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Sometimes
the injustices here in New Orleans leave me numb. But the continuing
debacle of our criminal justice system inspires in me a sense of
indignation I thought was lost to cynicism long ago. Ursula Price, a
staff investigator for the indigent defense organization A Fighting
Chance, has met with several thousand hurricane survivors who were
imprisoned at the time of the hurricane, and her stories chill me. “I grew
up in small town Mississippi,” she tells me. “We had the Klan marching
down our main street. But still, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Safe Streets, Strong
Communities, a New Orleans-based criminal justice reform coalition that
Price also works with, has just released a report based on more than a
hundred recent interviews with prisoners who have been locked up since
pre-Katrina and are currently spread across thirteen prisons and hundreds
of miles. They found the average number of days people had been locked up
without a trial was 385 days. One person had been locked up for 1,289
days. None of them have been convicted of any crime.
“I’ve been working
in the system for the while, I do capital cases and I’ve seen the worst
that the criminal justice system has to offer,” Price told me. “But even I
am shocked that there has been so much disregard for the value of these
peoples lives, especially people who have not been proved to have done
anything wrong.” As lawyers, advocates, and former prisoners stressed to
me in interviews over the last couple of weeks, arrest is not the same as
conviction. According to a pre-Katrina report from the Metropolitan Crime
Commission, 65% of those arrested in New Orleans are eventually released
without ever having been charged with any crime.
Samuel Nicholas (his
friends call him Nick) was imprisoned in Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) on a
misdemeanor charge, and was due to be released August 31. Instead, after
a harrowing journey of several months, he was released February 1. Nick
told me he still shudders when he thinks of those days in OPP.
“We heard boats
leaving, and one of the guys said ‘hey man, all the deputies gone,’” Nick
relates. “We took it upon ourselves to try to survive. They left us in the
gym for two days with nothing. Some of those guys stayed in a cell for or
five days. People were hollering, ‘get me out, I don’t want to drown, I
don’t want to die,’ we were locked in with no ventilation, no water,
nothing to eat. Its just the grace of god that a lot of us survived.”
Benny Flowers, a
friend of Nick’s from the same Central City neighborhood, was on a work
release program, and locked in a different building in the sprawling OPP
complex. In his building there were, by his count, about 30 incarcerated
youth, some as young as 14 years old. “I don’t know why they left the
children like that. Locked up, no food, no water. Why would you do that?
They couldn’t swim; most of them were scared to get into the water. We
were on work release, so we didn’t have much time left. We weren’t trying
to escape, we weren’t worried about ourselves, we were worried about the
children. The guards abandoned us, so we had to do it for ourselves. We
made sure everyone was secured and taken care of. The deputies didn’t do
nothing. It was inmates taking care of inmates, old inmates taking care of
young inmates. We had to do it for ourselves.”
Benny Hitchens,
another former inmate, was imprisoned for unpaid parking tickets. “They
put us in a gym, about 200 of us, and they gave us three trash bags, two
for defecation and one for urination. That was all we had for 200 people
for two days.”
State Department of
Corrections officers eventually brought them, and thousands of other
inmates, to Hunts Prison, in rural Louisiana, where evacuees were kept in
a field, day and night, with no shelter and little or no food and water.
“They didn’t do us no kind of justice,” Flowers told me. “We woke up early
in the morning with the dew all over us, then in the afternoon we were
burning up in the summer sun. There were about 5,000 of us in three
yards.”
Nick was taken from
Hunts prison to Oakdale prison. “At Oakdale they had us on lockdown 23
hours, on Friday and Saturday it was 24 hours. We hadn’t even been
convicted yet. Why did we have to be treated bad? Twenty-three and one
ain’t nothing nice, especially when you ain’t been convicted of a crime
yet. But here in New Orleans you’re guilty ‘til you’re proven innocent.
Its just the opposite of how its supposed to be.”
From reports that
Price received, some prisoners had it worse than Oakdale. “Many prisoners
were sent to Jena prison, which had been previously shut down due to the
abusiveness of the staff there. I have no idea why they thought it was
acceptable to reopen it with the same staff. People were beaten, an entire
room of men was forced to strip and jump up and down and make sexual
gestures towards one another. I cannot describe to you the terror that the
young men we spoke to conveyed to us.”
According to the
report from Safe Streets Strong Communities, the incarcerated people they
interviewed described their attorney’s as “passive,” “not interested,” and
“absent.” Interviewers were told that “attorneys acted as functionaries
for the court rather than advocates for the poor people they represented
... the customs of the criminal court excused -- and often encouraged --
poor policing and wrongful arrests. The Orleans Indigent Defender Program
acted as a cog in this system rather than a check on its dysfunction.”
Pre-Katrina, the New
Orleans public defender system was already dangerously overloaded, with 42
attorneys and six investigators. Today, New Orleans has 6 public
defenders, and one investigator. And these defenders are not necessarily
full-time, nor committed to their clients. One of those attorneys is known
to spend his days in court working on crossword puzzles instead of talking
to his clients. All of these attorneys are allowed to take an unlimited
number of additional cases for pay. In most cases, these attorneys have
been reported to do a much more vigorous job on behalf of their paid
clients.
“We have a system
that was broken before Katrina,” Price tells me, “that was then torn
apart, and is waiting to be rebuilt. Four thousand people are still in
prison, waiting for this to be repaired. There’s a young man, I speak to
his mother every day, who has been in the hole since the storm, and is
being abused daily. This boy is 19 years old, and not very big, and he has
no lawyer. His mother doesn’t know what to do, and without her son having
council, I don’t know what to tell her.”
Pre-hurricane,
according to the Safe Streets report, some detainees were brought to a
magistrate court shortly after being arrested, “where a public defender
was appointed ‘solely for the purposes of this hearing.’ The assigned
attorney did not do even the most cursory interview about the arrestee’s
ties to the community, charges, or any other information relevant to
setting a bond. Other interviewees were brought to a room where they faced
a judge on a video screen. These individuals uniformly reported there was
no defense lawyer present.”
The report
continues, “after appointment, (defense attorneys) by and large did not
visit the crime scene, did not interview witnesses, did not check out
alibis, did not procure expert assistance, did not review evidence, did
not know the facts of the case, did not do any legal research, and did not
otherwise prepare for trial … with few exceptions, attorneys with the
Orleans Indigent Defender program never met with their clients to discuss
their case. Appointed council did not take calls from the jail, did not
respond to letters or other written correspondence, and generally did not
take calls or make appointments with family members … (defenders)
frequently did not know the names of their clients.”
“This ain’t just
started, its been going on,” Nick tells me. “I want to talk about it, but
at the same time it hurts to talk about it. Someone’s gotta start talking
about it. It’s not the judge, its not the lawyers, it’s the criminal
justice system. Everybody who goes to jail isn’t guilty. You got guys who
were drunk in public, treated like they committed murder.”
I asked Price what
has to happen to fix this system. “First, we establish who was left
behind, collect their stories and substantiate them. Next, we’re going to
organize among the inmates and former inmates to change the system. The
inmates are going to have a voice in what happens in our criminal justice
system. If you ask anyone living in New Orleans, the police, the justice
system, may be the single most influential element in poor communities.
It’s what beaks up families, it’s what keeps people poor.”
How can people from
around the US help? “Education, health care, mental health. All these
issues that exist in the larger community, exist among the prisoners, and
no one is serving them. We need psychiatrists, doctors, teachers, we need
all kinds of help,” Price says.
“One thing I can’t forget is those children,” Benny Flowers tells me. “Why
would they leave those children behind? I’m trying to forget it, but I
can’t forget it”
Sitting across the
table from Benny, Nick is resolute. “I’m making this interview so that
things get better,” he tells me. “The prison system, the judicial system,
the police. We got to make a change, and we all got to come together as a
community to make this change. I want to stop all this harassment and
brutality.”
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
archived here
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
*
Nothing Stops
Mardi Gras
*
Imprisoned in New Orleans with Tamika Middleton
* Privatizing
New Orleans
* Loss
and Displacement at the Calliope with Jennifer Vitry
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