The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Interviews with more than a dozen deputies and employees, many of whom didn't want to reveal their names for fear of losing their jobs, depict a five-day struggle to keep destructive and desperate inmates at bay. The ordeal was marked by escapes by inmates and wholesale job walk-offs by deputies. But when officers in charge finally went over the head of Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman and called Attorney General Charles Foti for state reinforcements, the ensuing rescue operation was nothing short of heroic. Everyone escaped by boat as nearly every Sheriff's Office vehicle had been quickly and completely submerged.

Signs of the pandemonium can be seen throughout the sprawling complex of 10 concrete lockups, all of which took on 6 to 10 feet of water in the low-lying wedge of land off Broad Street between Interstate 10 and Tulane
Avenue: tied-together blankets hanging from broken cell windows, scorch marks from fires, rescue boats scattered on streets and sidewalks.

Next to one smashed jail cell window, taped to the outside of the building, is a sign scrawled by an inmate, "We Need Help." On the perimeter of the same building, slung over razor-wire atop a 16-foot fence, a cluster of thick blankets marks an apparent escape.

Chief Deputy Bill Short said Thursday he could confirm only four escapes, but the Sheriff's Office computer system was fished out of floodwaters just a couple of days ago and a full head count by the state Department of Corrections is still under way. The four escapees were transfers from the St. Bernard lockup, Short said, and they bolted shortly after the storm by breaching the roof of the Intake Processing Center.

"They made it to the roof and decided they had to get out. As far as others, I just don't know," said Short, who was promoted to his new position a week ago in acknowledgment of his steely command of the 800-inmate House of Detention during the storm and its aftermath.

Other deputies said they knew of more than a dozen escape attempts. One inmate, an Australian tourist who rode out the storm in Parish Prison after getting arrested on Bourbon Street for criminal trespassing, said he saw some inmates get away from once-secure areas, although he didn't know how far they made it.

"We had no food, no power, no air-conditioning, no toilets," Ashley McDonald, the Australian tourist, said in earlier published reports. "A lot of people started breaking out and escaping and that's when attention was brought to the jail."

One thing Short said he knows for certain is that there were no deaths, not among the inmates, not among the 900 or so employees who reported to work, not among the scores of residents who floated or waded in from the surrounding neighborhood to the relative safety of the veranda of the high-rise Community Correctional Center. One group from the area, a woman and two men, used 2-by-6-foor boards to row a hot tub to the impromptu gathering point, Short said. Others who were stranded were fished out by deputies.

"Did we know exactly what to do?" Short asked. "Nobody did. It was a wild ride, but we must have done some good things because nobody died."

Separating fact from storm-spawned fiction about the prison's inundation has been difficult, especially since the prison complex was plunged into a virtual communications blackout and each of the 10 lockups became islands surrounded by toxic water. Rumors of massive jail breaks, Gusman being taken hostage and large-scale riots have proved false. Gusman was not available for comment for the past two days because of meetings, a spokeswoman said.

But first-hand accounts from three of the largest facilities - Community Correctional Center, the House of Detention and Old Parish Prison - revealed a harrowing five days before everybody was evacuated. All of the sources told about multiple resignations, deputies who tossed their badges to the ground and turned their shirts inside out, only to find themselves in the awkward position of being stuck by floodwaters alongside their former colleagues. Short estimated that if he tried today to reassemble the agency's 900 sworn deputies, he could probably scrounge up 700.

The shrinking security presence made it only more difficult to deal with the prison's most pressing problems: keeping order and ferrying people to dry ground. Deputies said the mission was carried out despite losing power the day after the storm passed, running out of food the following day and finding nearly all entrances blocked by water when help finally arrived.

"Typical panic, that's what it was, longtime deputy Monte Davis said. "People just get disturbed when they don't know what's going on. It was a mess."

The earliest sign of inmate unrest was heard, not seen, deputies said: the sound of splintering glass as prisoners smashed the buildings' narrow exterior windows.

"They were hungry, they were thirsty and most of all, they were hot," a Community Correctional Center deputy said. "We saw them just hanging from the windows."

Short said deputies eventually sanctioned the destruction.

"The inmates did break out windows," he said. "In some cases, our staff helped them. If you didn't break the windows, you didn't breathe."

Deputies said they repeatedly calmed inmates by telling them that food, water and rescue were on the way, but the message began wearing thin. In the Community Correctional Center, two commanders and a deputy said, inmates breached several layers of security, smashing visitor center security windows and breaking through stairwell doors.

The worst damage was done by inmates who broke off metal shower rods and dayroom benches, then used them as battering rams, they said.

"The knocked out some cinder blocks and breached some visitation booths," the deputy said. "It was like the movie 'Attica.'"

Until the cavalry showed up Wednesday in the form of SWAT teams from the state Department of Corrections, the deputies said they were forced to scare inmates back into cells by brandishing their pistols and occasionally firing off beanbags.

Several deputies and commanders said there were periodic reports throughout the complex that sounded like gunfire, but Short said he didn't hear much about the use of lethal force.

"I used my shotgun a couple of times to break a window," Short said. "At first I tried my flashlight, but I broke it."

One deputy with military experience rigged up makeshift hot water bombs by using the heating element in the prefab military meals distributed by the National Guard. "We threw the water bombs through the broken windows to keep them back," the deputy said.

While the security situation was growing more and more tense, rising waters forced deputies to move inmates from lower floors to higher floors, in some cases mixing hard-core inmates with municipal offenders, teenagers with career criminals. Short said deputies gave in to agitated inmates by giving them full access to the sixth-floor rooftop.

Short said his staff was able to quell most of the inmate unrest, and in some cases, older inmates stepped in to calm the more volatile prisoners.

"I hate to use the word babysat, but they stayed with them and kept them calm," Short said. "There were some inmates who acted out, but I'd say 99 percent acted responsibly."

Even in the areas where the inmates were calm, stress among deputies was rising with each passing hour because the Sheriff's Office had only five boats, not nearly enough to evacuate thousands of inmates and a growing population of civilians. On the Community Correctional Center veranda, the scene resembled a smaller-scale version of the notorious evacuation crises at the Superdome and Convention Center, with hundreds of people living and sleeping on prison cots and chairs, trash and other debris rising in piles around them.

When one of the larger boats was idled with a fried motor, Short said he and his deputies crossed a rooftop and broke into an adjacent parking garage at police headquarters so they could "scavenge" car batteries for the boat's electric trolling motor. During a tour of the jail Thursday, Short showed how they used a downed utility line to lower the batteries to the boat bobbing in the water below.

Still, Short and others said, it took a call to Foti to regain complete security and get everbody out. Foti, Orleans Parish criminal sheriff for 30 years, responded quickly and forcefully by sending state Department of Corrections guards and SWAT teams. They were joined by a flotilla of 20 boats from the state Wildlife and Fisheries Department.

"DOC was a savior," Davis said. "When things weren't going fast enough, the attorney general lit a fire under people and got a lot of things going."

"One of the captains called Foti and said, "We're losing the battle," a deputy said. "They (DOC) showed up with all the things we didn't have: shotguns with beanbag rounds, tasers, rubber bullets, riot gear, bulletproof shields."

Once the inmate outbreaks were quelled and enough boats were on hand to carry people out, one of the storm's last and most massive waterborne evacuations began to unfold over three days, from Wednesday until the last employees were fished out of the prison complex Friday.

Most of the civilians were dropped off on the Broad Street overpass, where military helicopters flew them to evacuation points. The inmates were either flown or boated to an elevated portion of Interstate 10, where they were assembled until DOC buses could take them to other prisons around the state.

During the building-by-building rescues, the lines between inmates and deputies, deputies and commanders, commanders and civilians grew invisible, Davis said.

"Position doesn't mean much in those situations," Davis said. "I worked side-by-side with the sheriff and, other than him being my boss, everybody was in the same boat. It was just regular people trying to survive."
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