Buzzflash
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Newsvine
RedditIf, as Dostoyevsky claimed, the degree of civilization of a society can be measured by the treatment of its prisoners, we are in even deeper trouble in New Orleans than many realize. In this city, under the radar of most media, the biggest prison crisis since Attica is unfolding. And no one seems to care, because despite Hurricane Katrina's having "exposed" American poverty and racism, mass incarceration of poor black Americans remains an accepted, if overlooked, fact of modern life. After all, the thinking goes, they did the crime, now they have to do the time. However, like everything else in New Orleans, it's not so simple.
-
Can the Golden State Warriors Save Oakland?
Dave Zirin: The Warriors will miss this year's NBA playoffs, but they can still be winners by reaching out to at-risk youth in Oakland.
-
Rehabilitation, Resurrected
David Cole: This year nearly 700,000 inmates in US prisons will be granted their freedom. And in a rare act of bipartisanship, a new law provides millions to rehabilitate them.
-
Homeless in New Orleans
Lizzy Ratner: The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has turned New Orleans into a tragic Tale of Two Cities.
-
Waiting for Godot in a Wasteland
Billy Sothern: The most devastated neighborhood in America makes an ideal backdrop for a morally ambiguous play about abandonment.
-
Locked Up in Limbo
Laura Mansnerus: In California, sex offenders face the specter of incarceration without end.
-
Malcolm Suber: Good for New Orleans
City & County-Level Campaigns & Elections
Adolph Reed Jr.: A longtime activist, running in a special City Council election, is just what New Orleans needs.
-
New Orleans Is Us
Billy Sothern: If the American people continue to avert their eyes from the slow death of an abandoned city, their communities may soon be next to fail.
-
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Billy Sothern: As executions resume in the wake of a Supreme Court decision, we are reminded that a life cannot be willfully ended without violence.
-
Waiting for Godot in a Wasteland
Billy Sothern: The most devastated neighborhood in America makes an ideal backdrop for a morally ambiguous play about abandonment.
-
Bobby Jindal: Not Much to Celebrate
Conservatives & The American Right
Billy Sothern: Some herald the election of an Indian-American Republican governor as a milestone, but the poor and black citizens of Louisiana aren't among them.
-
New Orleans Is Us
Billy Sothern: If the American people continue to avert their eyes from the slow death of an abandoned city, their communities may soon be next to fail.
-
Goodbye, St. Thomas
Billy Sothern: In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans's ruling class is demolishing public housing to make way for private businesses and expensive condos.
-
Jefferson Should Go
Billy Sothern: The people of New Orleans suffered another blow with the indictment of Representative William Jefferson. They deserve better.
-
On the Porch in the Seventh Ward
Billy Sothern: As the New Orleans Jazz Fest unfolded, a down-home celebration, bright with beads, sequins and feathers, took place in the city's poorest neighborhoods.
Despite the universal awareness of the risk of flooding in the city, the low-lying jail failed to execute any real evacuation plan. Instead, even faster than New Orleans police abandoned the citizens of New Orleans, many of the sheriff's deputies who guard the city's prisoners abandoned their charges and left men and women wondering whether they were going to die as water rose in their locked cells. As prisoner Dan Bright told Human Rights Watch, "They left us to die there."
Prisoners helped one another escape the flood by prying open cell doors, breaking through windows and finding higher ground in the jail. While officials deny that any bodies were found, many prisoners who were there insist that they saw floating bodies. Those who made it out were rounded up by the few remaining guards and gathered on a nearby Interstate overpass. People remained there for almost two days--without water, under the sun--appearing as a blur of orange jumpsuits from the CNN cameras in helicopters flying above. They were left to urinate and defecate on themselves, hampered by restraints so tight that a month later attorneys who visited them could still see dark purple bands around their wrists. Eventually buses arrived and the detainees were transferred randomly to prisons around the state, but without the papers that might easily distinguish a person who had been arrested for illegally reading tarot cards or "angling without a license" from someone charged with a serious, violent crime.
