sweeps to clear the streets, picking up people for petty crimes like loitering or trespassing, and because other parish jails had evacuated their prisoners to New Orleans.

Despite the universal awareness of the risk of flooding in the city, the low-lying jail failed to execute any real evacuation plan. Instead, even faster than New Orleans police abandoned the citizens of New Orleans, many of the sheriff's deputies who guard the city's prisoners abandoned their charges and left men and women wondering whether they were going to die as water rose in their locked cells. As prisoner Dan Bright told Human Rights Watch, "They left us to die there."

Prisoners helped one another escape the flood by prying open cell doors, breaking through windows and finding higher ground in the jail. While officials deny that any bodies were found, many prisoners who were there insist that they saw floating bodies. Those who made it out were rounded up by the few remaining guards and gathered on a nearby Interstate overpass. People remained there for almost two days--without water, under the sun--appearing as a blur of orange jumpsuits from the CNN cameras in helicopters flying above. They were left to urinate and defecate on themselves, hampered by restraints so tight that a month later attorneys who visited them could still see dark purple bands around their wrists. Eventually buses arrived and the detainees were transferred randomly to prisons around the state, but without the papers that might easily distinguish a person who had been arrested for illegally reading tarot cards or "angling without a license" from someone charged with a serious, violent crime.

As bad as this was, it was only the beginning of the indignities the evacuated prisoners were to face.

the crime of being poor.

I think that people who are basically bad will "come out of the closet" during times of stress. It seems to me at least some of the police and guards are the real bad guys. What a shame.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/27/1433256&mode=thread&tid=25

DAN BRIGHT: The Templeman III building is a receiving cell. You go there, and they hold you until they put you into a steady housing development. And like she was saying, we were strictly abandoned. They just left us. When we realized what was going on, it was too late. It was total chaos. The water was up to our chest. You had guys laying in the water trying to climb to the top of their bunks. You had older guys who didn't have any medicine who we were trying to help. And the way we got out was we had to kick the cell door for maybe like an hour or two. And the cell doors, they sits on this hinge. You have to kick it off the hinge. And when you kicked it off the hinge you have to slide out the door. And Templeman III is -- I'm trying to explain it as best I could. It’s two levels. You had an upper level and bottom level. The guys on the bottom level was totally stuck in this water. Lights was out. So we had to get out on the top level and come down and help those guys. And the police, they had left.
...
NEAL WALKER: You hear a very similar story from everybody who was housed where Dan was held. I mean, there were other prisoners held in different places. You know, they were locked into their cells, not able to get out. I understand in the house of detention that the guys were literally not able to get out their cells at all, and in Templeman, prisoners were able to grab shower rods and break out the windows in an attempt to gain some attention from whoever they could get to see them.

But I -- you know, the stories are very consistent that floodwaters were rising, that the deputies had fled the jail, that there was no food, there was no water. The power went off, I think, sometime early Monday morning when the storm hit, and they went Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with no food.

I was aware of this a couple of days after it happened, seeing the prisoners on the freeway ramp, but it deserves to be put front & center again. It MUST NOT be forgotten.



Keith’s Barbeque Central

Can a TV/Radio program have a conscience?
Amy Goodman's shows through loud and clear, in compassion and respect for the 'least among us'.

Prisoners drowning in their cells is not even a 20 second blip on CNN, but on DN!, she accords it the gravity and time of an in-depth report. Which those human beings, any human beings, deserve.

Keith’s Barbeque Central

Keith’s Barbeque Central

aaaaaaaaiiiieeeeeeeeeeee.........!!!!!!!

edit: nominated

sort of thing.... that is unless it is convenient to do so, responsibility and accountability don't exist, and the government itself has set a putrid
example of how you can treat "the enemy". Other than that a free and democratic nation wouldn't do such a thing. Really. Trust me. Oh and Amurka doesn't torture its prisoners either, Amurka farms it out.

www.plugpower.com

China. Not per capita but as a total number.

The United States has found that prisons are very good business.

"We have privatized prisons so good people can profit from bad while keeping good Americans safer" is how it has been explained to me.

Once again, profit above human rights.

We are the monster.

It is apparent the author has never been to jail. Dignity-ROFL

I get so sick of hearing "this isn't how America is" - and people say this even as evidence repeatedly slaps them across the face proving that YES - this is EXACTLY how America is...


Just try and imagine you're one of these people and this happened to you - now look at America from their point of view. Stop trying to sell these people a myth of America and look at the reality. They were left to die. Forgotten.Beaten.Tortured (and being left to die in a locked cell is mental torture) - detained for no good reason - caught up in a "sweep" - arrested during a Hurricane and locked in a cell. No due process - not even prior to the storm - as records indicate.

Can you imagine the nightmare?

We love to identify ourselves as a progressive country, leading the world to freedom, but the reality is that every time we have been that, it was a short-lived departure from our usual MO of subjugating and stealing from the poor and powerless for the direct benefit of our domestic robber barons.
The Pilgrims came here to be free to practice their religious intolerance and to impose it on the natives. Then the next waves of immigrants that came here to exploit the resources, both natural and human, for profit, thus importing that time-honored institution of slavery, and on, and on, and on.
So this indecency is just amerikans being amerikans.

story days after the hurricane "relief" efforts started. There are interviews with inmates and guardsmen... shocking stuff, firsthand reports.... people abandoned, dying. Also she talked with lawyers, who are just trying to find out who was in the prisons. They still don't have a complete list apparently. They've probably got it on Archive.org too.

snip>

As bad as this was, it was only the beginning of the indignities the evacuated prisoners were to face. They found themselves in an impromptu patchwork of overcrowded state prisons, parish jails and facilities opened just to accommodate evacuated prisoners. The unluckiest among them, mostly from Jefferson Parish, found themselves at Jena Correctional, a former juvenile prison owned by the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation that was closed after the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Human Rights Watch and the Justice Department exposed widespread beatings of incarcerated children there in the late 1990s. That spirit was kept alive in the new incarnation of the prison: Evacuated prisoners were routinely and viciously beaten by their jailers, guards from other facilities who were without a chain of command and for whom there was zero possibility of accountability. Rachel Jones of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a pro bono attorney who was working there at the time, told me that after being a public defender in Brooklyn and a capital trial attorney in Louisiana, "I have never seen anything like it."


Jones said the inmates were bruised all over their bodies. They passed her little notes saying "help" when the guards weren't looking and reported that guards were calling them "nigger" and "boy." When she returned days later to follow up, they had been brutalized even more; some reported having received beatings from guards as retaliation. After visiting with many inmates at various prisons and jails, it became clear to her that these incidents were widespread, and she made it her top priority to get guys who didn't belong there out of jail.


Jones and a handful of other lawyers, including Phyllis Mann, a veteran Louisiana criminal defense attorney, began poring over the available records on the evacuated inmates and found thousands who had been unconstitutionally and illegally imprisoned. Many should have been released weeks or months earlier, as their sentences had long since expired. Some had been picked up on charges in the days before the storm for municipal offenses like unpaid traffic tickets and had never been before a judge, as required by the Constitution. Others were simply sitting in jail, awaiting trial for minor crimes for which the maximum sentence was far less than the amount of time they had already served. While some of these people have been released in the past month, many remain incarcerated and separated from their families when they are most needed. For example, as recently as mid-November, David Moffett, a 43-year-old man from New Orleans, was still incarcerated in a Bossier Parish jail on a ten-day sentence begun August 22 for public drunkenness.

snip>

It is hard to believe that a state with one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the United States--which itself is a world leader in incarceration--does not have a single organization or agency dedicated to the rights of prisoners, but it's true. Sadly, by orders of magnitude, there were more rescue people in Louisiana to protect the "animal rights" of dogs than there were lawyers or activists to protect the human rights of thousands of our citizens.

snip>

Another of our major flaws revealed.

the profits flowing to the BFEE.

and they can't buy, I mean donate to a candidate.

The poor don't matter, jeez, why does this surprise any of you.

We have landfills all over, the prisons in our societ are the human land fills, toss folks away, don't worry about recycling, just remove them from sight.

:cry:

:kick:

"Jones said the inmates were bruised all over their bodies. They passed her little notes saying "help" when the guards weren't looking and reported that guards were calling them "nigger" and "boy." When she returned days later to follow up, they had been brutalized even more; some reported having received beatings from guards as retaliation. After visiting with many inmates at various prisons and jails, it became clear to her that these incidents were widespread, and she made it her top priority to get guys who didn't belong there out of jail.

Jones and a handful of other lawyers, including Phyllis Mann, a veteran Louisiana criminal defense attorney, began poring over the available records on the evacuated inmates and found thousands who had been unconstitutionally and illegally imprisoned. Many should have been released weeks or months earlier, as their sentences had long since expired. Some had been picked up on charges in the days before the storm for municipal offenses like unpaid traffic tickets and had never been before a judge, as required by the Constitution. Others were simply sitting in jail, awaiting trial for minor crimes for which the maximum sentence was far less than the amount of time they had already served. While some of these people have been released in the past month, many remain incarcerated and separated from their families when they are most needed. For example, as recently as mid-November, David Moffett, a 43-year-old man from New Orleans, was still incarcerated in a Bossier Parish jail on a ten-day sentence begun August 22 for public drunkenness."

There is no public defender's office in NO.

:kick:

There will be accounts to settle when this prison mania comes to an end.