New
Orleans Prisoners Left To Drown After Katrina Struck
By Fergus Michaels
02 October 2005
World
Socialist Web
A
statement issued by Human Rights Watch reports that the New Orleans
Sheriffs Department abandoned hundreds of prisoners in the Orleans
Parish Prison (OPP) compound for several days after Hurricane Katrina
hit on August 29. The report documents a particularly brutal example
of the indifference and contempt for human life that characterized every
aspect of the governments response to the disaster.
Prisoners interviewed
by Human Rights Watch said they saw bodies of drowned inmates floating
in the surrounding waters, and the human rights organization says many
prisoners remain unaccounted for.
According to the
Human Rights Watch report (New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to
Floodwaters), officers who worked in building Templeman I and
II, part of the OPP complex, state that prisoner evacuation commenced
in their buildings on August 30, as waters began to rise to chest level.
The prisoners of Templeman III were not afforded the same treatment,
and were left stranded, locked in their cells, for two more days.
In interviews with
Human Rights Watch, inmates of Templeman III, which had some 600 prisoners,
said that they were not evacuated until Thursday, having spent three
days without food or water. They said there were no correctional officers
in the building to get the prisoners out.
The prison generators
died, leaving the trapped inmates without lights or air circulation.
The toilets ceased to function and the stench became unbearable. Those
inmates on the ground floor of the prison had water up to chest level.
The situation for
prisoners in Templeman III became increasingly desperate as the water
continued to rise. Earrand Kelly, an inmate, told Human Rights Watch,
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 Im scared. I
feel like Im about to drown. He was crying. Dan Bright,
another Orleans Parish Prison inmate said, They left us there
to die.
Corinne Carey, researcher
for Human Rights Watch comments, At best, the inmates were left
to fend for themselves. At worst, some may have died.
Several corrections
officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the
prison, despite the fact that it had been evacuated during floods in
the 1990s. One described the situation as complete chaos
as the storm approached.
A spokeswoman for
the Orleans Parish Sheriffs Department told Human Rights Watch
she did not know whether the officers had left the building before the
evacuation. She also said that search and rescue teams had gone to the
prison and that nobody drowned, nobody was left behind.
However, this claim was contradicted by inmates who spoke to the human
rights organization.
Many prisoners remain
unaccounted for. According to the report, 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 prisoners
who were left in these horrible conditions were being held for minor
violations, and some had not even been charged.
A September 25 article
in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on the same incident. It cited
a letter from Paul Kunkel, who was being held on a misdemeanor charge.
He wrote to a friend saying that guards had abandoned their posts on
Sunday, the day before the hurricane hit.
I thought
I was going to die in that jail, Kunkel wrote. I was locked
down in a cell made for two, with five people, no working toilet, no
food and no protection. People were panicking, breaking windows, setting
firesanything to try to get someones attention from the
outside. No one knew if we were forgotten. Three days later, they cut
the jail bars and let us out.
He continued, The
water was up to my chest. I was drinking that water for a day and a
half. It was filthy and contaminated. But I did not know what else I
could do. I wanted to live.
The trauma for the
inmates did not end when they finally made it out of the prison. Boats
were used to move them to the Broad Street overpass. The Post-Gazette
cited a letter from Robie Waganfeald, a friend of Kunkel, who wrote
to his father, I sat in the sun from 8 am to 6 pm10 hours[with]
no water and with National Guardsmen threatening to shoot people. Some
[prisoners] got hit with rubber bullets, others with pepper spray. It
was the most humiliating, unjustifiable thing Ive ever seen.
While Waganfeald
was moved to another corrections facility, Kunkel was taken to a fenced-in
field in Elayne Hunt Correctional Centre in Harrisonburg, a six-hour
ride from New Orleans, where he was held for another four days along
with several thousand other prisoners. He gave the following description
of the conditions there:
We lived in
90-degree-plus sun with no protection from the elements. One day it
poured, and the ground was wet and muddy. We were given one blanket,
and we were freezing at night... Inmates were stealing blankets, and
convicts were armed with homemade knives. There were no sanitary facilities.
It was like a concentration camp. I [was] very afraid.
Cynthia Meyers,
Kunkels friend, commented that the two prisoners were part
of a number of people who didnt do anything serious but were left
to drown. The pet animals have been treated better than those inmates.
It says to me there is a total lack of compassion for these [people].