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  • 2018-09-13 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Inmates Abandoned at Orleans Parish Prison During Hurricane Katrina? (en)
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  • Mandatory evacuations were ordered for more than a million people living in the coastal communities of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia in September 2018, as Hurricane Florence threatened the eastern coast of the United States. While most residents had the ability to hop on an interstate and flee to safety, others, such as prison inmates, enjoyed no such freedom of movement. A spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Corrections told Vice News that while they were monitoring the situation, they currently no plans to evacuate inmates as the hurricane approached, stating that it’s (previously) been safer to stay in place with the inmates rather than move to another location. Although this description may be accurate, many readers couldn't help but draw parallels to the example of Hurricane Katrina, during which Louisiana inmates suffered through horrendous conditions after a similar decision was undertaken: The claims made in this viral tweet - that more than 1,000 inmates at at Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) were left to die, that correctional officers abandoned their posts, that prisoners were stuck without food or potable water in flooded cells, and that 517 inmates went missing -- are largely derived from two reports filed by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. While some of the details of this time period have been lost to history (no official reports on inmate deaths during Katrina were compiled), news outlets, human rights organizations, and first-hand accounts from people who were imprisoned at OPP at the time of the storm have helped piece together the story. As Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, officials in Louisiana were faced with a quandary about what to do with the state's inmates. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin had ordered the city's first mandatory evacuation, but Sheriff Marlin Gusman opted not to move inmates out of OPP. During a press conference before the storm hit, Gusman said that we're going to keep our prisoners where they belong. In fact, OPP even took in some inmates from surrounding jail facilities. At the time of the storm, OPP was housing about 6,500 inmates. The prison lost power shortly after the storm made landfall on 29 August 2005, and as the first-floor cells of OPP started to flood, Sheriff Gusman called for help evacuating the prison. Completing the evacuation took several days, however, and many prisoners reported that during that period they felt as if they had been abandoned by guards and left to die. Human Rights Watch provided this summary of the evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison: The ACLU published more than a hundred first-hand testimonials from inmates about their time at OPP during and after the storm. A number of them reported that they were locked in cells as the water rose to their chests, and that they were largely abandoned by the guards and left without food or water: The OPP inmates were eventually evacuated to other prisons around the state. It's unclear, however, if all of the inmates housed at OPP before the storm made it out of the prison. Human Rights Watch compared a list of inmates at OPP from just before the storm to a list of the evacuated inmates compiled by the state Department of Corrections and Public Safety and found that 517 inmates were unaccounted for. It's not exactly clear what happened to these 517 individuals. Contemporaneous news articles reported that New Orleans correctional facilities simply weren't prepared for this type of disaster and that the system they had in place to keep track of inmates had largely failed: While some of the missing individuals may be explained away by accounting mistakes, several OPP inmates said they witnessed dead bodies floating in the flooded prison waters and reported that some prisoners had escaped during the storm: Sheriff Gusman later claimed that these reports were exaggerated: While the specifics of what occurred at Orleans Parish Prison during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 may never be publicly known, the general gist of this viral message is accurate: Thousands of inmates suffered through horrendous conditions as they awaited rescue after officials decided not to evacuate the prison before a hurricane. (en)
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