BY SUBHASH KATEEL
Y
OU can
tell a lot about a place from how it treats
its hurricane victims>,especially when they are
prisoners.
As New Orleans was being swallowed by
water and drowned by inaction, corrections officers at
Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) left inmates locked in their
cells to die with no food or water. As described in a report
from Human Rights Watch, corrections officers in Opp's
Templeman III compound had all fled the prison as early as
August 29. The compound's 600 inmates, including some
who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated
until Thursday, September 1, three days after flood waters
in the jail had reached their chests.
Many were not "evacuated" at all but had to break out of
prison on their own, sometimes setting shirts on fire to get
attention. Prisoners reported seeing their fellow inmates'
dead bodies floating in water that had now been diluted
with feces from the overflowing sewage system.
Although the prisoners were finally evacuated - with at
least 300 unaccounted for - the nightmare continued. Some
prisoners were transferred from New Orleans into facilities
in smaller parishes nearby, the parishes that make
Louisiana a Red State. Most of the prisoners had no idea
where their families were, whether their loved ones were
alive or dead, or how to contact them.
The officers at Jena Prison in Jefferson Parish didn't
seem to notice that their new residents were refugees, so
they treated them like prisoners of war, including cutting
their new guests' access to the phone and forcing them to lie
face down on the floor for hours at a time. When some
prisoners protested, insisting that they needed phone access
to find their families, they were met with pepper spray,
batons, and work boots. Prisoners reported being called
"nigger" as Jena officers made them lick their own blood
off the floor and lie face down in vomit. Of the 23 prisoners
that spoke to Human
Rights Watch investigators, only one reported not being
assaulted. Others begged the investigators not to leave
because they were afraid of repercussions.
When asked for his impression on what happened to
prisoners in New Orleans after Katrina, Malik Ndaula, a
former immigrant detainee in Louisiana's Concordia Parish
Prison and now an organizer with Keeping Hope Alive in
Boston, exclaimed with bewilderment, "Before Hurricane
Katrina you would have these racist-ass KKK corrections
officers that would beat you up, stun gun you, and tell you
in your face as they were beating you that they hated
niggers! I filed my own lawsuits in jail against these guys
before Katrina, and now people are acting like it is
something new?"
And indeed nothing is new. If anything, the state, local
and federal government responded to the people of New
Orleans after Katrina the way they knew best: by
criminalizing and incarcerating them. Despite his heartfelt
pleas on the radio, New Orleans Mayor Nagin stopped the
relief effort at the height of the disaster, to "restore law and
order." In the post-Katrina recovery period, refugees with
criminal convictions were even denied emergency aid. The
problem was so pervasive that Representative Robert C.
Scott had to propose legislation removing the barriers just
so people could access some help.
Nothing new
States in the deep south have always used the criminal
justice system as a way to keep Black folks in their place,
especially when they found out it was a convenient tool to
disenfranchise people th'at had just won their right to vote.
White rural communities discovered the criminal justice
system as a savior for their dying towns, while some
economists and demographers found it a creative way to
hide massive unemployment rates.
Louisiana, with its beautiful history and unique culture,
is no different. As Xochitl Bervera, an organizer with
Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarnated Children
(FFLIC) puts it, "Louisiana has the highest incarceration
rate in the country. If it was its own country, it would have
the highest incarceration rate in the world:'
I came to know about Louisiana's love for locking
people up when I flew down to visit immigrant detainees
with members of my organization, New York-based
Families For Freedom. One of the country's largest
immigrant detention centers is located in Oakdale,
Louisiana, a small economically depressed town four hours
from New Orleans. Many immigrant detainees from New
York were housed in Oakdale and smaller Parish Prisons,
such as Calcasieu and Concordia Parish Prison.
In March 2004, our organization received a letter
documenting the abuse of several immigrant detainees by
jail officials wanting to show a group of detainees who
defiantly fought for better conditions that "there was a new
sheriff in town:' Concordia's correctional officers proceeded
to kick, spit on, and taser detainees, eventually locking them
into solitary confinement. One detainee decided to defend
himself and paid dearly for it. Another detainee, from New
York by way of Jamaica, walks with a cane to this day.
Youth jails
Perhaps nothing in Louisiana's prison system caught the
world's attention more than its youth jails. Tallulah Youth
Prison was a sprawling eyesore that was known to ruin the
life of virtually every young person that stepped foot in it.
The tales of abuse - physical, verbal, and sexual - were
disturbingly vivid. Tallulah was a prison born to be bad;
within weeks of it opening in 1994, a federal judge declared
a state of emergency at the prison. Human Rights Watch
stated that Tallulah, as well as every other Louisiana youth
jail, violated most basic international standards of Human
Rights. Even the Justice Department declared the prison
"life threatening and dangerous:'
If racism and a corrupt prison system are nothing new in
Louisiana, neither is the fighting spirit of its people,
especially its prisoners. I learned half of what I know about
fighting for detention conditions from the detainees
at Concordia Parish Prison. I learned even more about
tearing down prison walls from the people of FFLIC.
Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated
Children got its start in 2001, as a group of families with
loved ones in Louisiana's youth jails, especially Tallulah
Youth Prison. The organization eventually set its sights on
its closure, or as they would call it, "the death of Tallulah:'
Over the next 2-3 years, FFLIC worked with advocates,
lawyers, and other organizers to form a formidable
coalition, attacking Tallulah Youth Prison in the state
legislature, in the courts, in the media, on the streets, and in
the jail itself. The message was steadfast; Tallulah Prison
should die, and in its place new life should be born in the
form of a community college and community reinvestment.
FFLIC won and won big. The state legislature passed
the Juvenile Justice Reform Act, and led the way for the
closing of Tallulah, proving that a humble, yet powerful
group of families with the right set of allies could conquer a
culture that saw the fate of their children as being behind
bars.
FFLIC's follow-up work was supposed to focus on
making sure the prison would be turned into a community
college and real community alternatives would be created.
But Katrina would change all of that.
People's tribunal
In the post-Katrina period FFLIC, an organization that
had no history in disaster relief, very little funding, a small
staff, and no FEMA grants, decided to go out and initiate
their own hurricane response. Their primary focus was first
to find every family member of FFLIC, incarcerated or not,
and ensure their immediate needs
were being addressed. Their second goal was to expose to
the world what is happening in New Orleans, especially
with prisoners. FFLIC enlisted the help of organizations
such as Critical Resistance and Atlanta's Communities
United to go from shelter to shelter across the country and
provide information to people who had loved ones locked
up in New Orleans when Katrina hit. This effolt took them
to Arizona, California, Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas,
documenting information along the way.
FFLIC is now working with other organizations and
coalitions, such as the People's Hurricane Fund to make
sure the rebuilding process does not mean rebuilding the
corrupt and brutal criminal justice system New Orleans and
Louisiana made famous before Katrina. But first the
community and the world has to come to terms with what
happened after Katrina.
Using the idea of a Truth Commission or People's
TIibunal, FFLI C hopes to use the evidence it gathers from
evacuees around the country to organize an evidentiary
hearing on the injustices and atrocities committed in
post-Katrina New Orleans. The evidence from tlie Truth
Commission would ultimately be used in international
courts, but it would also be used to push the government to
do its job and initiate an independent investigation.
All of FFLIC's work takes place with pain, suffering,
coping and rage in the background. As FFLIC members
explained in a heartfelt message to their friends around the
country, "Grieving and rage seem to be part of all of our
daily realities as we try to fully comprehend what has
happened and vision where we will go now that all has
changed. Grief is both for our members and allies whose
lives were lost, and for all of us whose homes are gone,
whose lives as we knew them will never be the same."
The same way that pain and suffering made way for the
walls of Tallulah to crumble like Jericho, the pain and
suffering, if harnessed, can make way for a better New
Orleans. With all the awful things the criminal justice
system projects on prisoners and their families, wouldn't it
be something to say that it was prisoners and their families
that helped save the soul of New Orleans? •
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Subhash Kateel is an Organizer with Families For
Freedom, a Brooklyn, NY-based multi-ethnic network of
immigrants directlyfacing andfighting deportation.
www.familiesfoifreedom.org.
For more info on FFLIC visit www:fflic.org. For more
info on Katrina related Prison issues visit: http://hrw.
org/doc/?t=usa_prisons.