Negligence by New Orleans city officials left inmates trapped and abandoned during Hurricane Katrina, Tom Jawitz, litigation fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, told a Georgetown audience Tuesday night.
The campus Prison Outreach program brought Jawitz to speak about the treatment of prisoners at the Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans during the natural disaster.
“It will always be complicated to evacuate a large facility,” Jawitz said. “But in the case of the prison, there was no societal obstacle like lack of access to public transportation that should have prevented the government from helping the prisoners evacuate.”
In its investigation of the prisoners’ treatment, the ACLU sent out letters requesting written testimonies of the nearly 7,000 evacuated inmates. Jawitz and his colleagues said that the 400 responses that they have received revealed significant failures in the emergency and evacuation plans of the prison.
When the power went out, so did the ability to lock and unlock the cells, trapping the prisoners as the filthy water kept rising, Jawitz concluded from prisoner testimonies.
“The floodwater got up to six feet, up to my neck, and I’m six foot one,” a male inmate wrote, remaining anonymous for legal reasons. “I really thought I was going to die.”
The official who oversaw the evacuation, Sheriff Marlin Gusman, denies that anything went wrong. Now running for reelection, Gusman sees no fault in the efforts in his election campaign advertisements.
“We stood by our post and we did our duty and we’re proud of the job we did,” Gusman said in his TV ads, according to Jawitz.
Many of the prisoner testimonies contradicted his statement, however, saying that deputies abandoned their posts and the inmates.
“Tell you the truth, they left us to die,” a female inmate wrote.
Since the sheriff did not authorize the prisoners to be evacuated, they remained trapped in the prison without food, water or medical attention for days, Jawitz said. The prisoners finally evacuated: first to a highway overpass, later to a temporary holding area and eventually to area prisons—though they were starved, dehydrated and abused every step of the way, according to the testimonies.
“Everywhere you looked there were fights, people getting stabbed, people getting raped,” one inmate said of the conditions at the temporary facility, Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabrial, La. “When they did come with food, they threw it to us from scaffold like they were at Mardi Gras.”[sic]
Months after the disaster, Jawitz and his team continue to receive and summarize the prisoner testimonies, available on the ACLU web site. These responses are currently being used to counter Gusman’s reopening of Orleans Parish Prison, which still lacks an appropriate evacuation plan for emergency conditions, according to a recent press release from the ACLU.
