Dispatches From the Gulf Region

A slightly different version of this story first appeared in the Left Turn Magazine.

The continuing debacle of our criminal justice system here in New Orleans 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 a small town near Mississippi," she tells me. "We had the Klan marching down our main street, but 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 100 recent interviews with prisoners who had been locked up before Katrina and are currently spread across 13 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 illegal."

As lawyers, advocates and former prisoners have 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, only 7 percent of those arrested were eventually convicted of a crime. The overwhelming majority of them spent at least a month behind bars before being released. Two out of three convictions were for simple drug possession.

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, 2005. Instead, after a harrowing journey of several months, he was released on 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 four 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. It's 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 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."