Imprisoned in New Orleans By Jordan Flaherty and

When Hurricane Katrina hit, there was no evacuation plan for the 7,000 prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison, the New Orleans city jail, generally known as OPP, or the approximate 1,500 prisoners in nearby jails. According to first-hand accounts gathered by advocates, prisoners were abandoned in their cells while the water was rising around them. They were subjected to a heavily armed “rescue” by state prison guards that involved beatings, mace and being left in the sun with no water or food for several days, followed by a transfer to state maximum security prisons. Although their treatment brought national attention to the condition of prisoners in Louisiana, and comparison to prison abuse scandals from Attica to Abu Ghraib, local government officials have attempted to dodge accountability and continue with business as usual.

A New Culture of Security

Raphael Schwartz, a 26-year-old Missouri man arrested and imprisoned for public intoxication in New Orleans on August 27, was sprayed with mace and abandoned by officers in a locked cell with seven other prisoners. According to papers filed by the ACLU of Louisiana as part of an emergency motion to inspect the prison, the man had no ventilation and nothing to eat or drink for four days.

Quintano Williams, a 31-year-old office manager picked up on marijuana charges just before the storm hit, declared as part of the ACLU’s lawsuit to being abandoned for days and then relocated to Hunts Correction Facility, a rural Louisiana maximum security prison, where he was left with thousands of detainees on a football field. There, he witnessed stabbings, but, he said, prison staff “did not interfere with anything that was going on as long as people did not try to get out of the area.”

Rachel Francois was arrested in mid-August, and as far as her family was able to discover never had charges filed against her. “We tried to bail her out,” her mother, Althea Francois, said. “It was the day before Katrina, and the bail bonds places were all closed. If they had been open, she would have been released that day. Instead, we could not get her released until two months later.” Francois, a prisoner-rights advocate, searched for two weeks before she found out where her daughter was being held.

Rachel and other women were taken to Hunts and then Angola, an all-male prison. “When I found out she was at Angola prison, just the idea really broke my heart,” her mother said. “She didn’t have a bed until the last few days she was there. She had no food for four days. She saw them throw food at the men like they were animals, but even then they didn’t give the women anything. The women were having panic attacks and were in fear for their lives. ”

After the hurricane, the incarceration of suspected “looters” was the first city function to restart. Due process and civil liberties were almost nonexistent for new arrestees, who were put in cages in a makeshift prison at a Greyhound bus station, with no access to phones or lawyers.

Most of the people trapped in this brutal web of governmental abuse and neglect would have been released within a few weeks even if convicted. However, as of this writing several months later, many remain locked in maximum security prisons such as Angola, Louisiana’s notorious former slave plantation.

The flooding of New Orleans showed vividly the results of local, state and federal governments’ misplaced priorities, as well as the privatizing and militarizing of relief. In the weeks after the disaster, while the people of New Orleans wanted to rebuild their city, what they got instead was “security.” Hundreds of National Guard troops, as well as police forces from across the U.S. and private security forces including Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International began patrolling the nearly empty city. New Orleans police were captured on video, shown around the world, beating an elderly Black resident in early October.

Before the Storm