Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters

New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters
22 Sep 2005 18:15:21 GMT

Source: Human Rights Watch

(New York, September 22, 2005)-As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New
Orleans, the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates
imprisoned in the city's jail, Human Rights Watch said today. Inmates in
Templeman III, one of several buildings in the Orleans Parish Prison
compound, reported that as of Monday, August 29, there were no
correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates.
These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells,
were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood
waters in the jail had reached chest-level. "Of all the nightmares
during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst," said Corinne
Carey, researcher from Human Rights Watch. "Prisoners were abandoned in
their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward
the ceiling." Human Rights Watch called on the U.S. Department of
Justice to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the Orleans
Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, and to establish the fate of
the prisoners who had been locked in the jail. The Louisiana Department
of Public Safety and Corrections, which oversaw the evacuation, and the
Orleans Sheriff's Department should account for the 517 inmates who are
missing from list of people evacuated from the jail. Carey spent five
days in Louisiana, conducting dozens of interviews with inmates
evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, correctional officers, state
officials, lawyers and their investigators who had interviewed more than
1,000 inmates evacuated from the prison. The sheriff of Orleans Parish,
Marlin N. Gusman, did not call for help in evacuating the prison until
midnight on Monday, August 29, a state Department of Corrections and
Public Safety spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. Other parish prisons,
she said, had called for help on the previous Saturday and Sunday. The
evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison was not completed until Friday,
September 2. According to officers who worked at two of the jail
buildings, Templeman 1 and 2, they began to evacuate prisoners from
those buildings on Tuesday, August 30, when the floodwaters reached
chest level inside. These prisoners were taken by boat to the Broad
Street overpass bridge, and ultimately transported to correctional
facilities outside New Orleans. But at Templeman III, which housed about
600 inmates, there was no prison staff to help the prisoners. Inmates
interviewed by Human Rights Watch varied about when they last remember
seeing guards at the facility, but they all insisted that there were no
correctional officers in the facility on Monday, August 29. A
spokeswoman for the Orleans parish sheriff's department told Human
Rights Watch she did not know whether the officers at Templeman III had
left the building before the evacuation. According to inmates
interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the
inmate's last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were
evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators
had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air
circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench. "They
left us to die there," Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told
Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the
evacuation. As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners
became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to
force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area.
All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility. "The
water started rising, it was getting to here," said Earrand Kelly, an
inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. "We was calling
down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of
minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one that I was cool
with, he was saying 'I'm scared. I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was
crying." Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies
floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A
number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get
everyone out from their cells. Inmates broke jail windows to let air in.
They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the
windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Apparently
at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows. "We started to see
people in T3 hangin' shirts on fire out the windows," Brooke Moss, an
Orleans Parish Prison officer told Human Rights Watch. "They were wavin'
em. Then we saw them jumping out of the windows . . . Later on, we saw a
sign, I think somebody wrote 'help' on it." As of yesterday, signs
reading "Help Us," and "One Man Down," could still be seen hanging from
a window in the third floor of Templeman III. Several corrections
officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the
prison, even though the facility had been evacuated during floods in the
1990s. "It was complete chaos," said a corrections officer with more
than 30 years of service at Orleans Parish Prison. When asked what he
thought happened to the inmates in Templeman III, he shook his head and
said: "Ain't no tellin' what happened to those people." "At best, the
inmates were left to fend for themselves," said Carey. "At worst, some
may have died." Human Rights Watch was not able to speak directly with
Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gussman or the ranking official in
charge of Templeman III. A spokeswoman for the sheriff's department told
Human Rights Watch that search-and-rescue teams had gone to the prison
and she insisted that "nobody drowned, nobody was left behind." Human
Rights Watch compared an official list of all inmates held at Orleans
Parish Prison immediately prior to the hurricane with the most recent
list of the evacuated inmates compiled by the state Department of
Corrections and Public Safety (which was entitled, "All Offenders
Evacuated"). However, the list did not include 517 inmates from the
jail, including 130 from Templeman III. Many of the men held at jail had
been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or
disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and
charged, much less been convicted.