This is a section I am writing for my thesis about the treatment of prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison during Katrina. It is summarized from a report done by the ACLU that can be found here. The contents of this post may be triggering.
On August 26th, the day Katrina hit, the Sheriff’s records report that there were 6,375 people in OPP; a number which does not include the nearly two thousand other inmates who had been evacuated to this prison. The prisoners’ ages ranged from 10 to 73 years old.
Soon after the storm made landfall the prisoners phones went dead. At that point there was still power to the building and several prisoners reported seeing the guards making calls from the control booth. The prisoners, unable to call their families or friends, were virtually erased from the public’s eye. The only exception was when Sheriff Gousman got on national television to announce that the prisoners would not be evacuated.
Before the storm deputies placed all of the prisoners on lockdown. Trapped in their cells, more and more people were being packed into OPP as the city was being evacuated. The cells were overcrowded, sometimes with seven or eight people to a two person room.
Two days after Katrina made landfall the levees broke. The lower levels of OPP flooded and prisoners stood in chest deep water. The generators were on the lower levels when the water rushed in the prison lost all power. Prisoners were left trapped in their automated cages with no lights or ventilation. Raphael Schwartz describes being in these conditions for four days. In Abandoned and Abused Schwartz details how he was pepper sprayed and abandoned by deputies.
“One of the prisoners in my cell began to kick the cell door to get the deputies’ attention. Two deputies came to our cell, and told the prisoner to stop kicking the cell door. When the prisoner continued to kick the door, the deputies sprayed two cans of mace into the cell, and left. I was in the back of the cell at the time, and I got mace on my arms. Other prisoners got mace in their eyes and on their faces. They washed the mace out with water from the sink in our cell. Some of us took off the clothing that had been maced and threw it out of the cell. The paint on the cell walls that were hit by mace began to peel off. I did not see another deputy for the next two days. ”- Raphael Schwartz
After days of chaos the prisoners were finally evacuated. With no way to contact their loved ones they were transferred to prisons around the state. Thousands of men were transferred to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center where they were kept outside with inadequate food, medical care, and protection.
Children left in water up to their necks, people dying trapped in their cells, people lost in the system for months after the storm- for those who have not been ‘inside’ these stories test our imagination. It is hard to reconcile that this happened in this so called land of the free. It is natural to jump to the idea that these stories are the exceptions. And while these stories are particularly horrific, they are not unexpected. The tragedies that happened inside OPP after the storm are a symptoms of the prison industrial complex (PIC).
