[Ppnews] Prison evacuees suffer guard abuse in Louisiana

[Political Prisoner News]

October 2, 2005
New York Times

Prisoners Evacuated After Hurricanes Allege Abuse
By DAVID ROHDE and CHRISTOPHER DREW


Lawyers for inmates in Louisiana say that prison guards have abused some of 
the nearly 8,000 prisoners who were evacuated from flooded jails in the New 
Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina.

The allegations are contained in affidavits filed by lawyers who have 
interviewed thousands of inmates in recent weeks. The complaints include 
accusations that some guards left prisoners locked in their cells while 
floodwaters rose to their necks, and that others engaged in regular 
beatings and other abuse.

The lawyers also estimate that as many as 2,000 people arrested for minor 
crimes just before the hurricane are still in prison five weeks later. They 
said that under normal circumstances, such low-level offenders would have 
seen a judge and been released within days. State and local officials say 
flooding has destroyed much of the court system and legal records in New 
Orleans.

On Friday, lawyers for the inmates filed papers requesting that the federal 
Department of Justice immediately seize control of a temporary holding 
facility in Jena, La., where more than two dozen inmates have complained of 
beatings, racial slurs and sexual taunts.

"We were concerned about stopping them from being abused," said Phyllis E. 
Mann, a Louisiana defense lawyer who led the effort to interview prisoners 
and who filed the papers. "We've had no response."

Officials from the Justice Department did not respond to a call requesting 
comment.

Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety 
and Corrections, said the department had received no complaints of abuse at 
the Jena facility. Ms. Laborde said all prisoners had been evacuated safely 
from jails affected by the floods. But she said her department would send a 
team on Monday to investigate the reported beatings there.

Ms. Laborde said in a statement that tactical teams of corrections officers 
responded to a disturbance at Jena on Sept. 2 and that 60 inmates were 
removed from the facility. She said there were no reports of significant 
injuries to prisoners.

Lawyers said that interviews with the 450 prisoners in Jena produced 
complaints that guards had been beating them, stripping them naked and 
hitting them with belts, shaving their heads, threatening them with dogs, 
shocking them with stun guns and assaulting them after they attempted to 
report the abuse.

The inmates said prison guards from Louisiana, as well as New York City 
corrections officers sent to the area after the hurricane, had participated 
in the abuse.

"I'm afraid for my safety," read one handwritten note that lawyers say was 
smuggled to them last week by a Jena prisoner. "It's going to be worse when 
y'all leave. I was beaten 9-28-05."

Thomas Antenen, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Correction, 
said that 10 corrections officers from the city were working in Jena but 
that no officers had reported problems there.

"All the reports have been positive," Mr. Antenen said. "I seriously doubt 
any of our personnel would be involved in that type of behavior."

But the lawyers reported systematic abuse in their legal filings. One of 
the lawyers, Christine Lehmann, said she had interviewed 38 inmates held in 
Jena.

"Of the inmates I interviewed, almost all said that they had been 
physically abused themselves or had seen others physically abused," Ms. 
Lehmann wrote in her affidavit. "Apparently the guards were particularly 
fond of dragging inmates out of their beds or pods (often by the hair) and 
beating them, often by slamming their heads repeatedly into the floor or 
the wall."

Guards used racial slurs, forced prisoners to get up on tables and "hop 
like bunnies" and threatened to force them to perform sex acts on guards, 
the affidavits said. The lawyers said that prisoners showed bruises, cuts 
and chipped teeth that were consistent with their accounts of beatings.

Prisoners confirmed that there had been a disturbance in the prison in 
early September. They said that the initial response had been heavy-handed, 
with guards forcing prisoners to lie naked, face down on the floor for five 
hours, and that brutal treatment continued for weeks.

Rachel Jones, one of the 30 lawyers who conducted the interviews, said that 
far more reports of abuse emerged from Jena than from the other 40 
facilities in Louisiana that received evacuated prisoners.

"I did not hear anything even closely approximating the extreme levels of 
abuse and sadism that I heard at Jena," Ms. Jones wrote in her affidavit. 
"The inmates I spoke to repeatedly expressed that they were 'terrified' and 
'scared for their lives' inside Jena."

The Jena facility is a former juvenile detention center that was closed in 
2000 after a federal investigation found systematic abuse there. It was 
reopened to house prisoners evacuated from southeastern Louisiana after 
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The jail is being operated by a combination of Louisiana state prison 
guards and volunteer corrections officers from New York. Defense lawyers 
complained that the impromptu facility did not have standard operating 
procedures, including a grievance process for inmates, that might curtail 
abuse.

Charles Jones, a state senator and chairman of the committee on government 
affairs, said in an interview last night that he was asking the state 
police and the corrections department to investigate the allegations at the 
Jena facility.

Other inmates interviewed by the lawyers said that they were locked in 
their cells in New Orleans and abandoned by guards as floodwaters rose. Dan 
Bright, a 37-year-old construction worker, said that the power went out in 
the Templeman III jail, where he was held after being arrested for public 
drunkenness and resisting arrest just before the storm.

Mr. Bright said that guards ordered prisoners into their cells, locked the 
doors and then left the facility. After power went out on the day of the 
storm, floodwaters then began to gradually fill his cell, eventually 
reaching up to his neck.

"Just imagine, you're in your cell, the light's out and the water was 
rising," he said. "The deputies were nowhere to be found. They completely 
abandoned us."

Mr. Bright said that when the floodwaters stopped rising, he and other 
prisoners remained in their cells for 24 hours, perched on top bunks or 
standing in the water. Prisoners who freed themselves from cells on upper 
levels were ultimately able to pry some cell doors off their hinges, he 
said. He said that when he left the jail four inmates were still stuck 
inside their cells.

In a report released last week, Human Rights Watch said they feared that 
some prisoners might have drowned in their cells and called for an 
investigation into whether prisoners were abandoned. The group said that as 
many 300 prisoners may be missing from city jails, but it is unclear 
whether they are somewhere in the state prison system, have escaped or have 
died. Ms. Mann, the lawyer who coordinated the interviews with prisoners, 
said prisoners reported being trapped in their cells, but none reported 
seeing prisoners drown.

Marlin N. Gusman, the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff who is in charge of 
the jails, said none of the 6,000 inmates died and "none was abandoned." 
But he acknowledged that it took three days to evacuate all the inmates, 
who were initially ferried by three small boats to a nearby overpass.

Sheriff Gusman said it "would have been impossible" to evacuate so many 
inmates as the storm approached. He said that most of the inmates were 
evacuated by the Wednesday after the storm. But then deputies realized that 
100 were still left in the upper stories of another building, he said, and 
they were rescued on Thursday.

Human Rights Watch has complained that the sheriff did not move inmates to 
state facilities before the storm, as some parishes did, or have a plan to 
deal with rising floodwaters.

Quantonio Williams, 31, an assistant office manager who had been arrested 
just before the storm and charged with marijuana possession, said guards 
locked him in his cell when floodwaters reached knee level in the jail 
where he was held in New Orleans.

Mr. Williams said the water rose to his chest before prisoners took over a 
control room and freed themselves.

He complained that during the subsequent evacuation, guards drank water for 
themselves but gave none to prisoners, who sat in open sun or on buses. 
When he finally arrived at a state prison in St. Gabriel , La., Mr. 
Williams said, hundreds of prisoners were placed in a field, were tossed 
sandwiches over a fence and were forced to go to the bathroom in the field.

Ms. Laborde said that the important factor was that no prisoners died 
during a storm that killed hundreds. "We were there for transportation and 
to save lives," she said.



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