The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

August 28, 2009

Homeless and Struggling In New Orleans On the Fourth Anniversary of Katrina, New Orleans is Still Far From Recovery

Homeless and Struggling In New Orleans
On the Fourth Anniversary of Katrina, New Orleans is Still Far From Recovery

by Jordan Flaherty
August 25th, 2009
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/homeless-and-struggling-in-new-orleans/

Crawling through a hole in a fence and walking through an open doorway, Shamus Rohn and Mike Miller lead the way into an abandoned Midcity hospital. They are outreach workers for the New Orleans organization UNITY for the Homeless, and they do this all day long; searching empty houses and buildings for homeless people, so they can offer services and support. "We joke about having turned criminal trespass into a fulltime job," says Rohn.

Up a darkened stairway and through the detritus of a building that looks like its been scavenged for anything of value to sell, Rohn and Miller enter a sundrenched room. Inside is Michael Palmer, a 57-year-old white former construction worker and merchant seaman who has made a home here. Palmer - his friends call him Mickey - is in some ways lucky. He found a room with a door that locks. He salvaged some furniture from other parts of the hospital, so he has a bed, a couch, and a rug. Best of all, he has a fourth-floor room with a balcony. "Of all the homeless," he says, "I probably have the best view."

Mickey has lived here for six months. He's been homeless since shortly after Katrina, and this is by far the best place he's stayed in that time. "I've lived on the street," he says. "I've slept in a cardboard box." He is a proud man, thin and muscled with a fresh shave, clean clothes and a trim mustache. He credits a nearby church, which lets him shave and shower.

But Palmer would like to be able to pay rent again. "My apartment was around $450. I could afford $450. I can't afford $700 or $800 and that's what the places have gone up to." Keeping himself together, well-dressed and fresh, Mickey is trying to go back to the life he had. "I have never lived on the dole of the state," he says proudly. "I've never been on welfare, never collected food stamps." Palmer rented an apartment before Katrina. He did repairs and construction. "I had my own business," he says. "I had a pickup truck with all my tools, and all that went under water."

Palmer is one of thousands of homeless people living in New Orleans' storm damaged and abandoned homes and buildings. Four years after Katrina, recovery and rebuilding has come slow to this city, and there are many boarded-up homes to choose from. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center counts 65,888 abandoned residential addresses in New Orleans, and this number doesn't include any of the many non-residential buildings, like the hospital Mickey stays in. Overall, about a third of the addresses in the city are vacant or abandoned, the highest rate in the nation. UNITY for the Homeless is the only organization surveying these spaces, and Miller and Rohn are the only fulltime staff on the project. They have surveyed 1,330 buildings - a small fraction of the total number of empty structures. Of those, 564 were unsecured. Nearly 40% of them showed signs of use, including a total of 270 bedrolls or mattresses.

Using conservative estimates, UNITY estimates at least 6,000 squatters, and a total of about 11,000 homeless individuals in the city.

UNITY workers have also found that not all people living in New Orleans' abandoned homes are squatters. In the last three months alone, they have found nine homeowners living in their own toxic, flood-damaged, often completely unrepaired homes. These are people living in buildings - identified as abandoned and not fit for human habitation - that they (or extended family members) actually own.

The abandoned building dwellers they've found are generally older than the overall homeless population, with high rates of disability and illness. The average age of folks they have found is 45, and the oldest was 90. Over 70% report or show signs of psychiatric disorders, and 42% show signs of disabling medical illnesses and problems. Disabling means "people that are facing death if not treated properly," clarifies Rohn. "We're not talking about something like high blood pressure."

Life in Abandoned Homes
"This leg here bent backwards and the muscle came up," says Naomi Burkhalter, an elderly Black woman in a wheelchair, sitting outside of the abandoned house she lives in and gesturing to her badly twisted leg. She was injured during Katrina, and can't walk. She stays in a flood-damaged house in New Orleans' Gert Town neighborhood, with no electricity or running water. She says the owner - who cannot afford to repair the home - knows she lives there, along with two other women. When they need water, they fill bottles up from neighbors. When she needs to get in and out of her house, she crawls, very slowly dragging herself up and down the steps with her hands, leaving her wheelchair outside and hoping no one takes it. Miss Naomi worked at a shrimp company and rented an apartment before Katrina. Now, between her injury and higher rents, she can no longer afford her former home. "My rent was 350 dollars," she explains. "But when I came back, my rent was up to $1200." Burkhalter has been homeless since then.

UNITY has received funding from the federal government for 752 housing vouchers specifically to help house the city's homeless population. They have put people on a list, with those in the most danger of dying if they don't get help on the top of the list. However, the vouchers still have not arrived, and at least 16 people from the list have already died while waiting. "The stress and trauma that these people have endured cannot be overstated," says Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY. "The neighborhood infrastructure that so many people depended on is gone."

This problem was exacerbated by the demolition of thousands of units of public housing, an act which not only took away the community that many people found brought them comfort and safety, but has also made affordable rentals for poor New Orleanians even harder to find. Section 8 subsidized housing has been offered as a solution for those displaced from public housing and other poor renters, but a new study from Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC) shows that discrimination keeps many people from finding quality housing through the program. According to the report, 82% of landlords in the city either refused to accept Section 8 vouchers, or added insurmountable requirements.

The study found that both discrimination on the part of landlords (99% of Section 8 voucher holders in Orleans parish are Black) and mismanagement on the part of the housing agency were barriers. One prospective landlord told a tester for GNOFHAC that he wouldn't rent to Section 8 holders, "until Black ministers...start teaching morals and ethics to their own, so they don't have litters of pups like animals, and they're not milking the system."

The mismanagement from the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) was also a big problem for prospective landlords. "I faxed HANO the needed information 12 times for the rent I was never paid" said one landlord. Another housing provider said, "I called every day for a month and never got a call back."

Last month, more than a hundred members of STAND for Dignity, a grassroots membership project of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, protested outside of the offices of HANO, decrying their lack of action. A single mother named Ayesha told the crowd that she had been on the Section 8 waiting list for eight years, and still hasn't received any help. She is paying 80% of her income on rent, and has been forced to go months at a time without water, gas or lights. George Tucker, another member of STAND, and also (like Mickey Palmer) a former merchant mariner, told the assembled crowd his story of being evicted from his apartment because HANO lost his paperwork. Because of bureaucratic carelessness, he was homeless for thirteen months. "This governmental crookedness is not new," he said. "But it cannot continue without consequences."

Last week, at least partly in response to criticism from folks like the members of STAND, HANO announced that they would accept new applications for Section 8 vouchers, for the first time in six years. The period that they will accept applications in is only a week long - from September 6 through 12.

Fear and Harassment
"My best friend died three weeks ago in this chair," says Mickey Palmer gesturing next to him in his room in the abandoned hospital. "There was two other people staying here with me. One gentleman got in an accident about two months ago and he's paralyzed in the hospital. Another friend of mine OD'ed and died here three weeks ago. My best friend. So I'm here alone."

Palmer also fears police harassment. "The police hate homeless people," he declares. "They'll arrest me on drunk in public," he says. "I haven't had a drink in months." Gesturing around the room that he has made into a home, he adds, "Of course, this is illegal. If I get caught I can not only be evicted, but incarcerated. I could go to jail for trespassing."

This fear drives the homeless further underground, and makes it even harder for organizations like UNITY to find them and offer help. "Our city has a long history of police criminalization of homelessness, so people have reason to hide," explains Martha Kegel.

Despite the size and scope of this problem, help has been hard to come by, from either the city, state, or federal government. "I'm not a politician and I'm not politically savvy," says Palmer. "But I don't think they care."

In a rare step forward last month, both houses of Louisiana's legislature unanimously passed a bill creating a statewide agency - to be almost entirely funded by the federal government - to address the issue of homelessness. However, Governor Jindal vetoed the bill. Jindal also vetoed funding for the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, further reducing medical and mental health services in the city - another factor that has made life hard for many homeless folks in the city. As rates of mental illness rise in the city, we now have less treatment available then ever before.

For people like Mickey, caught in a city with few good paying jobs, much more expensive housing, and ever-decreasing social services, there are not many options. "At one time we were part of the city and part of the workforce," Mickey says. "But people cannot afford the housing in New Orleans anymore. I find most of the people I know, my friends, they can't afford the rent."

Like most people in his position, Palmer has felt hopelessness at his plight. "I try not to get depressed, he says, nervously flicking his lighter. "But this can get you depressed. Coming back here last night got me a little depressed."

--------------------
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans and an editor of Left Turn Magazine. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and his reporting on post-Katrina New Orleans has been published and broadcast in outlets including Die Zeit (in Germany), Clarin (in Argentina), Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now!.

Posted by lois at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2008

New Orleans: Demoliton begins on jail destroyed during Hurricane Katrina

"The Justice Facilities Master Plan released last September called for the Sheriff's Office to get back to its pre-Katrina size of more than 6,000 beds by 2015. One part of the plan envisioned as many as 8,000 beds, up considerably from the current 2,600 beds. But Gusman said that is not his intention. "We don't want to have a bigger jail," Gusman said. The Sheriff's Office currently plans to mothball the much-criticized House of Detention, which holds more than 800 inmates in sometimes cramped quarters, once the new jail building is finished, said Renee Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for the agency. That plan is conditioned on the city finishing work at Old Parish Prison, a jail building right behind Criminal District Court, she said. The planning for the new jail still has some work, Lapeyrolerie said. It is expected to be completed by 2011."

Demolition on prison buildings under way
by Valerie Faciane, The Times-Picayune
Monday February 18, 2008, 8:03 AM

Demolition began Monday on three jail buildings damaged by Hurricane Katrina, making way for a new facility that Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman said will provide services and programs to help inmates.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will foot the bill for the $52.3 million project. The first step involves knocking down Templeman III and IV, two jail buildings built in 1995 and 1996 that the federal agency determined sustained significant damage during the storm, in part because of structural deficiencies. A gymnasium building also will be demolished.

After the wrecking balls have cleared the property, the Sheriff's Office will erect a new building with the capacity to house 1,438 inmates, as many inmates as were held in the two Templeman jails.

But Gusman said that he envisions a different kind of jail, one that will have the space to adequately house all the inmates, while also providing programs where they can learn skills before they are released. Since Katrina, all of the inmates housed in Orleans Parish jails are awaiting trial.

"Since I first took office in 2004, I have been committed to rehabilitating our inmates as a key component in reducing crime in our city," Gusman said.

Jim Stark, acting associate deputy administrator for FEMA's Gulf Coast Recovery Office, said the jail renovations are part of the overarching Justice Facilities Master Plan developed by various criminal justice agencies last fall in a process financed by FEMA.

But federal money will provide less than 25 percent of the almost $1 billion needed to build all of the projects in the ambitious master plan, which would include a new headquarters for the New Orleans Police Department and Orleans Parish district attorney, as well as a combined court building for criminal and civil courts.

Stark said the city will have to come up with other sources of money, such as bond issues or state financing, to complete all of the projects in the plan.

After a press conference in front of the buildings set to be demolished, Gusman and Stark headed over to a backhoe equipped with a jackhammer attachment. Both took a turn behind the controls of the backhoe, with the help of a professional construction worker, driving the hammer into the tile facade of Templeman III.

The Justice Facilities Master Plan released last September called for the Sheriff's Office to get back to its pre-Katrina size of more than 6,000 beds by 2015. One part of the plan envisioned as many as 8,000 beds, up considerably from the current 2,600 beds.

But Gusman said that is not his intention. "We don't want to have a bigger jail," Gusman said.

The Sheriff's Office currently plans to mothball the much-criticized House of Detention, which holds more than 800 inmates in sometimes cramped quarters, once the new jail building is finished, said Renee Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for the agency. That plan is conditioned on the city finishing work at Old Parish Prison, a jail building right behind Criminal District Court, she said.

The planning for the new jail still has some work, Lapeyrolerie said. It is expected to be completed by 2011.

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/gusman_will_announce_jail_demo.ht
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Posted by lois at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2007

New Orleans: "Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.”

“Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.”

December 19, 2007
Architecture, NY Times.

High Noon in New Orleans: The Bulldozers Are Ready
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Ever since it took over the public housing projects of New Orleans more than a decade ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been itching to tear them down.

Now, after years of lawsuits and delays, it looks as if the agency will finally get its Christmas wish. The New Orleans City Council is scheduled to vote on Thursday on whether to sign off on the demolitions of three projects. HUD already has its bulldozers in place, engines warm and ready to roll the next morning.

Arguing that the housing was barely livable before the flooding unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, federal officials have cast their decision as good social policy. They have sought to lump the projects together with the much-vilified inner-city projects of the 1960s.

But such thinking reflects a ruthless indifference to local realities. The projects in New Orleans have little to do with the sterile brick towers and alienating plazas that usually come to mind when we think of inner-city housing . Some rank among the best early examples of public housing built in the United States, both in design and in quality of construction.

On the contrary, it is the government’s tabula rasa approach that evokes the most brutal postwar urban-renewal strategies. Neighborhood history is deemed irrelevant; the vague notion of a “fresh start” is invoked to justify erasing entire communities.

This mentality also threatens other public buildings in New Orleans that can be considered 20th-century landmarks. If the government gets its way, a rich architectural legacy will be supplanted by private, mixed-income developments with pitched roofs and wood-frame construction, an ersatz vision of small-town America. That this could happen in a city that still largely lies in ruins is both sad and grotesque.

Scattered across the city, the housing complexes involve more than 4,500 units. HUD plans to complete the demolitions within the next six months.

Despite the rush to raze the complexes, none of the designs for new housing are complete. And federal officials did not give developers the option of preserving part of any of the complexes in plotting the new projects.

Few would argue for preserving every one of the projects as it exists today. The facades of a 1950s section of the B. W. Cooper housing complex, for example, are monotonously repetitive. Its claustrophobic lobbies are in sharp contrast to the more private, individual entrances found in some of the older apartments, and the overall quality of construction is low.

But the best of the projects, built as part of the New Deal’s progressive social agenda, feature many elements that are prized by mainstream urban planners today.

At the Lafitte housing complex, a matrix of pedestrian roads fuses the apartment blocks into the city’s street grid and the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. Low-rise apartments and narrow front porches, set around what were once beautfully landscaped gardens, are intended to encourage a spirit of community.

The quality of the construction materials would also be unimaginable in public housing today: Their concrete structural frames, red-brick facades and pitched terra cotta roofs would seem at home on a university campus.

The problems facing these projects have more to do with misguided policy and the city’s complex racial history than with bad design. The deterioration can be attributed to the government’s decision decades ago to gut most of the public services that supported them.

In the last few months the public has been able to judge firsthand how hollow HUD’s argument for demolition is. Just a few miles from Lafitte, the developer Pres Kabacoff is completing a renovation of the five remaining two- and three-story apartment blocks at the St. Thomas housing project, a complex that was partly demolished before the storm. The apartments, which are similar in scale to Lafitte’s, were renovated at a cost of under $200 per square foot — roughly what new construction with lesser materials would have cost.

Their handsome brick facades, decorated with wrought-iron rails and terra cotta roofs, are a stark contrast to the generic suburban tract houses that surround them on all sides. (And they are likely to be far more durable in the next storm.)

The point is that HUD’s one-size-fits-all mentality fails to take into account the specific realities of each project. The agency refuses to make distinctions between the worst of the housing projects and those, like Lafitte, that could be at least partly salvaged. Nor will it acknowledge the trauma it causes by boarding up and then eradicating entire communities in a reeling city.

In an eerie echo of the slum clearance projects of the 1960s, government officials are once again denying that these projects and communities can be salvaged through a human, incremental approach to planning. For them, only demolition will do.

The difference between then and now is what will exist once the land is cleared. If the urban renewal projects of the 1960s replaced decaying historic neighborhoods with vast warehouses for the poor, HUD’s vision would yield saccharine, suburban-style houses. And the situation is likely to get worse. The government has identified some other historically important public buildings for demolition as part of its push for privatization. Charity Hospital, an Art Deco structure built downtown in the late 1930s, was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and its fate is uncertain.

The Thomas Lafon Elementary School, a sleek Modernist structure from the 1950s, is destined for the wrecking ball. And there has been talk of tearing down the Andrew J. Bell Junior High School, an elegant French neo-Gothic building completed in the late 19th century.

Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/arts/design/19hous.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print
Katrina can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 07:23 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2007

Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council

November 20, 2007
Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council
By ADAM NOSSITER
NY Times

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 19 — In one of the clearest signs yet of Hurricane Katrina’s lasting demographic impact, the City Council is about to have a white majority for the first time in over two decades, pointing up again the storm’s displacement of thousands of residents, mostly black.

In local elections on Saturday, a veteran white politician, Jacquelyn B. Clarkson, defeated an African-American candidate, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, by 53 percent to 47 percent, in a contest for an at-large Council seat decided largely along racial lines. In addition, substantially more whites than blacks appear to have voted. Ms. Clarkson will become the fourth white member on the seven-member Council.

The total number of votes cast in the election — 52,614 — was sharply down from 113,000 in the election for mayor in May 2006. The low number called into question recent optimistic estimates that the city’s population had attained as much as two-thirds of its prestorm level, which was about 450,000.

In the 2006 election, many of those displaced by the hurricane voted absentee or drove into New Orleans to cast ballots. That vote from elsewhere appears to have been largely absent on Saturday, over two years after the storm.

“I think many people have moved on,” said Gregory C. Rigamer, a local demographic analyst whose work has been widely cited here. “When you look at this, you have to think the lower voter turnout would indicate that some people who previously cast votes from afar have lost interest.”

Since the mid-1980s, black politicians have held virtually all of the reins of power in a city where interest groups are sharply factionalized along racial lines and blacks were once two-thirds of the population. Saturday’s vote indicated a transition is in the making, perhaps similar to the one that occurred at the end of the segregation era here.

White candidates made other gains on Saturday, taking two New Orleans seats in the Louisiana Legislature long held by blacks, and a state court judgeship that had also been occupied by a black judge.

Voting was largely along racial lines. The apparently greater number of votes cast by whites — 29,700, compared with 22,900 black votes, according to an analysis by Mr. Rigamer — makes uncertain widely quoted estimates that blacks, despite a disproportionate population loss, are still substantially in the majority here.

The weekend election appeared to confirm what many had predicted immediately after the storm in 2005: New Orleans became almost overnight a smaller, whiter city with a much reduced black majority. And the results suggested that the election for mayor last year, where voting percentages were closer to pre- Katrina norms, might have been something of a fluke.

“Either blacks have really decided not to come back, in numbers, or they just voted by not voting,” said Cheron Brylski, a veteran political consultant here. “I’m really amazed at the number who just didn’t show up, knowing what was at stake.”

“I think this is the new normal,” she added. “We have to accept the fact that this is who is here, and this is who is back.”

The results on Saturday were greeted with gloom in black political circles.

“It is somewhat disheartening,” said Bill Rouselle, a veteran African-American consultant here. “It’s an indication that a lot of people have given up hope. A lot of people feel abandoned.”

Though not as highly publicized as the mayor’s race last year, the race for one of two at-large seats on the seven-member Council was nonetheless closely watched in New Orleans. The event that prompted the contest — the resignation of a popular black councilman who pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge — shocked the city as few events in public life here have, appearing as confirmation that a miasma of corruption still held sway in New Orleans.

Virtually none of the post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction projects planned by the city have gotten off the ground. Racial divisions on the Council have been sharp, and confrontations with Mayor C. Ray Nagin are frequent, though usually fruitless.

Ms. Brylski, the consultant, suggested that this might change under the newly constituted Council. “I do think the power shifts to the City Council,” she said, “and it’s incumbent on them to do something.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/us/nationalspecial/20orleans.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2007

A Message from an Organizer to the Left and Progressive Forces inside the USA. A Farewell Letter on the Second Anniversary of Katrina by Curtis Muhammad

ZNet | Activism

A Farewell Letter on the Second Anniversary of Katrina
A Message from an Organizer to the Left and Progressive Forces inside the USA
by Curtis Muhammad; People's Organizing Committee ; August 31, 2007

With this second anniversary of Katrina upon us, there are a few words I wish to speak. This letter is written to the progressive, left movement for justice in the USA. In the last two years, every left organization has been in New Orleans, but despite that there is still no sign of a mass movement. There is still no sign that most activists are willing to put their knowledge and resources at the service of the grass roots and take their leadership from the bottom. I have found myself wondering, have poor black people been so vilified and criminalized that they are completely off the radar even of the so-called left? When Katrina happened, I hoped and expected that this would be the trigger to once again set off a true mass movement against racism and for justice in the US, led by those most affected: poor, black working people. When it became abundantly clear that this was not happening, I found myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness, and began to wonder how to spend the last years of my life in the service of my people.

The thing that I remind myself when I'm contemplating hopelessness is the beauty of humanity and the fact that people have always fought for what was right even when they knew they couldn't win. They tried because they loved each other; I think it's because it's built into human beings for people to look out for each other. There is a drive in humanity to be just, to live in a society that is just, equal and respectful. I believe that ultimately people will achieve a just society; I believe humanity came out of a just society and will create it again.

I do believe that there was a time that the lovers of life, the lovers of humanity, the lovers of justice dominated the world. Some say this was so during the hunter-gatherer days, when though there were evil people they could never gain dominance. Their numbers were always small, less than 1%; people ran their lives collectively, and therefore the greedy could not dominate. Well then, I say what happened, there is only that same 1% who dominates the world now.

This thinking, this logic has been the motivating factor in my life of movement work: the belief that there is a basic humanity that is inside the soul of most people. That this humanity can be harvested and organized into a movement for justice to free our people from slavery, bondage, oppression and exploitation. That the 80% of the world who live on an average of $2 a day can and will overcome the 1% and return us to a collective life organized around love, justice and equality.

Most of you who know me also know I'm a storyteller and believe story to be a universal language that can be a vehicle for voice, the voice of all regardless of status, class, cast, race, gender. Story is an egalitarian language. So I wish to share with you my story, an abbreviated story of my organizing work from SNCC in Mississippi through the ghettoes of the US to the villages and jungles of Africa, to CLU, PHRF, NOSC, POC and finally the International School for Bottom-up Organizing. My story is meant to clarify why I now choose to live, work, teach and write outside the US and away from the grip of a drastically de-energized and often opportunistic and reactionary left in the USA.

* * *

I grew up in a community that, of necessity, had to take care of its own. In rural Mississippi in the 40s, 50s and 60s, mothers and fathers, grandparents, uncles and cousins protected the children from the hostile, racist world and collectively helped each other meet their needs. Nonetheless, when I was a child traveling to church on Sundays, I had to pass the tree from whose branches my cousin was lynched. The community of my birth gave me both my strength -- my faith in the people, my dedication to egalitarianism, and my undying hatred of racism and the oppressive few that control the world.

When SNCC came to town, I found my direction. It was both a community of love and a set of organizers devoted, at the risk of their lives, to the folk on the bottom: the poorest black folk in Mississippi, those who had nothing, not even the knowledge of how to read. SNCC introduced me to the struggles of my brothers and sisters around the world, and particularly in Africa. I became an internationalist and a revolutionary. The lessons of Ella Baker and SNCC have stayed with me throughout my life; I labored to make them a reality from Mississippi to the ghettoes of our major cities, from my time in the revolutionary movement in Africa to my work as a labor organizer, and I have done my utmost to apply them in post-Katrina New Orleans.

In 1998, I helped to organize Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition that was founded with a commitment to bottom-up organizing. (CLU principles included "ending the exploitation of oppressed peoples everywhere; educating, organizing and mobilizing the masses within our organizations and communities from the bottom up.") After eight years of organizing in some of the poorest areas of New Orleans, it became the "first responder" after Katrina, and led the formation of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF).

As a founding member of PHRF and an organizer and New Orleans resident, I was back in the city within 8 days of the flood, struggling with overwhelming pain and anger. I felt that Katrina represented an historic moment. Never before had all levels of government united to attempt genocide of 100,000 black people at the same time. Even in the 60s in Mississippi, they were murdering us in ones, twos and threes. I threw myself into the attempt to put the knowledge and resources of the left and nationalist organizations and "movement" people under the direction of the bottom: the poor and working class black folk who had been left to die in New Orleans. PHRF became a coalition that committed itself on paper to that goal.

What followed was a dramatic learning experience for me and for all those whose commitment is truly to the people and not to their own particular grouping. Within months, mainly as a result of a speaking tour I went on for PHRF, we had raised about a million dollars from folk across the country who were deeply moved by the attempted genocide of over a hundred thousand black folk. And by December, there was already conflict over who controlled that money and how it was to be used.

The New Orleans Survivor Council was organized by PHRF with the understanding that it was to become the leadership of the organization and the movement, and should control all resources. By April of 2006, when the NOSC began to sound like it wanted oversight of the funds, the interim leadership of PHRF took the money and ran, firing its own organizers for daring to tell the poor black residents in NOSC that they had the right to control the resources raised in their names. Undaunted, the young organizers continued working for the survivors and formed a new group called People's Organizing Committee (POC).

This event was a turning point for me. I realized that the words of those who I had considered my comrades were empty, that their so-called commitment to bottom- up was a fiction; that their real commitments were to various organizations and their own egos. Our attempt to institutionalize bottom-up had led instead to a coalition of opportunists.

When I had spoken to mass audiences about Katrina in the fall of 2005, I had spoken of my discovery of the depth of the fear and hatred America has for poor, black people. The images on the media of those left to die could have been taken in sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean: those people were very poor and very black. With the desertion of PHRF, I was confronted by the knowledge that this hatred of poor black people extended into and throughout the progressive movement, even within exclusively black organizations. I felt very lonely in my continued commitment to lift up precisely that segment of oppressed Americans to lead the movement.

But POC plunged ahead, still dedicated to that vision. Thousands of volunteers came in the spring and summer, and many continue to come to this day. The hearts of so many people are in the right place. The New Orleans Survivor Council and its member group Residents of Public Housing continue to work to put bottom-up leadership on the map and fight for the right of our community to return and control its own destiny. But the past year has also revealed further weakness and lack of vision in our movement.

From the days immediately following the flood, we recognized that immigrants, brown people, some of the poorest and most desperate of our brothers and sisters from countries to the south, were being brought into our city. They were put to the dirtiest, most dangerous clean-up tasks, and later to replace the forcibly dispersed black labor force, for slave wages and in slave conditions. From the start, we called for organizing this new part of the New Orleans community in unity with and under the leadership of the black folk on the bottom.

This call was part of my message in the speeches I made in the fall of 2005, and several immigrant organizers heeded the call and came to work with us. However, despite many serious attempts to develop unity between black survivors and immigrants, it has become clear that those organizers refuse to unite with and take leadership from black folk. They have organized immigrant slaves into separate groupings with no contact with the NOSC, despite their initial commitment to unity. They are essentially, wittingly or unwittingly, following the government's agenda, which is to build a racist, assimilationist immigrant "movement" that will serve the needs of a war economy and patriotism.

And so we come to the second anniversary of Katrina. Bottom-up organizing is still embryonic, though hanging on to life and with a small, dedicated band of survivors, organizers and volunteers. But the rest of the movement is in shambles, or under direct or indirect influence of our enemies.

Through the experience of the last two years, I have also come to the conclusion that the infiltration of and direct attacks on the movement that started (in my lifetime as an activist) in the late 60s and early 70s with Cointelpro have never stopped. Our movement has been successfully divided into thousands of groupings, non-profits and NGOs, and the left has been rendered ineffectual. It is not an accident that, for forty years now, the movement has been so totally reformist, or that those who want to be revolutionaries are so isolated as to be irrelevant. The government and its agencies have a stranglehold on the people, the culture and even the left. I do not think it is possible in the U.S. at this time, for me, to develop and train organizers with a real understanding and commitment to the folk on the bottom.

And thus, I find myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness. I find myself possibly in the position of writing not mainly to the current readers of these words, but to those future revolutionaries who will learn from our impasse. I find myself deciding to work toward creating an international organizing school as a vehicle to discover, recruit and train radical organizers. I want to continue my investigation of the movements in Mexico and South America among very poor -- members of the informal economy, workers, campesinos and landless people -- learn more about how class and hue interact to shape oppression, take inspiration from the fact that the struggle continues, un-abandoned, worldwide, and share my own knowledge and experience with the rebels of today and tomorrow.

I have lived 64 years and have struggled intentionally for justice for about forty-six of those years. I am thankful and appreciative to all those who have traveled some of that distance with me: those who helped nurture my children, who stood with me when I was imprisoned and tortured, those who have always supported my work and stood by me when all seemed to stand against me. To these worthy friends, comrades and loved ones, I will always honor you, be there for you, and know you are there for me.

Still, I have arrived at a place in my life where I wish to share everything I have and know with the "sufferers." My principle continues to be the struggle to engage the poor, oppressed, voiceless, and those who have the least and suffer the most. The only struggle that matters to me now is finding justice for those who have never had it.

This is me, where I am, trying to figure out how to organize our folk in a way that we always look at need as the principle of justice. If you are looking for me, look among the youth, the poor, and the struggling masses trapped in slave-like conditions throughout the world, for I am no longer available to an opportunistic and racist left. I NOW SEEK REFUGE AMONG THE POOR.

This is my struggle.

Wish me well,

Curtis

-- People's Organizing Committee www.peoplesorganizing.org
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=13666§ionID=1

To read or listen or watch to Curtis Muhammad’s interview on Democracy Now on Tuesday September 4th go to:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/145214

Posted by lois at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2007

Interview with Curtis Muhammad: Katrina and the history and current state of organizing in the U.S.

Please listen to this interview with Curtis Muhammad

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/145214

We turn to a conversation with Curtis Muhammad from the People's Organizing Committee. Muhammad is a native of New Orleans and a longtime activist. During the sixties, he was an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and co-founded Community Labor United. After the Hurricane hit, he hit the road tracking the New Orleans refugees into shelters from city to city. He first spoke to him in Jackson Mississippi a few days after the flood. On the second anniversary of Katrina, Curtis Muhammad wrote a farewell letter to the left and progressive forces in the United States. He is leaving the country and heading south. Amy Goodman visited him on his front porch in New Orleans and to ask why.

Posted by lois at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2007

The Nation: Locked Up in New Orleans

It's not so far from the way things were more than a century ago. Antebellum city records refer to what is now the Orleans Parish Prison as the Workhouse. In addition to those arrested for crime, the jail was a repository for slaves whose masters chose to lease them to the Workhouse. The same archives also reveal that African-Americans were committed to the Workhouse for "claiming to be free": In the space where the master's name was usually recorded, these inmates were referred to as "so-called free." After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans arrested in New Orleans for black-code crimes like vagrancy and unemployment were taken to the parish Workhouse. During Reconstruction, the incarcerated former slaves provided a critical pool of forced labor for railroad companies, agriculture and industry. In its first regular session post-Katrina, the state legislature amended a law regulating parish jail labor in order to grant immunity to prison authorities "for injuries or damages caused or suffered by prisoners participating in any work program during incarceration at parish jail facilities." When I asked a legislative staffer about the origins of the post-Katrina amendment, she said, "I believe it was because there was a labor shortage."

The Nation

Locked Up in New Orleans

by ROBIN TEMPLETON

[from the September 10, 2007 issue]

"I never got paid," Dewitt Solomon tells me. Nine months before the levees broke, Solomon had a minimum-wage job busing tables and washing dishes at Messina's, a popular New Orleans tourist restaurant. But instead of paying him directly, Messina's gave Solomon's paychecks to the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office. Solomon, who was serving time in the Orleans Parish Prison--the eighth largest penal institution in the country and the largest correctional facility in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina--was enrolled in the sheriff's work-release program.

"
The prison was supposed to give him his wages, minus the $500 a month it deducted for room and board, the day it returned to Solomon his freedom. Solomon says that the sheriff still owes him $1,500.

Sitting at the kitchen table at his home in New Orleans's West Bank, Solomon and I are feeding bottles to his twin sons. The babies weighed less than two pounds at birth. Now, at 13 months, they're startlingly small but chugging away at the formula like they're in a race to catch up. Solomon's 5-year-old daughter is prancing around the room with a Dora the Explorer coloring book. She has proclaimed that the cartoon heroine is her twin sister. The resemblance is, actually, striking.

Solomon says he tried for months to recoup his lost earnings and never got a call back from the sheriff's office. He gave up after floodwater washed away his only proof, the pay stubs he'd saved from the restaurant.

Solomon sounds more resigned than bitter. "It's not that I couldn't still use the money," he says. "I'm just glad I got in and out before it got any worse." Solomon describes how his brother-in-law was arrested on trespassing charges when he went to check on storm damage to his father's home. His cousin was also arrested for a nonviolent crime weeks ago, and no one in the family has been able to make contact or even determine where he's being held.

New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate of any major US city--double the national rate. Louisiana also locks up more people in local jails than any state due in part to state laws, unheard of in other parts of the country, that paralyze due process.

District attorneys have sixty days from the time of arrest in a felony case and forty-five days in a misdemeanor case to decide whether to press charges and typically use the full statutory time limit. From there, it takes an average of three months for detainees to get a court date. It can take up to three years to get to trial. According to a recent study by the Vera Institute of Justice, 41 percent of those entering the Orleans Parish Prison would qualify to be released on their own recognizance. Instead, the city opts to lock people up if they can't post bail, which is true of three-quarters of the jail's detainees.

While it was bad before the storm, "now the system is only working to pick people up," says Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley. "It's a vacuum, sucking poor people in and keeping them in. Being arrested now equals being sent to prison."

Nearly a year after Katrina, the city's backlog of cases reached at least 6,000. Judge Arthur Hunter of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court declared that "it is a pathetic and shameful state of affairs the criminal justice system finds itself in" and said that he would mark the one-year anniversary of the storm by beginning to release poor defendants.

But just as Hunter was declaring a constitutional state of emergency last summer, New Orleans was hit by a devastating crime wave. With half its former population, the city saw its crime rate escalate back to pre-Katrina levels. By the time it was gearing up for its second post-Katrina Mardi Gras celebration, national media were pronouncing New Orleans the murder capital of the United States.

Under the headline "Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing in New Orleans," the New York Times reported in February that a "uniquely poisoned set of circumstances" was fueling the violence, including the destruction of the city's only crime lab, friction between police and prosecutors, community distrust and fear of the police, uncooperative or vanished witnesses and "murderers' brutalized childhoods." The majority of victims and suspects have been young African-American men--many teenagers--caught up in a drug trade that was reinvigorated, reorganized and made more lethal amid turf wars in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The crime crisis is part and parcel of a wider social crisis. Two years after the storm, only one-third of the childcare centers and 45 percent of the public schools in Orleans Parish have reopened. Mental health services for residents suffering from depression, drug addiction or post-traumatic stress disorder are practically nonexistent. The city's Housing Authority has slated thousands of units of public housing for demolition, the majority of which were not damaged by the storm.

Bill Quigley has represented hundreds of families fighting to reclaim their homes and possessions from the Housing Authority. "One of the reasons they say they don't want to reopen public housing is that they don't want to let crime back into the city," Quigley explains. "But crime is already back in.

The truth is that there are a lot of young people here without their families. The families don't have housing. So kids are coming back on their own, without their aunts and their mothers and their grandparents. Neighborhoods are breaking down because we don't have the families back. We don't have a lot of the churches. We don't have the infrastructure in poor communities that we had before.

"Some of us in the city think it's a bigger crime to keep thousands of families out of their apartments than to sell drugs," he notes. "But law enforcement doesn't see it that way."

Indeed, city officials responded to the crime wave with a troop surge. The city's police department is nearly staffed back up to its pre-Katrina size and budgeted all the way back up. Local law enforcement has been joined by sixty state troopers and 300 National Guard troops in Humvees and military uniforms--they've christened themselves "Task Force Gator"--at a cost to the state of $35 million.

Police have been making a record number of arrests, now averaging over 1,300 a week. But as the crime problem persists, they don't seem to be getting the bad guys. According to recent exit interviews with detainees leaving the parish jail, conducted by the local criminal justice reform organization Safe Streets/Strong Communities, 80 percent were being held for nonviolent offenses, mostly on low-level drug or alcohol charges. "The city is plagued by violent crime, residents who will never be charged with a crime spend weeks in jail," the Vera Institute recently reported, "and some serious offenders are released with no charges."

Ursula Price, Safe Streets's outreach and investigations coordinator, describes the case of a woman in the jail "who had called 911 about a domestic violence incident. Instead of trying to help her, the police ran her name and ended up arresting her on an outstanding traffic violation."

Safe Streets provides first responders to the city's incarcerated. The group has racked up huge phone bills accepting collect calls from the Orleans Parish Prison and the diaspora of correctional facilities to which arrestees were scattered in the wake of the storm. Some callers just want to know why they're there--it can take days for police, whom one criminal defense lawyer described as "functionally illiterate," to complete a report. Others wonder how long they might be in, whether they have a court date, how they can get legal support or how they can contact their family or boss.

Callers from Orleans Parish Prison also report dungeonlike conditions: twenty-five people held in cells built for ten, so many people sleeping in one area that you can't even see the floor, no fresh or conditioned air, overflowing toilets, inconsistent electricity and iffy plumbing. The prison has yet to regain the accreditation it lost in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of inmates were abandoned in fetid floodwaters in what local writer and criminal defense attorney Billy Sothern described as "the biggest prison crisis since Attica" [see "Left to Die," January 2, 2006].

This summer Glenn Thomas, the 29-year-old son of Rosetta James, a member of Safe Streets/Strong Communities, died in Orleans Parish Prison. James didn't learn of her son's death from the sheriff's office, she says, but by word of
mouth: "One of the inmates was able to call his mother and tell her that Glenn had died, and she came and found me. I said, 'Nobody tell me nothing. I'm going to the jail.'" When she got there, the morning of July 4, James was told that her son, who had no known medical problems, had died the night before at 11 pm of "natural causes," and that she could call back in another month for the official report.

Thomas died waiting for his day in court. On May 19, 2004, he was arrested for simple drug possession. He was slated to appear in court about a year later, on August 31, 2005, when the city was uninhabitable. Nonetheless, a warrant was issued for his arrest for failing to appear. In October 2006, Thomas was arrested and detained in the Orleans Parish Prison. His new court date, the one he didn't live to see, was set for August 2007.

Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman's public information officer, Renee Lapeyrolerie, said they couldn't provide details about Thomas's death but said, "Well, in his criminal history he had a lot of drug arrests. Those things can be linked to health problems."

"This is the third death there's been in there this year," says Safe Streets co-director Norris Henderson. "It's all the same story. The jail says they don't know why any of these people died. Anything wrong that happens in his facilities the sheriff blames on the inmates or on not having enough money," Henderson says. "But you really can't blame Glenn for his own death, and you can't blame it on the money, because he's got that."

As mandated by a 35-year-old consent decree intended to remedy abusive conditions in the jail, the city pays the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office a per diem amount for each local inmate, plus $3.2 million annually to provide medical services. In his 2007 budget request to the City Council, Gusman asked for an additional $5 million for medical services, a request that was granted.

Henderson is solemn when asked what it will take to get public officials to pay attention to the crisis. "It's not like I want a Rodney King situation where people burn the city down, because we don't have much of a city left to burn. But we need to do something, a sit-down, a walkout, something. It's getting to the point where we need some drama."

Dana Kaplan of the Center for Constitutional Rights summarizes the essential problem facing reformers. "Right now Gusman's funding is tied to the number of the people in the jail. How are we going to get money for schools and services and jobs programs with so much money tied up in the jail?"

Gusman's recent budget requests make it clear that he is banking on crime. His 2007 "budget request for these payments is based on our expected City inmate population," the sheriff wrote to the City Council. "The inmate population is driven primarily by the number of arrests made by the Police Department. Since the storm, the arrest rate has consistently increased in an attempt to stem the rising crime rate." In his 2005 request, Gusman explained that the depopulation of the jail in the immediate wake of Katrina represented a "90 percent reduction in revenue, but our fixed costs remain high."

Gusman has never publicly said that his aim is to build Orleans Parish Prison, which can now accommodate 2,500 inmates, back up to its former size, which was 8,000 before Katrina. But in written testimony to the US House of Representatives in April 2007, he listed as chief among his critical needs "the restoration of our four largest jail facilities." This, Gusman wrote, "would increase our capacity (an additional 4,100 beds) to hold some of New Orleans [sic] most violent and repeat offenders."

In other words, "build them and fill them," says Henderson, "and we know who'll be filling them."

Henderson and other local advocates formed Safe Streets/ Strong Communities in the wake of Katrina, in the words of their founding statement, "to demand that elected officials address the root causes of our decades-long public safety crisis, cease blaming the victims, and stop investing time and money on tactics that have never worked.... Many of our children have been given nothing to reach for except guns and little to own and be proud of but their street corners."

While Safe Streets has scored some recent victories--helping win the appointment of a new Indigent Defender Board and funding to launch the Office of the Independent Monitor to oversee police policies and practices, for instance--the real challenge for activists is the fight to reallocate public resources, out of law and order and into community recovery.

But to Sheriff Gusman, these are one and the same; he has made sure that the city's path to recovery will be paved by his inmates--literally. Since Katrina, Gusman has used his Community Service Program and Neighborhood Response Team to deliver cheap labor for reconstruction projects. His office's website features photos of inmates in orange jumpers and sweatshirts emblazoned with Sheriff Gusman Community Service Program next to road signs announcing, Project Clean-Up. Inmates Working.

It's not so far from the way things were more than a century ago. Antebellum city records refer to what is now the Orleans Parish Prison as the Workhouse. In addition to those arrested for crime, the jail was a repository for slaves whose masters chose to lease them to the Workhouse. The same archives also reveal that African-Americans were committed to the Workhouse for "claiming to be free": In the space where the master's name was usually recorded, these inmates were referred to as "so-called free." After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans arrested in New Orleans for black-code crimes like vagrancy and unemployment were taken to the parish Workhouse. During Reconstruction, the incarcerated former slaves provided a critical pool of forced labor for railroad companies, agriculture and industry.

In its first regular session post-Katrina, the state legislature amended a law regulating parish jail labor in order to grant immunity to prison authorities "for injuries or damages caused or suffered by prisoners participating in any work program during incarceration at parish jail facilities." When I asked a legislative staffer about the origins of the post-Katrina amendment, she said, "I believe it was because there was a labor shortage."

Lieut. Eric Donnelly, director of the sheriff's work-release program, the one that Dewitt Solomon took part in before the storm, told a local business paper that the program played a vital role in restarting the city's economic engine. "As soon as the hurricane ended and we got a new phone, it was ringing off the hook from employers saying they needed their inmates," Donnelly said. "So as soon as we were getting them back in we had [employers] coming to pick them up themselves. That's how much they rely on this program."

But, as Solomon says, "you shouldn't have to go to jail to get a job."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/templeton

Posted by lois at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2006

AFL-CIO "Mobilizes Young Men of Color"

AFL-CIO "Mobilizes Young Men of Color"

By Lorinda M. Bullock, NNPA National Correspondent
November 27, 2006

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - The AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor organization, announced a new nationwide initiative that will provide job training and job opportunities for young Black men. They also announced their "Mobilization for Young Men of Color" initiative would start in the predominately Black and Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

In response to former Congressman Ron Dellums Commission's latest series of reports including "A Way Out: Creating Partners for Our Nation's Prosperity By Expanding Life Paths of Young Men of Color," Its goal was to give public and private sectors recommendations on how to reverse the negative social, economic and educational trends happening among young men of color.

"It was an amazing moment," said Gail Christopher, the director of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Health Policy Institute. The Washington-based think tank sponsored the commission's reports.

"It had all these burly, robust, tall, labor guys standing there saying, 'we have to take our country back and it starts with young men of color. It was amazing'," she said.

According to the Commission's report that was also released last week, it's going to take efforts of large groups like the AFL-CIO and many others to save minority males, especially African Americans, who account for the worst high school graduation and mortality rates in comparison to their White counterparts.

The commission reported, "more than 29 percent of African- American males who are 15 years old today are more likely to go to prison at some point in their lives compared to 4.4 percent of White males of the same age."

Christopher said a number of issues have to be addressed in order to end the "pipeline" to prison and the commission recommendations try to tackle the underlying issues hinder the progress and success of young minority men.

"We've put policies in place that exacerbate that historic problem. We expel them now from school at the drop of a hat through zero tolerance programs, we have disinvested in mental health care so when they have substance abuse problems or other types of challenges, from the standpoint of behavior and mental health, they go to jail instead of to treatment. We're warehousing our young people in jails where they learn to be criminals. That is wrong," she said.

The Dellums Commission, which is chaired by former Congressman and Mayor-elect of Oakland, Calif., Ronald V. Dellums, was formed by the HPI to analyze policies that affect young men of color and to develop action plans to improve their lives. The commission members, Christopher said, come from a variety of backgrounds.

"We didn't just fill it with thinkers and analysts. We filled it with judges and legislators and superintendents of schools and psychiatrists-people who live with these populations and treat them and understand something's got to be done."

Increasing the minimum wage; extending health care coverage to all uninsured children through the age of 18 who aren't covered by state programs; repealing mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes were among some of the commission's recommendations.

Helen Kanovsky, Chief Operating Officer AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, said the AFL-CIO is equally excited about the new initiative, and has been successful in similar ventures. To date, Kanovsky said the AFL-CIO has provided job skills and apprenticeship programs for years and spends more than $500 million annually for programs at 2,000 training centers across the country.

"They (the commission) talked with a large number of corporations as well, but it was labor that stepped up first. Labor stepped up and said we hear what you say, we've read your report, we agree and we're here to help and here's what we propose as our first step with you in implementing some of your recommendations," Kanovsky said.

The organization was among many, including the Congressional Black Caucus that received advanced copies of the commission's report. Christopher said the CBC was responsive to the recommendations and vowed to share them with other legislators.

For the AFL-CIO program, Kanovsky said the organization wanted to do a more comprehensive program with not only job training but job placement and mentoring programs.

"It's on the job training, apprenticeship, distance learning-we have a significant role for the national labor college-this includes setting up an E-learning center with satellite facilities," she said.

"The plan is to create something we call an anchor facility, which is a physical center to all of this where there is a place for community partnerships for labor, for business, for media for mentoring. We've talked to a number of people in the sports world who are interested in participating in the mentoring piece."

Kanovsky said New Orleans was an obvious choice for the location of the Pilot program especially with the rebuilding efforts that will allow the young men hands-on experience on construction sites doing a range of skillful jobs as electricians or bricklayers.

Currently, the AFL-CIO is scouting buildings for the "anchor facility" and a date has not been set for the opening, but Kanovsky said the location of the facility is expected to be decided in the coming months.

"It really builds on the kinds of things the labor movement has done for a long time, which is find a way to take people, give them a skill set and put them on the road to a middle class economic life," she said of the new initiative.

"That's how you sustain communities. And that's how you give people real hope and opportunity. You give them the skills that lead to the jobs that lead to the income that make them be not just productive members of society but let them achieve their personal goals of being able to support themselves, (and) support their families."

s%20Young%20Men%20of%20Color%22&author=By%20Lorinda%20M%2E%20Bullock%2C%20NN
PA%20National%20Correspondent&date=November%2027%2C%202006> talkback

Posted by lois at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2006

NY Times: New Olreans: Architecture "All Fall Down"

November 19, 2006, NY Times
Architecture
All Fall Down
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

NEW ORLEANS

The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s plan to demolish four of the city’s biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.

Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city’s urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city’s public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

So it’s not surprising that many of its residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here. Locked out of the planning process, they fear the planned demolitions are part of a broad effort to prevent displaced poor people from returning to New Orleans.

This demolition strategy is not new. It is part of a long-standing campaign to dismantle the nation’s public housing system that began in the 1970s. That campaign was based on the valid belief that the concentration of the poor into segregated ghettos condemned them to a permanent cycle of poverty, crime and drugs. Specifically, it was directed at the large-scale postwar housing developments that became a fixture of American cities in the 1960s — anonymous blocks of concrete housing, like Chicago’s recently partially demolished Cabrini-Green, whose deadening uniformity seemed to strip the poor of their identity, reducing them to repetitive numbers in a vast bureaucratic machine.

The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of a new model for public housing: mixed-income developments whose designs are largely based on New Urbanist town-planning principles. Nostalgic visions of Middle America, they are marked by narrow pedestrian streets and quaint two-story houses with pitched roofs and covered porches. For HUD, they have become the default mode for rebuilding in New Orleans.

But if the sight of workers dynamiting an abandoned housing complex was a cause for celebration in Chicago’s North Side, the notion is stupefying in New Orleans, whose public housing embodies many of those same New Urbanist ideals: pedestrian friendly environments whose pitched roofs, shallow porches and wrought iron rails have as much to do with 19th-century historical precedents as with late Modernism.

More specifically, they were inspired by local developments such as the 1850s Pontalba Apartments and late-19th “Garden City” proposals, whose winding tree-lined streets and open green spaces were seen as an antidote to the filth and congestion of the industrial city.

The low red-brick housing blocks of the Lafitte Avenue project, in the historically black neighborhood of Treme, for example, are scaled to fit within the surrounding neighborhood of Creole cottages and shotgun houses. To lessen the sense of isolation, the architects extended the surrounding street grid through the site with a mix of roadways and pedestrian paths. As you move deeper into the complex, the buildings frame a series of communal courtyards sheltered by the canopies of enormous oak trees. Nature, here, was intended to foster spiritual as well as physical well being.

That care was reflected in the quality of construction as well. Solidly built, the buildings’ detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary public housing complex.

They would be almost impossible to reproduce in the kind of bottom-line developments that have become the norm.

In truth, the collapse of New Orleans’ public housing system had less to do with bad design than with cynical government policies, which were rooted in the city’s divisive racial politics. Up through the 1950s, residents of Lafitte were supported by a network of social services, from nursery schools financed by the Works Progress Administration to onsite medical care, adult education programs, Boy Scout groups and gardening clubs.

But as the middle class fled to the suburbs in the 1960s, these services were gradually stripped away, transforming entire areas of the inner city into ghettos for the black underclass.

By 2002, conditions had worsened to the point that the city of New Orleans agreed to turn control of its public housing over to HUD. Today, the richly landscaped gardens are gone. Many of the lawns have been paved over and replaced by basketball courts. Huge garbage bins, some with fading paintings of balloons, are scattered across decaying lots. Towering floodlights illuminate forbidding concrete pathways.

That neglect has now touched bottom in post-Katrina New Orleans. Most of the city’s public housing was boarded up a few months after the storm — long before most residents were able to claim their possessions or clean out their refrigerators. Many are now rat-infested. And while HUD has promised that anyone who comes back will be provided housing in the same neighborhood, those residents that have managed to return have had little voice about what their housing will be. (By comparison, the city has set up numerous town meetings to help homeowners decide how to rebuild their neighborhoods.)

The point is not that projects like Lafitte should be painstakingly restored to their original condition; nor are we likely to return to the same spirit of social optimism that created them any time soon. None of the projects rise to the level, say, of the best Modernist workers housing built in Europe in the 1920s, some of which were such refined architectural compositions that their apartments are now occupied by upper-middle-class sophisticates.

But they certainly rank above the level of much of the conventional middle-class housing being churned out today. And it is not difficult to imagine how a number of thoughtful modifications — the addition of new buildings, extensive landscaping, extending the existing street grid to anchor the project more firmly into the city — could transform the project into model housing.

Yet HUD has never seriously considered such a plan. And although HUD says it has studied what it would cost to restore the projects, it has not released any figures. Finally, it has been unwilling to acknowledge the psychic damage of ripping out more of the city’s fabric at a time when New Orleans has yet to heal the wounds of Hurricane Katrina.

HUD officials say they have not yet set a date for demolition, but they have already selected a team of developers — Enterprise Community Partners and Providence Community Housing, an arm of the Catholic church — which are working on plans for the site. Meanwhile, HUD’s vision of the future is already visible several miles away at the New Fischer development in Algiers. Built to replace a decaying 1960s-era housing complex, part of which is still under demolition, the neighborhood’s rows of two-story houses, painted in cheery pastel colors, will be occupied by a mix of low- and middle-income families. Its porch-lined streets are straight from a Norman Rockwell painting of small-town America.

But in many ways, the development is also an illusion. Conceived as an internalized world, with the majority of its narrow streets dead-ending into nowhere, the development is virtually cut off from the lifeblood of the surrounding city — the shops, streets, parks and freeways that weave the city into an urban whole. And its uniform rows of houses represent a vision of conformity that has little to do with urban life. Instead, it replaces one vision of social isolation with another.

In its broadest sense, that approach is part of the continued assault against cities as places of contact and friction, where life is embraced in its full range. By smoothing over differences, it seeks to make the city safe for returning suburbanites and tourists.

This is a fool’s game. The challenge in New Orleans is to piece together the fragments of a shattered culture.

Sadly, HUD’s plan manages to trivialize the past without engaging the painful realities that have shorn this city apart.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/weekinreview/19ouroussoff.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (photos here)

Posted by lois at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2006

Hurricane Recovery & Women- a new report

Katrina Anniversary Report
August 27, 2006
co-released by the Women's Funding Network and the Ms. Foundation for Women
http://www.wfnet.org/donate/katrinarelief.php
Hurricane Recovery Through Women's Funds

As we saw in New Orleans, when disaster strikes, the disaster is indiscriminate but the damage is not. Society does discriminate, and those already denied resources and advantages then become the most affected by the disaster's wholesale destruction.

Hurricane Recovery Through Women's Funds

As we saw in New Orleans, when disaster strikes, the disaster is indiscriminate but the damage is not. Society does discriminate, and those already denied resources and advantages then become the most affected by the disaster's wholesale destruction.

Anticipating Hurricane Katrina's potential for long-term harm to female entrepreneurs, low-income women, single-parent households, and women at risk of violence, the Women's Funding Network partnered with the Ms. Foundation for Women, Inc. and W.K. Kellogg Foundation to issue $500,000 in grants to the following member 1 funds delivering services and support to the scores of female Katrina survivors that have resettled in their states: Atlanta Foundation for Women (Georgia), Chicago Foundation for Women (Illinois), Women's Fund of Birmingham (Alabama), Women's Fund of Greater Jackson (Mississippi) and Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis.

Evacuation demographics show that poorer families often ended up the farthest away from the Gulf region; many went wherever emergency flights and buses were destined. Among those that lacked cars or lost their vehicle to flooding, a significant number of families are trying to regain their footing and start their lives anew wherever they landed.

Before Katrina, fifty-six percent of families in New Orleans were not two-parent but female-headed, single-parent households with median annual income of just $16,450-notching them below the federal poverty line. The Institute for Women's Policy Research recently found that women represent more than 90% of prime-age American workers (age 26-59) who average low earnings over 15 years. For many of Hurricane Katrina's female survivors, the loss of their home meant the loss of a home-based business as well.

Attempting to turn around their lives' upheaval, Hurricane Katrina's survivors are hoping for better prospects than they had before. The women's funding movement has set out to help make this a reality. Throughout the South and in other parts of the country, women's funds are delivering resources to create sustainable economic opportunities and to reverse social injustices as the centerpiece of long-term relief for the direct impact of the disaster. The role of the women's funding movement in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath is to identify the ways in which women and girls are impacted, and to make them integral to the disaster recovery and rebuilding of their communities. Thirty years of partnership with grassroots women puts women's funds in a crucial position to funnel support to local activists dealing with economic and social justice issues as well as the long-term reconstruction effort.

* Prior to Katrina, The Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis (WFGM) was recognized as an important link in the community with grant-making, leadership, volunteer and 25 grantee organizations with supportive services that specifically address special needs of low income and women of color. Thus, in the aftermath of Katrina, WFGM was called upon to be represented on a Task Forces created by the City of Memphis to plan a response process to identify and aid the evacuees. WFGM quickly became a direct point of contact for the grantee organizations, evacuee victims, family members, churches, donors, volunteers and the general public. PWFGM estimates that at least 5,000 evacuees have now made Shelby County, Tennessee their permanent home. The Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis is dedicating $100,000 to programs providing holistic services for Katrina survivors-work readiness, career development, economic literacy, non-traditional training, entrepreneurship development, housing placement, medical needs, child care, and counseling.
* Within one week of the storm, over 300 displaced families and individuals in Alabama had been linked with emergency resources via a one-stop center comprised of 12 organizations. The Women's Fund of Greater Birmingham played a leadership role in ensuring that women received this emergency support. Today The Women's Fund is planning toward the economic self-sufficiency of women re-building on the Alabama coast, and Katrina's survivors who have adopted Birmingham as their home. The Women's Fund is bundling a continuum of services for low-income and women of color, teaching marketable skills for above-minimum wage jobs, offering job search support and mentoring, and providing childcare vouchers and reliable transportation to help ensure successful employment experiences. They want evacuees to "know that Birmingham will be a permanent home community in which they can thrive."

Reconstruction brings the opportunity to transform prior inequalities, not just for women of the Gulf coast. From the aftermath of the Asian tsunami to the earthquake in northern Pakistan, women are re-building their lives and local infrastructure-or providing for the needs of the displaced-while many of the relief agencies struggle to catch up.

Grassroots women were at the heart of many success stories after Hurricane Mitch, the Category 5 storm that wiped out vast areas of Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998. Having survived Hurricane Joan ten years earlier, the women of Mulukutu, Nicaragua, started a brick factory and held carpentry workshops to build stronger homes for their families. Concerned about the conditions that existed prior to the disaster, including high levels of domestic violence, problems with STDs and unwanted pregnancies, the women used their construction skills to build a women's health clinic, which provided shelter and treatment for families displaced by Hurricane Mitch. Not surprisingly, they gained political power in the municipality and earned respect from their community.

Women's funds in the US are taking a similarly holistic approach to evacuees' long-term needs and combining that with their bird's-eye view of challenging the injustices women had long faced in the Gulf Coast region prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

* Louisiana lost five domestic violence shelters in Hurricane Katrina, and Mississippi lost three. A 2005 report by the Violence Policy Center highlighted Mississippi as having one of the highest rates of homicides committed against women in the country. The stress of the disaster and displacement combined with lack of jobs and income will contribute exponentially to pre-existing tendencies toward violence. The Women's Fund of the Community Foundation of Greater Jackson is focusing on providing support for shelters, childcare, physical and mental health services, and legal assistance for women and children who have experienced domestic violence or abuse, "to give a voice in rebuilding to those left out of the process."

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, women's funds have led and made visible the approach that women are not passive victims but vital agents of survival, recovery, and change for their families and communities. Women and girls were in the thick of the crisis and are now on the frontline of resource management and rebuilding in every household, school, and community.

Women's funds are investing in local women's leadership, resourcefulness, and resilience, re-building communities to be more resistant to the economic, race, and gender inequalities that eroded their lives long before the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Posted by lois at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

Katrina: Nationwide is on your side except if you are a Katrina Victim

Cyrus Dugger
Remember: Nationwide Insurance is On Your Side - Unless You are a Katrina Victim
http://www.dmiblog.net/archives/2006/08/remember_nationwide_insurance.html

As we reach the anniversary of Katrina, I thought we should all remember the ongoing manmade elements of the continuing disaster....... by way of my previous post.

Nationwide Insurance is On Your Side - Unless You are a Katrina Victim

The Homepage of Nationwide Insurance

At Nationwide, we're working hard every day to meet the insurance and financial needs of our customers, at every stage of life. Whatever happens.

You can count on it. With more than $157 billion in statutory assets, Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the world.

We offer a full range of products and services for your home, your car, your family, and your financial security. We're easy to reach no matter where you are, day or night, from any one of the 50 states and Washington D.C. to Europe and Latin America.

Simply put - Nationwide is On Your Side

Unless you are victim of Hurricane Katrina.

Despite the broadly smiling African-American man on their website's homepage, Nationwide is doing nothing close to making hundreds of the many African-American Katrina victims smile.

The insurance company is systematically denying homeowner insurance claims by Katrina disaster victims. The company claims that its home insurance policy only covers damage from wind and not from water.

In the first case of more than 3,000 individual claims against insurance companies mounting similar defenses (Mississippi Attorney General also filed a separate class action lawsuit), Federal District Judge L.T. Senter Jr, the judge who will be responsible for deciding almost all of the other cases, sided with Nationwide and held that:

"The provisions of the Nationwide policy that exclude coverage for damages caused by water are valid and enforceable terms of the insurance contract. Similar policy terms have been enforced with respect to damage caused by high water associated with hurricanes in many reported decisions."

The damage to the home in question owned by Police Lieutenant Paul Leonard and his wife Julie Leonard, is estimated at $130,000. In his decision, the judge increased the sole compensation for wind damage from $1,228 to $2,889. Notably, the Leonards were required to pay a $500 deductible before receiving their benefits.

There are a few problems with this decision.

The first is that despite his ruling, the judge specifically held that the contract's distinction between water and non-water damage was ambiguous, and that if a decision were based on the contract's its plain text, it would also have excluded all claims for any damage if water contributed to the damage in any way.

This finding implies that the insurer purposefully wrote contracts in a way that it could later argue covered nothing if water was involved in damaging the house in any manner. These types of insurance contracts are contrary to established Mississippi law.

As stated in the decision:

A windstorm is a weather condition that is specifically included in the coverage of
this policy. When the policy is read as a whole, I find that this exclusionary provision is ambiguous-the policy as a whole providing explicitly for windstorm coverage in one section and purportedly excluding the same coverage on the grounds that a windstorm, a "weather condition," and an excluded peril, a flood, occurred at approximately the same time - If this second provision were read to exclude wind damage that occurs at or near the time that any excluded water damage occurs, the result would be contrary to well-established Mississippi law.

If the judge found that this language was ambiguous to the extent that if read literally it would have such an absurd result, it is arguably so ambiguous that the distinction between water and non-water damages should be ruled null and void in its entirety.

The plaintiffs' primary argument was that a "storm surge" driven by wind, is different from the classic flood which was specifically excluded form the contract.

As identified in the complaint, the insurance company somewhat acknowledged the ambiguity:

"On September 7, 2005, nine (9) days after Hurricane Katrina, defendant Nationwide suspiciously sent Plaintiffs a "Hurricane Coverage and Deductible Provision Endorsement," which for the first time attempted to exclude damage caused by hurricane "storm surge" for the October 2005 to October 2006 policy period. This conveniently new "Hurricane Coverage and Deductible Provision Endorsement," which of course was not in effect during Hurricane Katrina, conclusively establishes that 'storm surge' damage was not an excluded form of damage."

I'm not a weather expert but, for what it's worth, storm surge has a separate definition than flood on Wikipedia.

The second major issue is that the plaintiffs repeatedly asked their insurance agent if they needed flood insurance. What is significant about the decision is the judge's finding that the evidence did not support the claim that their insurance agent "misled them by implying that their Nationwide homeowners policy would cover water damage caused by storm surge flooding."

The judge found that the insurance agent repeatedly said that there was no need to get additional insurance. Moreover, despite these inquiries and the response the repeated response that additional coverage was not needed, the judge found that the plaintiff "lept" to the conclusion that the agent had said that additional insurance was not needed because his insurance already covered all hurricane related damage.

According to the judge:

"[The insurance agent] sometimes discouraged his clients from purchasing flood insurance policies. That much is clear from the testimony of a variety of witnesses, including Fletcher's office assistant, Cindy Byrd Collins. There was enough evidence on this point to warrant the conclusion that Fletcher, as a matter of habit and routine, expressed his opinion, when he was asked, that customers should not purchase flood insurance unless they lived in a flood prone area (Flood Zone A) where flood insurance was required in connection with mortgage loans - There was no testimony from which I can discern the reason Fletcher discouraged some of his clients from purchasing flood insurance policies."

The court's primary point was that while the agent may have given bad advice, he did not affirmatively mislead the plaintiffs. This point could really go either way. The agent may have just genuinely felt that it was not necessary, but this point also raises the issue of the level of the duty of cared owed by an insurance agent to his or her clients. More importantly, the issue is also illustrative of the fact that even if the insurance agent had misled them, how would they prove it?

There are also two other side issues.

The first is that the insurance adjuster who first surveyed the damage attributable to wind later modified his report to reduce coverage for a variety of items. "The adjuster had also been reprimanded twice by the Texas Board of Professional Engineers for not following 'generally accpeted engineering practices.'"

The plaintiffs' attorney has also cited whistleblowers who have come forward to claim that insurance companies are secretively rewriting their existing contracts to excluded water related damages.

While reasonable minds can disagree about the outcome of this first of 3,000 cases, what is most distressing is the reaction of the insurance community.

In response to the ruling, the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America ("PCIAA") praised the decision and said that the decision allowed

"[I]nsurers and other businesses in the state to operate without a lingering cloud of uncertainty about the validity of their contracts, which will help energize both the insurance market and the economy of Mississippi."

"Help energize both the insurance market and the economy of Mississippi?"

Don't you need repaired homes for that? How is denying claims to rebuild destroyed homes energizing anything but the profits of insurance companies, let alone for the whole of the state?

PCIAA also said that the decision:

"[R]einforced the need for consumers to take proactive steps to prepare for disasters by making sure that their insurance polices are up to date and that they have the correct type of coverage… especially for flood insurance."

But, as previously stated, the plaintiffs in this case repeatedly asked their insurance agent if they needed additional flood insurance coverage, and were repeatedly told - - - no.

The Property Insurers of America also said that:

"A healthy insurance industry is absolutely key to a rejuvenated economy down here."

Except that without people or homes, how can the economy exist?

Is this the twilight zone?

In other news:

"Shares of most property and casualty insurers rose following the ruling, amid a generally surging stock market - - - American International Group Inc. shares added 73 cents to $62.43

Allstate Corp. shares gained 80 cents to $57.22,

St. Paul Travelers Cos. shares rose 93 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $44.02,

and Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. shares jumped $1.01 to $82.49"

and such

and so on

and on

and on

and on.

Posted by Cyrus Dugger at August 29, 2006 03:20 PM

Posted by lois at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

Black Commentator: Bill Quigley- One Year After Katrina

August 31, 2006 - Issue 195

Cover Story, Black Commentator
New Orleans a Year After Katrina
New Orleans is still in intensive care.
By Bill Quigley http://www.blackcommentator.com/195/195_cover_katrina_quigley.html

Bernice Mosely is 82 and lives alone in New Orleans in a shotgun double. On August 29, 2005, as Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the levees constructed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers failed in five places and New Orleans filled with water.

One year ago Ms. Mosely was on the second floor of her neighborhood church. Days later, she was helicoptered out. She was so dehydrated she spent eight days in a hospital. Her next door neighbor, 89 years old, stayed behind to care for his dog. He drowned in the eight feet of floodwaters that covered their neighborhood.

Ms. Mosely now lives in her half-gutted house. She has no stove, no refrigerator, and no air-conditioning. The bottom half of her walls have been stripped of sheetrock and are bare wooden slats from the floor halfway up the wall. Her food is stored in a styrofoam cooler. Two small fans push the hot air around.

Two plaster Madonnas are in her tiny well-kept front yard. On a blazing hot summer day, Ms. Mosely used her crutches to gingerly come down off her porch to open the padlock on her fence. She has had hip and knee replacement surgery. Ms. Mosely worked in a New Orleans factory for over thirty years sewing uniforms. When she retired she was making less than $4 an hour. “Retirement benefits?” she laughs. She lives off social security. Her house had never flooded before. Because of her tight budget tight, Ms. Mosely did not have flood insurance.

Thousands of people like Ms. Mosely are back in their houses on the Gulf Coast. They are living in houses that most people would consider, at best, still under construction, or, at worst, uninhabitable. Like Ms. Mosely, they are trying to make their damaged houses into homes.

New Orleans is still in intensive care. If you have seen recent television footage of New Orleans, you probably have a picture of how bad our housing situation is. What you cannot see is that the rest of our institutions, our water, our electricity, our healthcare, our jobs, our educational system, our criminal justice systems – are all just as broken as our housing. We remain in serious trouble. Like us, you probably wonder where has the promised money gone?

Ms. Mosely, who lives in the upper ninth ward, does not feel sorry for herself at all. “Lots of people have it worse,” she says. “You should see those people in the Lower Ninth and in St. Bernard and in the East. I am one of the lucky ones.”

Housing

Hard as it is to believe, Ms. Mosely is right. Lots of people do have it worse. Hundreds of thousands of people from the Gulf Coast remain displaced. In New Orleans alone over two hundred thousand people have not been able to make it home.

Homeowners in Louisiana, like Ms. Mosely, have not yet received a single dollar of federal housing rebuilding assistance to rebuild their severely damaged houses back into homes.

Over 100,000 homeowners in Louisiana are on a waiting list for billions in federal rebuilding assistance through the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. So far, no money has been distributed.

Renters, who comprised most of the people of New Orleans before Katrina, are much worse off than homeowners. New Orleans lost more than 43,000 rental units to the storm. Rents have skyrocketed in the undamaged parts of the area, pricing regular working people out of the market. The official rate of increase in rents is 39%. In lower income neighborhoods, working people and the elderly report rents are up much higher than that. Amy Liu of the Brookings Institute said “Even people who are working temporarily for the rebuilding effort are having trouble finding housing.”

Renters in Louisiana are not even scheduled to receive assistance through the Louisiana CDBG program. Some developers will receive assistance at some point, and when they do, some apartments will be made available, but that is years away.

In the face of the worst affordable housing shortage since the end of the Civil War, the federal government announced that it refused to allow thousands of families to return to their public housing units and was going to bulldoze 5000 apartments. Before Katrina, over 5000 families lived in public housing – 88 percent women-headed households, nearly all African American.

These policies end up with hundreds of thousands of people still displaced from their homes. Though all ages, incomes and races are displaced, some groups are impacted much more than others. The working poor, renters, moms with kids, African-Americans, the elderly and disabled – all are suffering disproportionately from displacement. Race, poverty, age and physical ability are great indicators of who has and who has made it home.

The statistics tell some of the story. The City of New Orleans says it is half its pre-Katrina size – around 225,000 people. But the U.S. Post Office estimates that only about 170,000 people have returned to the city and 400,000 people have not returned to the metropolitan area. The local electricity company reports only about 80,000 of its previous 190,000 customers have returned.

Texas also tells part of the story. It is difficult to understand the impact of Katrina without understanding the role of Texas – home to many of our displaced. Houston officials say their city is still home to about 150,000 storm evacuees – 90,000 in FEMA assisted housing. Texas recently surveyed the displaced and reported that over 250,000 displaced people live in the state and 41 percent of these households report income of less than $500 per month. Eighty-one percent are black, 59 percent are still jobless, most have at least one child at home, and many have serious health issues.

Another 100,000 people displaced by Katrina are in Georgia, more than 80,000 in metro Atlanta – most of whom also need long-term housing and mental health services.

In Louisiana, there are 73,000 families in FEMA trailers. Most of these trailers are 240 square feet of living space. More than 1600 families are still waiting for trailers in St. Bernard Parish. FEMA trailers did not arrive in the lower ninth ward until June – while the displaced waited for water and electricity to resume. Aloyd Edinburgh, 75, lives in the lower ninth ward and just moved into a FEMA trailer. His home flooded as did the homes of all five of his children. “Everybody lost their homes,” he told the Times-Picayune, “They just got trailers. All are rebuilding. They all have mortgages. What else are they going to do?”

Until challenged, FEMA barred reporters from talking with people in FEMA trailer parks without prior permission – forcing a reporter out of a trailer in one park and residents back into their trailer in another in order to stop interviews.

One person displaced into a FEMA village in Baton Rouge has been organizing with her new neighbors. Air conditioners in two trailers for the elderly have been out for over two weeks, yet no one will fix them. The contractor who ran the village has been terminated and another one is coming – no one knows who. She tells me, “My neighbors are dismayed that no one in the city has stepped forward to speak for us. We are “gone.” Who will speak for us? Does anyone care?”

Trailers are visible signs of the displaced. Tens of thousands of other displaced families are living in apartments across the country month to month under continuous threats of FEMA cutoffs.

Numbers say something. But please remember behind every number, there is a Ms. Mosely. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people each with a personal story like Ms. Mosely are struggling to return, trying to make it home.

Water and Electricity

New Orleans continues to lose more water than it uses. The Times-Picayune discovered that the local water system has to pump over 130 million gallons a day so that 50 million gallons will come out. The rest runs away in thousands of leaks in broken water lines, costing the water system $2000,000 a day. The lack of water pressure, half that of other cities, creates significant problems in consumption, sanitation, air-conditioning, and fire prevention. In the lower 9th ward, the water has still not been certified as safe to drink – one year later.

Only half the homes in New Orleans have electricity. Power outages are common as hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs have not been made because Entergy New Orleans is in bankruptcy. Entergy is asking for a 25 percent increase in rates to help it become solvent. Yet Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy Corporation reported earnings of $282 million last year on revenue of $2.6 billion.

Health and Healthcare

Early this month, on August 1, 2006, another Katrina victim was found in her home in New Orleans, buried under debris. The woman was the 28th person found dead since March 2006. A total of 1577 died in Louisiana as a result of Katrina.

A friend of mine, a lawyer with health insurance and a family physician, went for an appointment recently at 11am. The office was so crowded he had to sit out in the hall on the floor to wait his turn for a seat in the waiting room. Three hours later he met his doctor. The doctor thought might have a gall stone. The doctor tried to set up an ultrasound. None were available. He ordered my friend to the emergency room for an ultrasound. At 4pm my friend went to the hospital emergency room, which was jammed with people: stroke victims, young kids with injuries, people brought in by the police. At 5am the next morning, my friend finished his ultrasound and went home. If it takes a lawyer with health insurance that long to get medical attention, consider what poor people without health insurance are up against.

Half the hospitals open before Katrina are still closed. The state’s biggest public healthcare provider, Charity Hospital, remains closed and there are no current plans to reopen it anytime soon. Healthcare could actually get worse. Dr. Mark Peters, board chair of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans said within the next two to three months, “all the hospitals” will be looking seriously at cutbacks. Why? Doctors and healthcare workers have left and there is surging demand from the uninsured who before Katrina went through now non-existent public healthcare. There is a shortage of nurses. Blue Cross Blue Shield officials reported, “About three-quarters of the physicians who had been practicing in New Orleans are no longer submitting claims.”

There is no hospital at all in the city for psychiatric patients. While the metropolitan area had about 450 psychiatric beds before the storm, 80 are now available. The police are the first to encounter those with mental illness. One recent Friday afternoon, police dealt with two mental patients – one was throwing bricks through a bar window, the other was found wandering naked on the interstate.

The elderly are particularly vulnerable. Over 70 percent of the deaths from Katrina were people over 60 years old. No one knows how many seniors have not made it back home. Esther Bass, 69, told the New York Times, after months of searching for a place to come home to New Orleans, “If there are apartments, I can’t afford them. And they say there will be senior centers, but they’re still being built. They can’t even tell you what year they’ll be finished.” As of late July 2006, most nursing homes in the 12 parish Gulf Coast area of Louisiana are still not fully prepared to evacuate residents in the face of a hurricane.

The healthcare community has been rocked by the arrest of a doctor and two nurses after the Louisiana Attorney General accused them of intentionally ending the lives of four patients trapped in a now-closed local hospital. The accusations now go before a local grand jury which is not expected to make a decision on charges for several more months. The case is complicated for several reasons. Most important is that the doctor and nurses are regarded as some of the most patient-oriented and caring people of the entire hospital staff. It is undisputed that they worked day and night to save hundreds of patients from the hospital during the days it was without water, electricity or food. Others say that entire hospital and many others were abandoned by the government and that is what the attorney general should be investigating. The gravity of the charges, though, is giving everyone in the community pause. This, like so much else, will go on for years before there is any resolution.

Jobs

Before Katrina, there were over 630,000 workers in the metropolitan New Orleans area – now there are slightly over 400,000. Over 18,000 businesses suffered “catastrophic” damage in Louisiana. Nearly one in four of the displaced workers is still unemployed. Education and healthcare have lost the most employees. Most cannot return because there is little affordable housing, child care, public transportation and public health care.

Women workers, especially African American women workers, continue to bear the heaviest burden of harm from the storm. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that the percentage of women in the New Orleans workforce has dropped. The number of single mother families in New Orleans has dropped from 51,000 to 17,000. Low-income women remain displaced because of the lack of affordable housing and traditional discrimination against women in the construction industry.

Tens of thousands of migrant workers, roughly half undocumented, have come to the Gulf Coast to work in the recovery. Many were recruited. Most workers tell of being promised good wages and working conditions and plenty of work. Some paid money up front for the chance to come to the area to work. Most of these promises were broken. A tour of the area reveals many Latino workers live in houses without electricity, other live out of cars. At various places in the city whole families are living in tents. Two recently released human rights reports document the problems of these workers.

Immigrant workers are doing the dirtiest, most dangerous work, in the worst working conditions. Toxic mold, lead paint, fiberglass, and who knows what other chemicals are part of daily work. Safety equipment is not always provided. Day laborers, a new category of workers in New Orleans, are harassed by the police and periodic immigration raids. Wage theft is widespread as employers often do not pay living wages, and sometimes do not pay at all. Some of the powers try to pit local workers against new arrivals – despite the fact that our broken Gulf Coast clearly needs all the workers we can get.

Public transportation to and from low-wage jobs is more difficult. Over 200 more public transit employees have been terminated – cutting employment from over 1300 people pre-Katrina to about 700 now.

Single working parents seeking childcare are in trouble. Before Katrina, New Orleans had 266 licensed day care centers. Mississippi State University surveyed the city in July 2006 and found 80 percent of the day care centers and over 75 percent of the 1912 day care spots are gone. Only one-third of the Head Start centers that were open pre-Katrina survived.

Public Education

Before Katrina, 56,000 students were enrolled in over 100 public schools in New Orleans. At the end of the school year there were only 12,500. Right after the storm, the local school board gave many of the best public schools to charter groups. The State took over almost all the rest. By the end of the school year, four schools were operated by the pre-Katrina school board, three by the State, and eighteen were new charter schools.

After thirty-two years of collective bargaining, the union contract with the New Orleans public school teachers elapsed and was not renewed and 7500 employees were terminated.

For this academic year, no one knows for certain how many students will enroll in New Orleans public schools. Official estimates vary between a low of 22,000 and a high of 34,000.

There will be five traditional locally supervised public schools, eighteen schools operated by the State, and thirty-four charter schools. As of July 1, not a single teacher had been hired for fifteen of the state-run schools. As of August 9, 2006, the Times-Picayune reported there are no staff at all identified to educate students with discipline problems or other educational issues that require special attention.

Whatever the enrollment in the new public school system is in the fall, it will not give an accurate indication of how many children have returned. Why? Many students in the public charter schools were in private schools before the hurricane.

Criminal Legal System

Consider also our criminal legal system. Chaka Davis was arrested on misdemeanor charges in October 2005 and jailed at the Greyhound station in New Orleans in October of 2005.

Under Louisiana law, he was required to be formally charged within 30 days of arrest or released from custody. Because of a filing error he was lost in the system. He was never charged, never went to court, and never saw a lawyer in over 8 months – even though the maximum penalty for conviction for one of his misdemeanors was only 6 months. His mother found him in an out of town jail and brought his situation to the attention of the public defenders. He was released the next day.

Crime is increasingly a problem. In July, New Orleans lost almost as many people to murder as in July of 2005, with only 40 percent of the population back. There are many young people back in town while their parents have not returned. State and local officials called in the National Guard to patrol lightly populated areas so local police could concentrate on high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. Arrests have soared, but the number of murders remain high. Unfortunately, several of the National Guard have been arrested for criminal behavior as well – two for looting liquor from a home, two others for armed robbery at a traffic stop.

Criminal Court District Judge Arthur Hunter has declared the current criminal justice system shameful and unconstitutional and promises to start releasing inmates awaiting trial on recognizance bonds on the one year anniversary of Katrina. The system is nearly paralyzed by a backlog of over 6000 cases. There are serious evidence problems because of resigned police officers, displaced victims, displaced witnesses, and flooded evidence rooms. The public defender system, which was down to 4 trial attorneys for months, is starting to rebuild.

“After 11 months of waiting, 11 months of meetings, 11 months of idle talk, 11 months without a sensible recovery plan and 11 months tolerating those who have the authority to solve, correct and fix the problem but either refuse, fail or are just inept, then necessary action must be taken to protect the constitutional rights of people,’ said Hunter.

In the suburbs across the lake, Sheriff Jack Strain told the media on TV that he was going to protect his jurisdiction from “thugs” and “trash” migrating from closed public housing projects in New Orleans. He went on to promise that every person who wore “dreadlocks or che-wee hairstyles” could expect to be stopped by law enforcement. The NAACP and the ACLU called in the U.S. Justice Department and held a revival-like rally at a small church just down the road from the jail. Though the area is over 80 percent white, the small group promised to continue to challenge injustice no matter how powerful the person committing the injustice. Recently, the same law enforcement people set up a roadblock and were stopping only Latino people to check IDs and insurance. I guess to prove they were not only harassing black people?

Finally, a grand jury has started looking into actions by other suburban police officers who blocked a group of people, mostly black, from escaping the floodwaters of New Orleans by walking across the Mississippi River bridge. The suburban police forced the crowd to flee back across the two mile bridge by firing weapons into the air.

This is the criminal legal system in the New Orleans area in 2006. None dare call it criminal justice.

International Human Rights

The Gulf Coast has gained new respect for international human rights because they provide a more appropriate way to look at what should be happening. The fact that there is an international human right of internally displaced people to return to their homes and a responsibility on government to help is heartening even though yet unfulfilled.

The United Nations has blasted the poor U.S. response to Katrina. The UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva accepted a report from Special Reporter Arjun Sengupta who visited New Orleans in fall of 2005 and concluded: “The Committee…remains concerned about information that poor people, and in particular African-Americans, were disadvantaged by the rescue and evacuation plans implemented when Hurricane Katrina hit the United States of America, and continue to be disadvantaged under the reconstruction plans.”

Asian tsunami relief workers who visited New Orleans over the summer were shocked at the lack of recovery. Somsook Boonyabancha, director of the Community Organisations Development Institute in Thailand, told Reuters she was shocked at the lack of progress in New Orleans. “I’m surprised to see why the reconstruction work is so slow, because this is supposed to be one of the most rich and efficient countries in the world. It is starting at such a slow speed, incredibly slow speed.”

Warnings to the Displaced

Local United Way officials see the lack of housing, healthcare and jobs and conclude that low-income people should seriously consider not returning to New Orleans anytime soon.

United Way wrote: “Most of these people want to come home, but if they do not have a recovery plan they need to stay where they are. Some of these evacuees think that they can come back and stay with families and in a few weeks have a place of their own. But the reality is that they may end up living with those relatives for years. Sending people back without a realistic plan may have serious consequences: the crowding of families into small apartments/homes/FEMA trailers is causing mental health problems – stress, abuse, violence, and even death – and this problem is going to get worse, not better. Also, when the elderly (and others) are those returning and living in these conditions, their health is impacted and then the lack of medical facilities and hospital beds is a problem. Again the result may be death….Basically if an evacuee says they have a place to stay – like with relatives – those communities will give them bus fare back or pay for U-hauls. If an evacuee was a renter here and they want to return they should be told to plan on returning in 3-7 years, and in the meantime stay there, get a job, and be much better off.”

FEMA officials in Austin are also warning people about returning to New Orleans. They wrote: “Before you return….New Orleans is a changing place…you should consider the conditions you may be returning to. Many neighborhood schools will not be open by August. Your children may have to travel some distance to get to school…Grocery and supermarkets have been slow to return to many neighborhoods. Sometimes there aren’t enough residents back in your neighborhood for a store to open and be profitable. You may have to travel a large distance to groceries. Walking to the store might not be an option…If you or your family members require regular medical attention, or if you are pregnant or nursing, the services you received before the storm may be scattered and in very different and distant locations. Depending on your medical needs, you may have to drive across the river or even as far away as Baton Rouge…If you or your family members have allergies, remember that there is lots of dust and mold still in the city. While you may have suffered from allergies before the storm, please consider that being in the city will only worsen your allergies. If you have asthma, other respiratory or cardiac conditions, or immune system problems, you would be safer staying out of flooded areas due to the mold, particles and dust in the air. If you must return to the city, wear an approved respirator when working in moldy or dusty areas. …Additionally, police, fire and emergency personnel are stretched to their limits…If you own a car, gas and service stations are limited in many areas. You may need to purchase a gas can in the event you cannot get gas near your home…Public transportation (busses) are also limited and do not operate in all areas….Available and affordable housing is extremely rare. Waiting lists for apartments are as large as 300 on the list, depending on how many bedrooms you need. Living inside your home could be dangerous if mold has set in of if your utilities are not in top working condition…Living in New Orleans may be easier said than done until we have fully recovered from the storm.”

This is New Orleans, one year after Katrina.

Where Did the Money Go?

Everyone who visits New Orleans asks the same question that locals ask – where is the money? Congress reportedly appropriated over $100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion was allocated to temporary and long-term housing. Just under $30 billion was for emergency response and Department of Defense spending. Over $18 billion was for State and local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure. $3.6 billion was for health, social services and job training and $3.2 for non-housing cash assistance. $1.9 billion was allocated for education and $1.2 billion for agriculture.

One hour in New Orleans shows the check must still be in the mail.

Not a single dollar in federal housing rehab money has made it into a hand in Louisiana. Though Congress has allocated nearly $10 billion in Community Development Block Grants, the State of Louisiana is still testing the program and has not yet distributed dollar number one.

A lot of media attention has gone to the prosecution of people who wrongfully claimed benefits of $2000 or more after the storm. Their fraud is despicable. It harms those who are still waiting for assistance from FEMA.

But, be clear - these little $2000 thieves are minnows swimming on the surface. There are many big savage sharks below. Congress and the national media have so far been frustrated in their quest to get real answers to where the millions and billions went. How much was actually spent on FEMA trailers? How much did the big contractors take off the top and then subcontract out the work? Who were the subcontractors for the multi-million dollar debris removal and reconstruction contracts?

As Corpwatch says in their recent report, “Many of the same ‘disaster profiteers’ and government agencies that mishandled the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the failure of ‘reconstruction’ of the Gulf Coast region. The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same ‘contract vehicles’ in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are ‘indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity’ open-ended ‘contingency’ contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also ‘cost-plus’ contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend.”

We do know billions of dollars in no-bid FEMA contracts went to Bechtel Corporation, the Shaw Group, CH2M Hill, and Fluor immediately after Katrina hit. Riley Bechtel, CEO of Bechtel Corporation, served on President Bush’s Export Council during 2003-2004. A lobbyist for the Shaw Group, Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA Director and friend of President Bush. The President and Group Chief Executive of the International Group at CH2MHill is Robert Card, appointed by President Bush as undersecretary to the US Department of Energy until 2004. Card also worked at CH2M Hill before signing up with President Bush. Fluor, whose work in Iraq was slowing down, is one of the big winners of FEMA work and its stock is up 65 percent since it started Katrina work.

Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota has raised many protests and questions over inflated prices. “It is hard to overstate the incompetence involved in all of these contracts – we have repeatedly asked them for information and you get nothing.” Republican U.S. Representative Charles Bustany, who represents an area heavily damaged by Hurricane Rita, asked FEMA for reasons why the decision was made to stop funding 100 percent of the cost of debris removal in his district. FEMA refused to tell him. He then filed a Freedom of Information request to get the information, and was again refused. When he asked to appeal their denial, he was told that there were many appeals ahead of his and he would have to wait.

If a US Senator and a local U.S. Republican Representative cannot get answers from FEMA, how much accountability can the people of the Gulf Coast expect? There are many other examples of fraud, waste and patronage.

How did a company that did not own a truck get a contract for debris removal worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Miami Herald reported that the single biggest receiver of early Katrina federal contracts was Ashbritt, Inc. of Pompano Beach, FL, which received over $579 million in contracts for debris removal in Mississippi from Army Corps of Engineers.

The paper reported that the company does not own a single dumptruck! All they do is subcontract out the work. Ashbritt, however, had recently dumped $40,000 into the lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, which had been run by Mississippi Governor and former National GOP Chair Haley Barbour. The owners of Ashbritt also trucked $50,000 over to the Republican National Committee in 2004.

How did a company that filed for bankruptcy the year before and was not licensed to build trailers get a $200 million contract for trailers? Circle B Enterprises of Georgia was awarded $287 million in contracts by FEMA for temporary housing. At the time, that was the seventh highest award of Katrina money in the country. According to the Washington Post, Circle B was not even being licensed to build homes in its own state of Georgia and filed for bankruptcy in 2003. The company does not even have a website.

FEMA spent $7 million to build a park for 198 trailers in Morgan City Louisiana – almost 2 hours away from New Orleans.

Construction was completed in April. Three months later only 20 of the trailers were occupied. One displaced New Orleans resident who lives there has to walk three miles to the nearest grocery.

Hurricanes are now a booming billion dollar business. No wonder there is a National Hurricane Conference for private companies to show off their wares – from RVs to portable cell phone towers to port-a-potties. One long time provider was quoted by the Miami Herald at the conference that there are all kinds of new people in the field - 'Some folks here said, `Man, this is huge business; this is my new business. I'm not in the landscaping business anymore, I'm going to be a hurricane debris contractor.' "

On the local level, we are not any better.

One year after Katrina the City of New Orleans still does not have a comprehensive rebuilding plan. The first plan by advisors to the Mayor was shelved before the election. A city council plan was then started and the state and federal government mandated yet another process that may or may not include some of the recommendations of the prior two processes. One of the early advisors from the Urban Land Institute, John McIlwain, blasted the delays in late July. “It’s virtually a city with a city administration and its worse than ever…You need a politician, a leader that is willing to make tough decisions and articulate to people why these decisions are made, which means everyone is not going to be happy.” Without major changes at City Hall the City will have miles of neglected neighborhoods for decades. “We’re talking Dresden after World War II.”

Signs of Hope

Despite the tragedies that continue to plague our Gulf Coast, there is hope. Between the rocks of hardship, green life continues to sprout defiantly.

Fifteen feet of water washed through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School for Science and Technology in the lower 9th Ward. When people were finally able to get into the building, the bodies of fish were found on the second floor. Parents and over 90% of the teachers organized a grass-roots effort to put their school back together. Their first attempts to gut and repair the school by locals and volunteers from Common Ground were temporarily stopped by local school officials and the police. Even after the gutting was allowed to resume, the community was told that the school could not reopen due to insufficient water pressure in the neighborhood.

But the teachers and parents are pressing ahead anyway in a temporary location until they can get back in their school. Assistant Principal Joseph Recasner told the Times-Picayune: “Rebuilding our school says this is a very special community, tied together by more than location, but by spirituality, by bloodlines, and by a desire to come back.”

New Orleans is fortunate to have a working newspaper again. The Times-Picayune won a well-deserved Pulitzer for its Katrina coverage. Its staff continues to provide quality documentation of the Gulf Coast region’s efforts to repair and rebuild.

The New Orleans Vietnamese people continue to inspire us. They were among the very first group back and they have joined forces to care for their elders, rebuild their community church, and work together in a most cooperative manner to resurrect their community. Recently they took legal and direct action to successfully stop the placement of a gigantic landfill right next to their community. Their determination and sense of community-building is a good model for us all.

The only Republican running for Congress in New Orleans is blasting President Bush over failed Katrina promises. Joe Lavigne is running radio ads saying, “Sadly, George Bush has forgotten us. He’s spending too much time and money on Iraq and not enough living up to his promise to rebuild New Orleans. His priorities are wrong. I’m running for Congress to hold President Bush accountable.” Maybe other Republicans will join in.

Tens of thousands of volunteers from every walk of life have joined with the people of the Gulf Coast to help repair and rebuild. Lawyers are giving free help to Katrina victims who need legal help to rebuild their homes. Medical personnel staff free clinics. Thousands of college, high school and even some grade school students have traveled to the area to help families gut their devastated homes. Churches, temples, and mosques from across the world have joined with sisters and brothers in New Orleans to repair and rebuild.

Despite open attempts to divide them, black and brown and white and yellow workers have started to talk to each other. Small groups have started to work together to fight for living wages and safe jobs for all workers. Thousands came together for a rally for respectful treatment for Latino and immigrant workers. Seasoned civil rights activists welcomed the new movement and pledged to work together.

Ultimately, the people of the Gulf Coast are the greatest sign of hope. Despite setbacks that people in the US rarely suffer, people continue to help each other and fight for their right to return home and the right to live in the city they love.

On Sunday morning, a 70 year old woman told a friend where her children are. “They are all scattered,” she sighed. “One is in Connecticut, one in Rhode Island, one in Austin.” When he asked about her, she said, “Me? I am in Texas right now. I am back here to visit my 93 year old mother and go to the second line of Black Men of Labor on Labor Day. But I’m coming back. Yes indeed. I will return. I’m coming back.”

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at Quigley@loyno.edu.

For more information visit www.justiceforneworleans.org

Posted by lois at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2006

Hurricane Katrina Update: Finding Faith in Our Darkest Hour

Finding Faith in Our Darkest Hour
A New Orleans Update

By Xochitl Bervera, August 30, 2006
Friends and Famiies of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
NOTE: FFLIC continues to need financial support. For contact information go to the end of this posting.

Friends from around the country ask us: “How are things in New Orleans? Are things getting better?” I always have to pause, surprised that people haven’t heard. I forget that the national media has abandoned us, that George Bush flew into town for five minutes to make promises of federal support which gave the rest of the country and the world permission to look away. I am stunned that people don’t know how much worse it is in New Orleans today for our organization, for our members, for our community than it was even six months ago.

When people ask, I have to tell them: It’s worse than you think. It’s not what people want to hear, but it’s the truth that isn’t being reported in the mainstream media, so I have to keep telling them. And every time, I draw on a renewed commitment on the part of FFLIC and many others in New Orleans and around the country to hold onto faith and to the knowledge that the spiritual and material power of people who believe in and work for justice will one day prevail - and so we keep moving forward. Because it is always darkest before dawn and New Orleans, a year after Katrina, is due for the brightest of dawns.

How are things in New Orleans? For the young people and families who are FFLIC’s heart and soul, things are not well. Besides the chaos of still-unrepaired infrastructure (traffic lights are still broken, garbage pick up remains illusive, levees are insufficiently repaired, and entire neighborhoods remain exactly as they did in October of last year) the clear plan of developers and the business community to deny the right of return to New Orleans’ Black community is being implemented in the ugliest of ways. HUD recently unveiled its plan to demolish 5000 units of public housing. The Recovery School District will simply not open its schools that serve poor Black neighborhoods. Officials refuse to re-open Charity Hospital, the source of health care for New Orleans’ poor and working class. All are part of a plan that has been in the works since the day after the storm. We are witnessing the normally gradual process of gentrification sped up to its logical conclusion, with developers interested in eliminating (and quickly!) all public infrastructure that supports the lives of poor and working class Black communities, and politicians eager to accommodate them. Politicians publicly make their commitment to welcome everyone back while quietly making the policy decisions that guarantee its impossibility.

And yet, people keep coming home! Black New Orleanians, whose land and city this is, are finding their way back every day despite all the predictions and efforts to the contrary. Our families and communities made it back to vote and made their numbers and power felt. Folks are back looking for jobs which don’t exist and housing which is boarded up and vacant.

What does this mean? It means there are hundreds of children in the city with no public schools to attend in their neighborhood. It means there are thousands of people suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (only psychologists tell us there is no “Post” to our PTSD as the stress of daily life in New Orleans is newly traumatizing each day) with no mental health care. It means people still have no consistent place to live, no sense of protection from a future storm, no jobs to make a living, no health care to treat even basic medical needs. It means folks come back, are forced to leave again, come back and forth and back and forth…

It means that the institutions that stabilize a community – like churches, schools, and grandmas – are absent, while instability and stress factors are through the roof.

It means that there has been a 25% jump in the mortality rate, including a threefold increase in the suicide rate. It means that Arsenio and Markee Hunter, Warren Simeon, Iraum Taylor and Reggie Dantzler, – all New Orleans youth and several of whom were friends and children of FFLIC’s – were slaughtered on a street corners not 5 blocks from our offices, gunned down with a submachine gun that somehow make it back into the city and onto the streets. It means we have lost Kerry Washington, a son and a father, who died mysteriously inside the overcrowded, overheated Orleans Parish Prison –where he paid with his life for an old warrant of simple drug possession. It means Ronald Smith who was gunned down by police will never get to see how beautifully his brother testified at a city council hearing two months ago. It means our members and families live in fear of both the violence on the streets and the violence of the police who are supposed to protect them.

It means, in short, that the clash between the gentrifying forces and the Black community - who were not meant to survive, endure, and return – has turned deadly. Where the lack of schools, housing and healthcare fails to keep people away, those in power will turn to the police and prisons.

If there was ever any doubt that the criminal justice system would be used to keep Black New Orleanians from returning, the last few months have eliminated the last of it. With 300 National Guardsman called in to patrol (with M-16s which are “locked and loaded”) the empty streets of the neighborhoods where the lack of infrastructure has slowed efforts to rebuild, the NOPD has been able to turn its attention to “protecting” the neighborhoods that have been rebuilt. By consistently profiling, harassing and arresting poor people of color, NOPD are now making over 140 arrests per week. The vast majority of these arrests are for minor violations, including spitting on a sidewalk. The kinds of charges being put on people – resisting arrest, obstruction of justice, battery on a police officer - speak more to the tension between NOPD and community than to public safety.

The rise in NOPD arrests occurs at a moment when the Orleans Parish Prison is becoming made increasingly dangerous by its overcrowding and lack of adequate health care. Harsh criticism from national media and lawyers of Sheriff Gusman’s operation of OPP has not stopped him from opening new “temporary” beds at breakneck speed and sending hundreds of prisoners up to the state penitentiary in Angola to try and keep up with the new arrests.

So how are things in New Orleans?
But, there is a beacon of light. Undeniably, organizing has taken root in the city. From neighborhood associations to workers rights, environmental justice, and public safety reform groups, people are beginning to come together and use their people power, their power to disrupt, to shame, to confront elected officials and demand that they do what they were elected to do: serve the people of this city.

An inspiring example of how organizing and reform work are together making a difference is in the juvenile justice system itself. Even as news coverage concentrates all the blame for crime on young Black men, and the demonized threat of these young Black men is used to justify everything from shutting down public housing to bringing in the National Guard, the juvenile justice system itself is continuing on the path of reform that had just begun when the storm hit.

The changes in New Orleans’ juvenile justice system are real. During the six months before Katrina, there were over 4000 juvenile arrests in New Orleans. In these last six months, there have been 169. After the storm, Orleans Parish Juvenile Court Chief Judge David Bell took leadership in implementing many reforms that had previously been discussed, but never implemented. For starters, he brought in Attorney (and FFLIC friend) Ilona Picou to work as the court's recovery coordinator. Ilona, well versed in juvenile justice reform, coordinated 38 volunteer attorneys from outside Louisiana to winnow down the number of active cases from 26,500 to 2,500.

A new set of procedures on how to deal with kids has dropped the number of kids being arrested by police from over 100 a day to an average of 17 per day. Police are no longer arresting kids for trespass, for example, for sitting on a basketball court after school. The Court has been able to use savings from such basic changes to upgrade its computer and phone systems. It has also purchased vehicles for use by families in need of supervision, drug court, weekend detention and alternatives to detention programs. Money that had been used to put kids in jail before the storm is now being used to bring support families need to keep their kids at home.

So, why is juvenile justice improving at the very same moment criminal justice for adults is spinning out of control, and despite the recent blame-the-victim policy responses of curfews and increased law enforcement? In part, it is because juvenile justice reform efforts – led by FFLIC and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana – were already underway when Katrina hit. Before the storm, FFLIC, a voting member of the Children and Youth Planning Board was actively engaged in getting the many stakeholders to agree that detention reform in Orleans Parish was necessary. After touring the decrepit Youth Study Center and witnessing first hand the horrific conditions in which over 100 of our children were detained on any given day, FFLIC made a commitment to ensure that any reforms of the juvenile justice system would include the closure of that facility and the reduction of the number of children held at any given time. FFLIC worked hard with other stake holders, including the juvenile court judges, to recruit the Annie E. Casey Foundations Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) to come to Orleans to implement their proven program to reform local juvenile justice systems and help jurisdictions spend less on incarceration and more quality community based programs for kids and families.

So when the storm hit, the adult system and the juvenile system responded in precisely opposite ways. The juvenile system which had been forced to see children as the precious human being they are, and detention beds as the costly, ineffective burden they are, chose to speed up its reform process. The adult system which had made no such culture shift and no such commitment to change, has continued down its path of death and destruction.

What does this mean? To FFLIC, it is a reminder that our work has impact, value and indeed can make a very real difference in people’s lives and in the systems which affect our lives. To all of us, it shows that issue based organizing has the potential to result in system shifts that can withstand a racist onslaught even of the magnitude we are witnessing in New Orleans today. It also tells us that FFLIC must not be content to just see the changes in the juvenile system, knowing more children each day are being bumped into the adult system and that no matter what the courts say, our 17 and 18 year old children are no less human, no less ours, no less worthy of our commitment to keep them safe from the harm of the streets, safe from the harm of law enforcement, safe from the harm of racism and displacement. As FFLIC looks forward, we must re-commit ourselves to organizing, to building our membership base and to our mission of improving the lives of Louisiana’s youth, especially those at risk of getting involved in the juvenile justice system in the context of today’s it’s-worse-than-you-think New Orleans. If we and the many others in New Orleans who have begun, keep on organizing, we have hope that we may soon be able to answer the question differently, “So how are things in New Orleans?”

Xochitl Bervera
Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
188 Williamsburg Street
Lake Charles, LA 70605
337) 562-7083

1600 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd
New Orleans, LA 70113
(504) 606-8846

Posted by lois at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2006

ACLU Report Details Horrors Suffered by Orleans Parish Prisoners in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

ACLU Report Details Horrors Suffered by Orleans Parish Prisoners in Wake of Hurricane Katrina (8/10/2006)
National Prison Project Calls for Immediate Action by President, Congress and Justice Department

NEW ORLEANS -- As the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project today released Abandoned & Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina. The report documents the experiences of thousands of men, women and children who were abandoned at Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) in the days after the storm.

"The prisoners inside the Orleans Parish Prison suffered some of the worst horrors of Hurricane Katrina," said Eric Balaban, a staff attorney for the National Prison Project. "Because society views prisoners as second-class citizens, their stories have largely gone unnoticed and therefore untold."

In conjunction with the report's release, the National Prison Project urged the president to direct the Department of Justice to evaluate OPP's current evacuation plans in an effort to determine whether any meaningful improvements have been made over the past year. The ACLU also asked Congress to audit the jail's emergency preparedness plans. The ACLU is calling for a full and immediate investigation into abuses at Louisiana correctional facilities during and after the storm and is also urging the DOJ to make the findings from such an investigation public and accessible to state and federal prosecutors.

The ACLU report describes a history of neglect at Orleans Parish Prison, one of the most dangerous and mismanaged jails in the country. This culture of neglect was evident in the days before Katrina, when the sheriff declared that the prisoners would remain "where they belong," despite the mayor's decision to declare the city's first-ever mandatory evacuation. OPP even accepted prisoners, including juveniles as young as 10, from other facilities to ride out the storm.

As floodwaters rose in the OPP buildings, power was lost, and entire buildings were plunged into darkness. Deputies left their posts wholesale, leaving behind prisoners in locked cells, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests.

"The sheriff's office was completely unprepared for the storm," said Tom Jawetz, Litigation Fellow for the National Prison Project. "The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did more for its 263 stray pets than the sheriff did for the more than 6,500 men, women and children left in his care."

Prisoners went days without food, water and ventilation, and deputies admit that they received no emergency training and were entirely unaware of any evacuation plan. Even some prison guards were left locked in at their posts to fend for themselves, unable to provide assistance to prisoners in need.

The prisoners were finally evacuated by order of the state after days of fear and chaos. The report follows the prisoners as they were transferred to jails and prisons around Louisiana. Thousands of the men were first transported to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, where they were placed outdoors in a yard with inadequate food, medical care, and protection from other prisoners, many of whom were armed with makeshift weapons. According to the report, at several other facilities, prisoners were subjected to systematic abuse and racially motivated assaults by prison guards.

"Some prisoners at Hunt attacked other prisoners, and guards did nothing to prevent this from happening," said Katie Schwartzmann, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Louisiana. "Guards threatened prisoners with guns when they were approached for help, and shot at one prisoner who had been stabbed by a group of other prisoners."

Among the people profiled in the ACLU report are:

* Ivy Gisclair, who was being held at OPP for $700 in traffic violations (mostly parking tickets) and had never been in any serious trouble with the law. After days in OPP following the storm, Ivy was transferred to Hunt, where he witnessed stabbings, rapes and countless fights. Ivy was finally transferred to Bossier Parish Maximum Security Prison. His release date came and went. When he asked a guard about it, he was pepper sprayed, repeatedly shocked with a Taser, beaten by multiple guards, and put in solitary confinement with no clothes. Ivy was released in an orange prison jumpsuit at a gas station by the side of the road, three weeks after his scheduled release date. It was the day of Hurricane Rita.
* Renard Reed, a guard at OPP's psychiatric ward who reported to work before the hurricane out of a sense of camaraderie and shared responsibility. Like many other guards, Renard was locked in during his shift to prevent desertion, and was then ordered to go to the roof with a shotgun and shoot anyone trying to leave one of the flooded buildings. He was still stranded at the prison long after the prisoners were evacuated.
* Ashley George, a 13-year-old girl housed in OPP's Youth Center, who was moved to an area adjacent to an adult male holding area where the men watched her use the toilet. As the building began to flood, Ashley spent days in water up to her neck. Adult prisoners rescued Ashley and the other children from the waters. After being taken to the bridge for evacuation, Ashley was lucky enough to be given a bag of potato chips and water. She reports again being forced to relieve herself publicly and that pregnant girls received no assistance or treatment.

"These are the untold horrors of Hurricane Katrina," Balaban said. "We must preserve these stories to create a record of the tragedy and to ensure that the mistakes detailed in this report are never repeated."

The report, along with several multimedia features including a slide show, video footage and maps, is online at: www.aclu.org/prison/conditions/26198res20060809.html

The letter to the Department of Justice is online at: www.aclu.org/prison/conditions/26420leg20060809.html

URL: http://www.aclu.org/prison/conditions/26421prs20060810.html

Posted by lois at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2006

Sentencing Project Submits Recommendations to the UN Human Right Committee

The Sentencing Project Submits Recommendations
to U.N. Human Rights Committee

The Sentencing Project, in conjunction with a broad coalition of human rights organizations, has submitted two issue reports to the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee in preparation for hearings regarding the United States’ compliance with dictates specified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). These documents are part of a larger “shadow” report that examines U.S. violations of human rights protected under the international treaty.

For the report, The Sentencing Project prepared a statement, Violations of Article 25:Voting Rights, describing widespread problems in the implementation of felony disenfranchisement laws by state governments, resulting in confusion among the electorate and preventing a substantial number of eligible voters from registering.

The Sentencing Project also coordinated the development of a domestic criminal justice section for the Shadow Report. The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Open Society Policy Center, Penal Reform International, and The Sentencing Project contributed statements for the section, and other national organizations endorsed its recommendations. Key findings in this section include:

The United States fails to adequately fund a viable public defense system, which jeopardizes the fairness of criminal court proceedings and increases the likelihood of erroneous convictions;
Mandatory minimum sentences exacerbate racial inequality in the criminal justice system and have devastating consequences for the African American community;
The American correctional system fails to protect basic human rights in prison, primarily through overcrowding, violence, inadequate programming, and confinement in “supermax” prison facilities;
The practice of routinely prosecuting juveniles in adult criminal court, in some cases subjecting children to sentences of life without parole, continues in the U.S. despite guarantees in the ICCPR for its occurrence to be limited to “exceptional circumstances.”

Ryan King, Policy Analyst with The Sentencing Project will participate in briefings before the Committee at its meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on July 17 and 18. The Committee is expected to release an official list of recommendations regarding the United States' compliance with the treaty at the end of July.

These reports can be found at:
http://www.sentencingproject.org

Posted by lois at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2006

Natural Disasters in Black and White

How Racial Cues Influenced Public Response to Hurricane Katrina

By Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin
Thursday, June 8, 2006; 6:05 PM

Natural disasters are typically occasions for political unity rather than controversy. In the aftermath of large-scale death and destruction, Americans reach for their wallets rather than engage in rancorous debates over fixing responsibility and blame.

Hurricane Katrina proved an exception. In the first place, it was quickly apparent that government officials at all levels were utterly unprepared for the scope and severity of the disaster. Thousands of people were left cooped up in the Superdome for days in the most primitive of conditions. The feeble relief efforts provoked a firestorm of criticism leading eventually to the resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown.

Not only did Katrina raise questions about the government's ability to deal with large-scale flooding, it also rekindled longstanding issues concerning the standing of African-Americans. The people who remained left behind in New Orleans to suffer the brunt of the hurricane's consequences were disproportionately black. Post-hurricane publicity, although sympathetic to victims, was criticized as seeming to be racially biased at times. The media publicized instances of looting by blacks while characterizing similar activity on the part of whites as "looking for food." Other reports alleged that gangs of armed blacks had attempted to shoot down rescue helicopters. Quite unexpectedly, Katrina became a metaphor for the state of race relations in America.

We designed this experiment to investigate how racial cues conveyed in news coverage conditioned Americans' response to Katrina. We wanted to explore whether public outrage over the governmental response was mitigated by frank coverage of the demographics of the victims, their perceived inability to help themselves and in some cases their lack of compliance with rescue efforts.

Racial cues can be conveyed within two distinct genres of news coverage. "Thematic" news reports cover events in general terms providing information about background and context. In contrast, "episodic" news personalizes events by focusing on the experiences of specific individuals. We presented participants with two different thematic frames for Katrina; one, completely lacking in race-related references, focused on the scope of the flooding and destruction in different areas of New Orleans. The second added implicit racial cues to the coverage by focusing on the breakdown of law and order in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. We anticipated that people who read the former news report would favor more energetic government relief efforts than those exposed to the report on lawlessness. In fact, this is exactly what we found.

Our manipulation of race was more explicit in the case of episodic news coverage. We presented study participants (those who were not assigned to either of the two thematic reports) with a typical story about a displaced Katrina victim. By varying the victim's ethnicity we could observe whether the audience responded differently to efforts to help the entire class of Katrina victims when they were presented with a specific case of an African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or white victim. Here our results suggest that the race-ethnicity of the person showcased by the news report was relevant: participants responded more generously (in the sense of recommending higher levels of government assistance to hurricane victims) when they encountered a victim who was white.

The study design was as follows. All participants first read one of the three news reports. Some participants were assigned to the two thematic conditions, but the majority encountered an episodic report featuring a particular individual left homeless by the hurricane. We embedded several manipulations of the victim's personal attributes into this episodic report. The victim's name was either Terry Miller or Terry Medina. Terry was either a mother or father of two children, married or single, and said to be either a school custodian, factory worker, or real estate agent. We also inserted a small headshot photo of Terry into the report; depending on the condition, the photograph showed a white, African-American, Hispanic, or Asian person (see Table 1 for an example of the episodic report). We selected a total of 18 different photographs (9 men and 9 women) from a national database all showing people from the shoulders up with a neutral (non-smiling) expression. We then edited each photograph so as to alter the subject's skin complexion. In effect, for each of the 18 selected faces, we created dark and light-skinned versions of our fictional Terry. (Examples of the skin color manipulation are provided in Table 2.) We then had Stanford undergraduates view all 36 photographs and identify the ethnicity of the person. (They were asked to classify each face as white, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or ambiguous.) A majority of the undergraduates were able to identify each face as either white, African-American, Hispanic, or Asian.

Approximately 2,300 people completed the experiment. As in our past studies, the sample was skewed heavily in the direction of Democrats and liberals -- only 12 percent of the participants identified as Republican. Eighty-six percent were critical of President Bush's handling of Katrina. The sample was also highly educated -- 84% had completed at least a bachelor's degree. These features of the sample are especially important in light of the results we describe below.

Our principal interest was to trace the connections between different forms of news coverage and participants' willingness to support government assistance to hurricane victims. We asked participants to indicate how much money hurricane victims should be awarded in the form of assistance for housing and general living expenses. For each type of assistance, they could check a box that ranged from $200 per month to $1200 per month. Participants also indicated for how long (from a minimum of three to a maximum of eighteen months) victims should receive government assistance. Based on these responses, we created separate measures of the total amount of recommended assistance and the average length of time for which victims could receive this assistance. (The average total amount of assistance was nearly $1,500 and the average length of assistance was twelve months.) These measures reflect some mix of beliefs about the moral obligation of the government to assist victims of natural disasters on the one hand, and beliefs about how deserving were Katrina's victims on the other.

We began by examining the effects of the different genres of Katrina news on the amount and duration of recommended financial assistance for hurricane victims. Our analysis includes participants of all ethnicities although the vast majority (86 percent) were white. We expected that beliefs about the appropriate level of assistance would vary with the presence or absence of racial cues in the news. As shown in Figure 1, the looting news frame had significant effects. Participants were least generous in their recommendations after reading the report on looting. Episodic framing of the disaster -- presenting readers with an actual flesh and blood victim attempting to restart his or her life -- and impersonal descriptions of the scope of destruction both elicited higher levels of recommended assistance. The data does not permit us to assess whether the significant reduction in the amount and length of financial assistance in the looting condition is attributable to racial cues per se, but many previous studies have documented the existence of a close connection between references to violent crime and implicit racial stereotypes. We suspect that exposure to the news story on looting "primed" people to associate hurricane victims with crime, thus making them scale back on what they considered the appropriate level of assistance.

We can test for the effects of racial cues more directly within the various episodic coverage conditions where participants either encountered a white, African-American, Hispanic, or Asian family uprooted by Katrina. The appropriate comparisons (see Figure 2) demonstrate that beliefs about the appropriate amount of assistance did not vary substantially by the race of the person depicted in the news. However, participants recommended different periods of assistance depending on the ethnicity of the victim they encountered. Those who saw the African-American version of Terry Miller (Medina) awarded a significantly reduced period of assistance. (On average, the difference between the African-American condition and the remaining episodic conditions was nearly one month.) Conversely, participants awarded a significantly longer period of assistance after reading about the same Terry Miller, but who now appeared to be white.

We do not mean to suggest that participants were sensitive only to the race of the person featured in the new story. In fact, they were also affected -- and significantly so -- by gender and occupation. Participants recommended considerably higher levels of assistance after reading about Terry Miller the mother and Terry Miller the real estate agent. Occupation is clearly a proxy for earnings potential, and we suspect that people saw fit to award more generous levels of assistance when they encountered a case of a victim with significant lost earnings. Interestingly, neither marital status nor surname made any difference at all to the level of recommended support.

Finally, we turn to the question of skin color. For each of the episodic news conditions we created a lighter and darker complexion image of the person in question. We anticipated that the impact of skin color would be especially influential when the person in question was non-white. That is, we expected that darker skin color would prompt people to consider race only when they believed the person in question to be non-white. In fact, the impact of the skin color manipulation on the level of recommended financial assistance was striking. (We have plotted the difference in the level and length of disaster relief between the dark and light conditions in Figure 3.) When the hurricane victim in the news was a dark-complexion white, the amount of assistance for hurricane victims actually increased. Perhaps well tanned whites are perceived as vigorous, fit and attractive, thus putting our respondents in a more favorable state of mind concerning hurricane victims in general. But for every other ethnic group -- blacks, Hispanics and Asians -- the effect of skin color ran in the opposite direction. When people saw a dark-skinned black, Hispanic, or Asian, they recommended lower levels of financial assistance. This divergence in the effects of skin color for whites and non-whites was statistically significant. A similar, but weaker pattern emerged for duration of assistance. Here the effects of darkened skin color were to increase the duration of assistance in the white and Asian conditions, but to decrease it in the case of the African-American and Hispanic conditions.

These results suggest that news media coverage of natural disasters can shape the audience's response. Framing the disaster in ways that evoke racial stereotypes can make people less supportive of large-scale relief efforts. News reports about flooding evoke one set of apparently positive images in the reader's mind; reports about lawlessness evoke quite another.

The effects of the racial identity of individual hurricane victims on the prescribed level of government assistance for all victims are suggestive of what psychologists call the "automaticity" of stereotyping. People cannot help stereotyping on the basis of ethnicity despite their best efforts to act unbiased and egalitarian. As we noted at the outset, this particular sample of participants consisted of highly educated individuals who located themselves toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. Many of them live in and around the nation's capital, one of the more racially diverse and cosmopolitan areas of America. We suspect that this group would score at or very near the top of most measures of support for civil rights and racial equality. Yet their responses to Katrina were influenced by the mere inclusion of racial cues in news media coverage. The fact that this group awarded lower levels of hurricane assistance after reading about looting or after encountering an African-American family displaced by the hurricane is testimony to the persistent and primordial power of racial imagery in American life.

Shanto Iyengar is Professor of Communication and director of the Political Communication Lab at Stanford University. Richard Morin is director of Washington Post polling and a staff writer.

Posted by lois at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2006

In the Black(water) (Hurricane Katrina)

by JEREMY SCAHILL
[from the June 5, 2006 issue]The Nation

Tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims remain without homes. The environment is devastated. People are disenfranchised. Financial resources, desperate residents are told, are scarce. But at least New Orleans has a Wal-Mart parking lot serving as a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center with perhaps the tightest security of any parking lot in the world. That's thanks to the more than $30 million Washington has shelled out to the Blackwater USA security firm since its men deployed after Katrina hit.. Under contract with the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Federal Protective Service, Blackwater's men are ostensibly protecting federal reconstruction projects for FEMA.

Documents show that the government paid Blackwater $950 a day for each of its guards in the area. Interviewed by The Nation last September, several of the company's guards stationed in New Orleans said they were being paid $350 a day. That would have left Blackwater with $600 per man, per day to cover lodging, ammo, other overhead--and profits.

Shortly after the hurricane hit, Blackwater "launched a helicopter and crew with no contract, no one paying us, that went down to New Orleans," says company vice chairman Cofer Black. "We saved some 150 people that otherwise wouldn't have been saved. And, as a result of that, we've had a very positive experience." Indeed. It was only days after the company arrived that it started reeling in lucrative deals.

According to Blackwater's government contracts, obtained by The Nation, from September 8 to September 30, 2005, Blackwater was paid $409,000 for providing fourteen guards and four vehicles to "protect the temporary morgue in Baton Rouge, LA." That contract kicked off a hurricane boon for Blackwater. From September to the end of December 2005, the government paid Blackwater at least $33.3 million--well surpassing the amount of Blackwater's contract to guard Ambassador Paul Bremer when he was head of the US occupation of Iraq. And the company has likely raked in much more in the hurricane zone. Exactly how much is unclear, as attempts to get information on Blackwater's current contracts in New Orleans have been unsuccessful.

"We saw the costs, in terms of accountability and dollars, for this practice in Iraq, and now we are seeing it in New Orleans," says Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, who has been one of Blackwater's few critics in Congress. "They have again given a sweetheart contract--without an open bidding process--to a company with close ties to the Administration."

After The Nation exposed Blackwater's operations in New Orleans this past fall [see "Blackwater Down," October 10, 2005], Schakowsky and a handful of other Congress members raised questions about the scandal. They entered the report into the Congressional Record during hearings on Katrina and cited it in letters to DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner, who then began an inquiry. In letters to Congressional offices in February, Skinner defended the Blackwater deal, asserting that it was "appropriate" for the government to contract with the company. Skinner admitted that "the ongoing cost of the contract...is clearly very high" and then quietly dropped a bombshell: "It is expected that FEMA will require guard services on a relatively long-term basis (two to five years)." Two to five years? Already most of the 330 federally contracted private guards in the hurricane zone are working for Blackwater, according to the Washington Post. Another firm, DynCorp, is also trying to grab more of the action, offering its security services for less than $700 per day per guard.

The hurricane's aftermath has ushered in the homecoming of the "war on terror," a contract bonanza whereby companies can reap massive Iraq-like profits without leaving the country and at a minuscule fraction of the risk. To critics of the government's handling of the hurricane, the message is clear.

"That's what happens when the victims are black folks vilified before and after the storm--instead of aid, they get contained," says Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies and an editor of Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch. "If officials really cared about protecting the people of New Orleans, they wouldn't be giving millions to scandal-ridden contractors. They would have given the city money to rebuild their levees to withstand more than a Category 2 Hurricane. They still haven't done that--and hurricane season is upon us."

Kromm alleges that vital projects that have "gotten zero or little money" in New Orleans include: job creation, hospital and school reconstruction, affordable housing and wetlands restoration. Even in this context, DHS continues to defend the Blackwater contract. In a March 1 memo to FEMA, Matt Jadacki, the DHS Special Inspector General for Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery, wrote that the Federal Protective Service considered Blackwater "the best value to the government."

While companies like Halliburton may have raked in more profits since George W. Bush took office, few have seen growth as dramatic as Blackwater's. The firm has been at the front of the line at the domestic and international taxpayer-funded feeding troughs and has recently hired some high-profile former government officials, like Cofer Black, former chief of CIA counterterrorism, and former Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz. In March Black represented Blackwater at a conference in Jordan, announcing that the company was seeking to broaden its role in even more conflict zones. Blackwater is rapidly expanding its operations, creating a new surveillance-blimp division, launching new training facilities in California and the Philippines, and increasingly setting its sights on the lucrative world of DHS contracts. It is clamoring to get into Darfur and has also hired Chilean troops trained under the brutal rule of Augusto Pinochet. "We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals," company president Gary Jackson told the Guardian. "The Chilean commandos are very, very professional, and they fit within the Blackwater system." The business magazine Fast Company recently named Jackson one of its "Fast 50," predicting that the company and its president are in for "a very strong (and long) decade."

It's hard to imagine that the cronyism that has marked the Bush Administration is not at play in Blackwater's success. Blackwater founder Erik Prince shares Bush's fundamentalist Christian views. He comes from a powerful Michigan Republican family and social circle, and his father, Edgar, helped Gary Bauer start the Family Research Council. According to a report prepared for The Nation by the Center for Responsive Politics, in all of Erik Prince's political funding generosity since 1989, he has never given a penny to a Democrat running for national office. Company president Jackson has also given money to Republican candidates. For his part, Joseph Schmitz--the former Pentagon Inspector General turned general counsel to Blackwater's parent, The Prince Group--lists on his résumé membership in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Christian militia formed before the First Crusade. Like Prince, he comes from a right-wing family; his father, former Congressman John Schmitz, was an ultraconservative John Birch Society director who later ran for President. Joseph Schmitz was once in charge of investigating private contractors like Blackwater, but he resigned amid allegations of stonewalling investigations conducted by his department. He now represents one of the most successful of those contractors.

Schakowsky charges that the Administration has written Blackwater "blank checks," saying that the internal DHS review of the company "leaves us with more questions than answers." She points out that the report fails to address the major issues stemming from deploying private forces on US streets. In her testimony this past September, Schakowsky said, "Ask any American if they want thugs from a private, for-profit company with no official law-enforcement training roaming the streets of their neighborhoods. The answer will be a resounding NO."

Blackwater's ascent comes in the midst of a major rebranding campaign aimed at shaking its mercenary image. The company is at the forefront of the trade association of mercenary firms, the International Peace Operations Association, which lobbies for even greater privatization of military operations. Blackwater and its cause have clearly found serious backing in the Bush Administration. Hiring Blackwater, says Schakowsky, "may be legal, but it is not a good deal for taxpayers and Gulf region residents in particular." Blackwater's sweetheart deals, both domestic and international, are representative of how business has been done under Bush. They are a troubling indicator of a trend toward less accountability and transparency and greater privatization of critical government functions. It's time that more members of Congress ask tough questions about Blackwater and its rapid, profitable rise.
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060605/scahill

Posted by lois at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2006

Judge Steps in for Poor who are Incarcerated Since Katrina

New York Times
May 23, 2006
Judge Steps In for Poor Inmates Without Justice Since Hurricane
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS * Hurricane Katrina took his house, his courtroom and, Judge Arthur L. Hunter Jr. says, his faith in the way his city treats poor people facing criminal charges.

Nine months after the storm, more than a thousand jailed defendants have had no access to lawyers, the judge says, because the public defender system is desperately short of money and staffing, without a computer system or files or even a list of clients.

And so Judge Hunter, 46, a former New Orleans police officer, is moving to let some of the defendants without lawyers out of jail. He has suspended prosecutions in most cases involving public defenders. And, alone among a dozen criminal court judges, he has granted a petition to free a prisoner facing serious charges without counsel, and is considering others.

It is, he said in an interview, his duty under the Constitution. "Something needs to be done, it's that simple," he said. "I'm the lightning rod, yes."

The district attorney's office opposes letting defendants back out on the street, saying the court should find them lawyers. But Judge Hunter said he has had little luck finding private firms willing to take on most indigents' cases, and there appears to be no money to pay their expenses.

The public defenders' office, run not by City Hall but by a parish board, is basically broke. Louisiana, alone among the states, relies mainly on local court fees * mostly surcharges on traffic tickets * to finance its public defenders, according to the National Legal Aid and Defender Association.

It is a financing system that Judge Hunter and Calvin Johnson, the chief judge of the criminal court in New Orleans, have recently found to be unconstitutional because it forces poor people to pay for the system. The Louisiana attorney general's office says it plans to appeal those decisions.

In Orleans Parish, the traffic and the tickets both evaporated after Hurricane Katrina. Most of the office's 42 part-time public defenders were laid off. And they were, by many accounts, inadequate to begin with; a new study sponsored by the federal Justice Department says that the office probably needs 70 full-time lawyers, a computer system for case management, support staff and a reliable source of financing.

The study calls for scrapping the current system, which an appeals court decision recently described as "overburdened, underfunded and perhaps unconstitutional." The public defenders' office in New Orleans is slated to receive a $2.8 million federal grant on May 31 * but the study says it needs more than $10 million to get up and running and operate for a year.

The criminal justice system in New Orleans was notoriously troubled long before the storms, and if anything, it is now worse. Officials hope to resume jury trials soon for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, but still do not know if they will have enough courtrooms, jurors or witnesses to proceed.

On a recent Friday morning, in a borrowed courtroom in the Federal Building downtown, Judge Hunter listened to testimony from Ronald Dunn, 43, who was arrested on Aug. 19, 10 days before Hurricane Katrina hit, on a charge of possessing crack cocaine. Like the vast majority of the defendants in criminal court here, he cannot afford to hire a lawyer, and so would normally be represented by a public defender.

Handcuffed, shackled and wearing jailhouse orange, Mr. Dunn told the court that as the water rose, he spent four frightening days without food in the House of Detention, and was then moved from prison to prison, losing touch with his family.

In the nine months since the hurricane, he said, he has never even spoken to a lawyer. "I don't have a lawyer," Mr. Dunn said. "I never been to court." Without a lawyer a defendant cannot even plead guilty.

Pamela R. Metzger, the director of the Criminal Court Clinic at Tulane Law School, has petitioned the court to release Mr. Dunn and more than a dozen other poor prisoners in similar circumstances. Releasing them would not hamper the prosecution, she argued, and would give them an opportunity to try to gather evidence in their own defense. And, she said later, "to be free from imprisonment and punishment without due process of law."

But David S. Pipes, an assistant district attorney, argued against releasing Mr. Dunn, whom he described as a five-time felon. (Court documents show that Mr. Dunn has been arrested 10 times since 1990 and has pleaded guilty to previous drug and theft charges.)

More broadly, Mr. Pipes said: "The proper solution for someone who does not have an attorney is to get them an attorney. Releasing them does not cure anything and does not protect their rights."

Of course, everyone in the courtroom could describe a life turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Pipes is working out of an office in an old nightclub because the district attorney's office flooded. Professor Metzger is commuting to New Orleans from Atlanta.

And Judge Hunter is driving back and forth to Tampa, Fla., where his family fled, or Baton Rouge, where he has bought a house where he plans to live with his wife and teenage son, a cousin and a widowed aunt.

Over the years, the district attorney and others have accused Judge Hunter of being too soft on defendants, and of having too high an acquittal rate in nonjury trials. (He says he is simply fair.) But even longtime critics like the independent Metropolitan Crime Commission say that when it comes to the public defenders' office, he is doing the right thing.

"I don't have any problem with what he's trying to do there," said Rafael C. Goyeneche III, president of the commission. "He's demanding that it function properly."

The battle over indigent defendants is proceeding on several levels. Last month, Judge Hunter granted a petition for release filed by Professor Metzger on behalf of Donald Crockett, a mentally ill man accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He has been in jail since October 2003.

The district attorney's office appealed, and an appellate court found that additional procedural steps were required. Though it reversed the judge's decision, the court suggested such releases might be possible once the program completely runs out of money. Professor Metzger said she planned to appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has submitted a budget that would double, to $20 million, the appropriation for defenders around the state, and a legislative task force set up before Hurricane Katrina continues to work on the issue.

The Louisiana State Bar Association has made fixing the public defender system a priority and has paid for both another study and for the salaries of three defenders for a year, said Frank X. Neuner, president of the bar association. In Orleans Parish, the criminal court judges have appointed new directors (including Professor Metzger) to oversee the public defenders' program.

Judge Johnson, who runs the criminal court and is a former public defender himself, has been working to build a consensus for changing the system, something he said he has supported for years. He was the first judge after Hurricane Katrina to order an investigation into whether the public defenders could adequately represent the poor.

But having Judge Hunter halt prosecutions and consider freeing inmates has helped focus attention on the issue, Judge Johnson said.

"You have to have some guy out there rattling the saber, absolutely," Judge Johnson said. "I think the message was loud, clear and necessary."

Posted by lois at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2006

New Orleans: Teenage Prisoners Describe Hurricane Horrors

May 10, 2006
Teenage Prisoners Describe Hurricane Horrors
By ADAM NOSSITER, NY Times

NEW ORLEANS, May 9 - More than 100 teenagers held in detention during Hurricane Katrina endured horrific conditions in the storm's aftermath, including standing for hours in filthy floodwater, having nothing to eat and drink for three to five days, and being forced to consume the waters as a result, according to a report released here Tuesday.

The report was prepared by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a group that has long advocated changes in the state's troubled juvenile system. It was based on interviews with more than 60 teenagers held at the Orleans Parish Prison during the storm, as well as with prison staff members.

Youths who were interviewed described water rising in their darkened cells and a scramble onto top bunks to avoid it. They also said that when they were finally rescued - in some cases, after several days - they experienced dizziness and dehydration because of lack of food. One reported being "roped together" with plastic handcuffs as he and others were led out through neck-high water.

"There was food floating in the water and we tried to catch it and eat it; that's how hungry we were," said one 15-year-old identified as E. F. in the report.

T. G., 16, said, "Kids were going crazy, shaking their cells for food and water."

Another youth, R. S., 16, said: "We went five days without eating. Kids were passing out in their cells."

Among the many wrenching stories of evacuation after Hurricane Katrina, including the chaotic removal of more than 7,000 prisoners from the Orleans Parish Prison, that of the teenagers ranks as one of the more disturbing - an anarchic portrait of about 150 youthful inmates fending for themselves in dire conditions.

The prison was under the supervision of Marlin Gusman, the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff, who, through a spokeswoman, declined to respond to the report. The authors of the report said city and parish officials should have ordered the prison to be evacuated but lacked a formal plan to do so.

The report described what happened after the storm as symptomatic of a juvenile justice system recognized as one of the country's worst, an outpost of a sprawling prison empire where more people were locked up, per capita, than in any other state.

Only a week ago, a federal judge in Baton Rouge released the juvenile system from Justice Department control, six years after Louisiana was ordered to make changes and after numerous investigations and lawsuits. Several youth prisons in the state had achieved infamy as places of routine beatings and systematic deprivation, and federal authorities concluded that conditions were unconstitutional.

For years, advocates and a handful of state legislators had pushed for an overhaul but had met with resistance from state prison bureaucrats and indifference from elected Louisiana officials. Finally, the Legislature agreed in 2003 to a series of changes, shutting down the most notorious youth prison, in the northern part of the state.

At the same time, Louisiana agreed to move away from simply locking up hundreds of teenage offenders, instituting a more residential model of incarceration, as other states were doing.

But those changes, while lauded by advocates, were not all in place in August of last year, and the teenagers taken handcuffed and shackled to the Orleans Parish Prison ahead of the hurricane were exposed to the deficiencies of the old system.

"They left us in there with no food and no water," said Eddie Fenceroy, 15, a former detainee against whom charges have since been dismissed, advocates said.

Mr. Fenceroy described standing in the floodwater for "a whole day" before being rescued. "Some people were drinking the water," he said.

The advocacy group's director, David J. Utter, said that in a telephone conversation Monday evening, Sheriff Gusman pledged not to continue holding juveniles in the jail system here.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/us/10prison.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2006

New Orleans: Down by Law- Orleans Parish Prison Before and After Katrina

Down by Law
Orleans Parish Prison before and after Katrina
Barry Gerharz and Seung Hong

This article is from the March/April 2006 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.
When the levees broke in New Orleans, floodwaters flowed into Orleans Parish Prison (known to locals as "OPP"). During and after the storm, some prisoners were locked in first-floor cells as the waters slowly rose. Meantime, the eighth largest penal institution in the United States became even more crowded as smaller parish jails carried out emergency evacuations and sent their inmates to OPP. Guards were nowhere to be found. Prisoners spent days with little or no food and water. Many stood in sewage-filled water up to their waists or necks. Adults and juveniles were detained together, forcing youth to compete for resources with larger, stronger adults.

After eventually being rescued, or in some cases breaking free from their cells and tiers, the prisoners were moved to a nearby overpass to sit in the hot sun. From there, most prisoners--convicts imprisoned for violent offenses and pre-trial detainees alike--were transported almost 70 miles to the Hunt Correctional Facility in St. Gabriel, La., and deposited in an open field, some of them for two or three days. From Hunt Correctional, the prisoners were randomly placed in at least 35 facilities around the state, including other parish jails, private prisons, and state prisons.

New Orleans attorney and activist Phyllis Mann describes who was in OPP at the time of the hurricane:

"[O]ne young man who had been arrested for reading Tarot cards without a permit ... young women who were pregnant; young men and women who sadly chose the wrong weekend to try out an illegal drug; middle-aged soccer moms who just had not gotten around to paying that speeding ticket É and then there were the poor of New Orleans who were arrested for sleeping on the street (obstructing public passage), 'brother can you spare a dime' (begging)."

OPP had flooded before. When there was severe flooding in New Orleans in 1995, for instance, prisoners were moved out of OPP to Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities. At least two days before Hurricane Katrina smacked into New Orleans, the DOC offered OPP assistance in evacuating the prison, according to a DOC spokesperson. OPP officials replied they were okay, that they would hunker down. When a Human Rights Watch investigator asked an OPP spokesperson why the facility did not take up the offer its neighboring parishes embraced, she replied that OPP had more inmates than the surrounding parishes that opted to evacuate their jails in advance.

The sheriff ostensibly had an evacuation plan, yet questions remain. Why weren't at least first floor prisoners moved to higher floors? Why didn't officials make the plan public? When asked about the evacuation plan, OPP's spokesperson told an investigator that the plan was on "this guy's computer" but believed the computer was flooded during Katrina. Weeks later the ACLU requested the evacuation plan under a public records statute. The group was given a scant two-page document (see p. 42) that does not address how OPP buildings would be evacuated in the event of an emergency; what responsibilities state and local agencies had to coordinate a response to an emergency; how food and potable water would be distributed to staff and prisoners during an emergency; or what training staff members and prisoners should receive on proper evacuation procedures.

The New Orleans criminal justice system in the aftermath of Katrina is not a pretty sight. Even before the hurricane the system was a failure. It violated the humanity and civil rights of thousands of people while doing little to make the streets safer. The money and resources that taxpayers poured into it were wasted by political patronage and outdated practices. However extreme, the New Orleans criminal justice system exemplifies trends that can be found across the United States. The explosive growth of incarceration since the 1970s; the substitution of financial for public-safety motives for mass incarceration; the racism of violent policing, inadequate indigent defense, and excessive and unnecessary pretrial detention; shockingly inadequate healthcare and little pretense of rehabilitation: these endemic problems were merely made more visible by Katrina. What is new in New Orleans is a concerted movement that is forming to rebuild a system that is humane and serves communities instead of undermining them.

The Prison that is a Jail that is a Prison
Orleans Parish Prison, a sprawling campus of facilities in the Mid-City section of New Orleans, near the Superdome, is unusual in a number of ways. Louisiana's parishes are equivalent to other states' counties. So despite its name, Orleans Parish Prison is actually a county jail, not a prison.

County jails typically house pretrial detainees and those serving short sentences for misdemeanors. From April 26, 1999, through January 15, 2001, 90,786 people were booked at OPP on attachments (warrants for failure to appear in court), traffic or municipal charges, or state charges not involving a felony offense. In many of these cases police could have issued citations rather than arresting the person.

Unlike most county jails, OPP also has contracts to house state and federal prisoners, serving as a de facto overflow prison for the DOC and the federal prison system. Thus, the facility mixes some people convicted of violent felonies with others awaiting trial on trivial misdemeanors.

OPP has one of the largest populations of any jail in the country, averaging 6,846 inmates at any one time. New Orleans is the thirty-fifth most populated city in America but has the eighth largest penal institution in terms of the total number of prisoners per day, giving it the honor of having the highest incarceration rate of any large city, with 1,480 prisoners per 100,000 residents. This is double the United States' incarceration rate, already the highest of any country. OPP is also the largest correctional institution in Louisiana, housing about 1,700 more people than the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

The head of the parish prison is the parish sheriff, an elected official whose official title is "Criminal Sheriff." Pre-Katrina, New Orleans had the twenty-second largest police force in the country, but ranked eighth in total number employed in law enforcement because of the enormous staff of the Criminal Sheriff's office.

OPP wasn't always the current behemoth. When Charles Foti was elected criminal sheriff for Orleans Parish in 1974, a seat he would hold for 30 years, OPP had a population of only about 800, despite the fact that the population of Orleans Parish was more than 100,000 higher then than just prior to Katrina. By the time Foti left after being elected state attorney general, he had expanded OPP's total capacity over tenfold to approximately 8,500.

NOPD: A Department In Crisis
"This police force has been chronically plagued with provable, demonstrated horrendous instances of corruption and brutality for ages," says Mary Howell, a local civil rights attorney who's worked on criminal justice reform for 30 years. "[There have been] cases of mock executions, rape, armed robbery. There was one officer who used to do bank robberies during his lunch breaks." In the six months since Katrina, NOPD has already been involved in several notorious incidents. Among them:

An alleged shootout with a "gang of snipers" on the Danziger Bridge that resulted in three deaths and several bullet wounds. An investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed that those shot by NOPD were in fact not "snipers" but instead likely innocent unarmed families fleeing Katrina. Included in the casualty list was an unarmed 40-year-old African-American man with developmental disabilities, Ronald Madison, who was shot multiple times in the back and killed, as well as an unarmed, African-American teenage girl who was shot and injured.
The brutal beating of 64-year-old retired African-American schoolteacher Robert Davis, caught on tape by the Associated Press. Davis was seen having his head repeatedly slammed into a brick wall by police until he collapsed into a pool of his own blood.
The videotaped incident involving Anthony Hayes, a mentally ill, 38-year-old African-American man, who was armed with a three-inch knife and surrounded by sixteen NOPD officers. Officers fired nine bullets into Hayes after, officers claimed, he lunged at one of them. Critics and experts slammed the NOPD for unnecessary deadly force.
In only one of these three incidents, the Robert Davis beating, has any officer been formally disciplined. The department's lack of credibility with community members makes cooperation and witness testimony difficult to obtain. As a result, the department solves an astonishingly low share of the city's crimes, especially violent crimes. For example, following the multiple shooting at the Bring New Orleans Back Second Line Parade in January, where gunmen fired into a crowd of locals from close range, police expressed frustration over their stalled investigation. Three people were injured by the gunmen in front of large crowds of bystanders, yet no witnesses were willing to step forward to help identify suspects.
A History of Abuse and Neglect
The accounts from prisoners, including women and juveniles, of being abandoned in locked cells as floodwaters continued to rise during Hurricane Katrina are just a part of the history of cruel indifference and abuse in OPP.

Just a year and a half ago, two guards were indicted for beating an OPP prisoner to death after he was picked up on charges of public drunkenness. In 2004 OPP was one of the top five prisons with substantiated reports of sexual violence in the nation. It is perhaps for these reasons that the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff had a $17.3 million insurance fund in 2002, $4.9 million of which was designated for the payment of claim liabilities.

OPP has been under one of the longest federal court-ordered consent decrees in U.S. history. For over 35 years, a federal court has been monitoring OPP as a result of a 1969 case, Hamilton v. Morial. The prison is run under guidelines from various federal consent decrees that mandate upgrades in medical treatment, among other areas. Whether the consent decrees have been effective is another matter. Healthcare at OPP was horribly inadequate even before Katrina. A pregnant prisoner reported being left in shackles during labor and another claimed she was denied an examination by a gynecologist despite bleeding immediately after childbirth. In 2001, Shawn Duncan died of dehydration in the OPP psychiatric unit after being held in restraints for 42 hours. He was in jail on traffic charges. Prisoners have died from such treatable conditions as a peptic ulcer, meningitis and bacterial pneumonia. Paul Willis, 52, who died of a ruptured peptic ulcer in 2004, likely writhed in agony for 12 hours before he died. A prisoner died in each of the three months before Hurricane Katrina struck: one died while under medical observation for health problems; another hung himself while under suicide watch.

Both before Katrina and since, a day in OPP was wasted because of scant rehabilitative programs available to prisoners. Only 400 people could participate in the prison's adult literacy program at one time. Prisoners were often released without planning for housing and needed services, further contributing to recidivism problems. Both city and state prisoners were released into a city with only one fully functional re-entry program for ex-offenders. Last year, local programs that helped hundreds of former prisoners get jobs and stay out of trouble were forced to shut down because the state decided to reallocate the federal money that financed them. The re-entry programs that were closed were highly successful, with participant recidivism rates as low as 9%.

Financing a Fiefdom
There is no public safety reason for Orleans Parish Prison to be the largest correctional facility in the state. The jail has grown for other reasons. By agreement, the city of New Orleans pays the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff $22.39 per day for each local prisoner OPP houses--roughly $100,000 per day. (OPP receives even more money to house federal prisoners--about twice as much per prisoner.) For 2006, New Orleans projects it will spend over $50 million to house prisoners. The cost to the city has doubled since 1994, when it was just $22.5 million.

Such payments have led former Orleans Parish criminal sheriffs to discuss the trafficking of prisoners in business terms. Interim Sheriff Bill Hunter commented that "fewer inmates translates into less revenue for the jail." After a drop in state prisoners housed at OPP from 2000 to 2002, then-Sheriff Foti remarked, "If you were in the stock market, you would call this a slow-growth period."

The finances of the Orleans Parish prison empire are a mystery to local and state officials. In fact, the $75 million-plus annual budget presented to the City Council in 2005 was a meager two pages--the same length as the OPP evacuation plan. Personnel expenditures, which totaled $39,910,562, were listed on a single line; the sheriff didn't bother to break the figure down.

This lack of accountability also allows the Orleans criminal sheriff to have unparalleled control over the city's largest patronage base. In 2005, the sheriff had roughly 1,200 nonunion employees who served at his pleasure, exempt from the civil service protections enjoyed by other city employees. The New Orleans Times-Picayune remarked that the victory of current Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman marked his evolution from political appointee to full-fledged politician with his own patronage base.

"OPP has long been a shameful centerpiece of New Orleans' broken criminal justice system with its history of human and civil rights abuses, fatal disease, and institutional violence. It's no coincidence that OPP has also emerged as a centerpiece of political power in New Orleans," says Shana Sassoon from the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a group of reformers who have been advocating for positive change in the policies and conditions of OPP.

Prison Labor
The lack of accountability extends to prison labor. Orleans Parish prisoners working alongside roadways, erecting stands for Mardi Gras, setting Christmas lights for the city's Celebration of the Oaks, or working at a Halloween haunted house have long been common sights.

In 1989, the Times-Picayune reported that private citizens and companies could hire prisoners to perform work at minimum wage. From these wages the sheriff would deduct living expenses, travel expenses, support of the prisoners' dependents, and payment of the prisoners' debts, with any remaining money going to the prisoner. Recently OPP built an aquaculture facility--run entirely by prison labor--to raise about 600,000 to 700,000 pounds of tilapia per year. Prison laborers are often used as political tools. When running for office in 2003, Marlin Gusman told the League of Women Voters: "I will work with the city administration to reduce the burden on the general fund and provide more prisoner labor to augment city services."

Hurricane Katrina has not changed the prison's policy on the exploitation of prison laborers who are paid pennies on the dollar; in fact, it may have accelerated it. After the hurricane struck, Gusman promised to make prisoners available to assist in the recovery. Given the fact that the majority of prisoners had yet to be convicted or were convicted of minor offenses, this use of prisoners amounts to modern slavery--or a throwback to the notoriously racist convict-lease and state-use prison labor systems that proliferated in the South after Reconstruction.

Indigent Defense
Once arrested and detained in OPP, New Orleans' poorest citizens are left to an indigent defender system that is one of the worst in the country. Funded almost entirely by traffic ticket revenue, the indigent defender system has been so underfunded that one public defender was forced to file a motion to have a trial court declare him ineffective because of his overwhelming workload and lack of investigative and expert resources. The vast majority--88%--of all those charged in criminal cases in Louisiana qualify as indigent, yet on average prosecutors receive over three times as much funding per case as public defenders.

Those arrested are often the victims of what is called "police sentencing," which occurs when an arrested person spends up to nearly nine weeks in jail before even spurious charges are dismissed. Even then, these people are released only because a state law requires district attorneys to file an indictment or bill of information within 45 days of the arrest of a person for a misdemeanor and within 60 days for a felony. In contrast, the average waiting period in New York City is five days. If adequate indigent defense services allowed public defenders to meet with clients much earlier, many of these people would be released in days rather than losing weeks or months of their lives in jail.

How to Build a Truly Safe Community
Born in the hurricane's aftermath, New Orleans' Safe Streets/Strong Communities Coalition has articulated the following goals for the city's criminal justice system:

Goal 1: Transform the New Orleans Police Department

End corruption, misconduct and abuse;
Create a department accountable and transparent to the community it serves;
Create a department that improves community safety, supports crime prevention, and practices effective responses to crime.
Goal 2: Transform the Orleans Parish Jail System

Close Orleans Parish Prison and replace it with a physical structure and living conditions that are safe and humane for everyone;
Ensure that detention is only used to protect public safety or ensure court appearance;
Build, expand and support alternatives to incarceration;
Ensure that the operation, control and budgeting of the jail system is transparent and accountable to the community it serves and is not used as a mechanism for political power and patronage.
Goal 3: Transform the New Orleans' Criminal Court System

Ensure that the indigent defender system is politically independent, is adequately and equitably funded, and operates as a model client-centered defender system;
Ensure that courts are fair, efficient, and effective;
Ensure that the court system prioritizes and supports effective alternatives to incarceration.
Safe Streets strongly believes that there is a way to make the streets safer without an over-reliance on punishment, jails and brutality. There can be safe streets and strong communities free from violence for everyone in New Orleans, regardless of race or economics. Safe Streets also knows that this moment is a unique opportunity for a bold transformation of a badly broken system. Working with the impressive collection of organizations and individuals who have come together to seize this opportunity, we will pursue our goals strategically and build a public safety system worthy of the people of New Orleans.

Source: Safe Streets/Strong Communities
The Costs of a Damaged System
After Hurricane Katrina, the state DOC took custody of the incarcerated men, women and children trapped in OPP. Approximately 8,000 prisoners were then scattered throughout the state of Louisiana to different parish prisons. As the days and then weeks passed, many of these inmates began to complain because the date on which they were supposed to be released had passed. Prisoner advocates acquired a computer print-out from September 9, 2005, listing every single OPP inmate along with their charges and release dates. These records revealed that very few inmates were being released by DOC according to their set dates. Most continued to be held past their term.

Eventually a group of volunteer criminal defense lawyers filed habeas corpus petitions to free the inmates who were being held for no valid legal reason. Soon after judges from Orleans Parish began signing orders to release some inmates who were in prison on low-level charges for nonviolent offences, the DOC sent a memo out to all local jail wardens. This leaked memo addressed the fate of 280 prisoners; it details a plan to "release 35 inmates per day over a period of 8 days (excluding weekends)." It still is unclear why these 280 prisoners eligible for release--likely to be a small subset of those eligible for release, given that so many in OPP were pre-trial detainees--were being trickled out of prison so slowly.

Although the DOC might have been simply overwhelmed, there are other possible reasons why it released people at such a sluggish pace. The DOC currently receives financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) for each prisoner it holds. A spreadsheet obtained by criminal defense attorneys lists the reimbursements the DOC is requesting from FEMA. The projected reimbursement for just one day, December 19, 2005, was $146,495.42. At that daily rate, DOC was expecting to be reimbursed roughly $13 million dollars for holding 4,215 prisoners from September 1 until December 1, 2005. The most recent memo obtained estimates that FEMA will reimburse the DOC $120,735.94 for holding 3,716 prisoners on January 13, 2006. In other words, there is a serious financial disincentive for the DOC to move quickly on releasing prisoners.

In contrast, the New Orleans public school system learned in January that FEMA had denied its application for an $87 million loan to keep its schools solvent. "FEMA gives away $120,000 a day to already powerful and corrupt prisons but won't even loan a penny to poor struggling schools. Children always seem to be the ones being asked to pay the price while adults squander our children's futures," says Xochitl Bervera, prison activist and codirector of Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children.

During a recent special session on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the state legislature passed a bill barring lawsuits by people kept in prison past their release dates. Prisoners in the custody of the sheriff or law enforcement agency who were evacuated during and immediately after the hurricanes and were not released within the time required by the Code of Criminal Procedure cannot sue the sheriff or law enforcement agency for damages. The primary beneficiary of this legislation is the DOC.

In New Orleans, OPP reopened in mid-October, housing a small population. In a November 10 letter to the New Orleans City Council, Sheriff Marlin Gusman reported: "Our current inmate population is approximately 600."

At the time, only two of OPP's twelve major units were operational. Gusman acknowledged that "even those two that are operational will still require additional repairs and improvements to be brought to pre-Katrina level." The sheriff's letter did not say whether the facility had been tested for toxins which are likely to have come into OPP with the flood waters.

Gusman is clear, however, about the urgency to reopen OPP. "Our main source of revenue is per diem payments for the care, custody and control of inmates," he wrote. "Our current inmate population is É a 90 percent reduction in revenue, but our fixed costs remain high."

At Stake: The Future of a City and Its People
Clearly, even before Katrina criminal justice policy in New Orleans was at a crisis point. But this is not just a public safety crisis. It is simultaneously a crisis of civil rights, education, and poverty. One in seven African-American men in Louisiana end up in the prison system, while only 1 in 35 end up in college. Arrest and detention policy is seemingly arbitrary and often nonsensical as NOPD arrests and detains citizens for offenses as minor as riding a bicycle with one hand. Meanwhile, violent crime skyrockets and cases are rarely solved. Police exercise minimal restraint, leaving communities fearing police even more than they fear street crime. The court system remains in disarray as public defenders are overwhelmed with massive caseloads resulting in inadequate indigent defense and prolonged incarceration for low-level non-violent offenders. Families and children lose breadwinning parents to frivolous arrests and incarceration, sending communities into a cycle of poverty. But the real costs of a broken criminal justice system cannot be measured in mere dollars. They include the damage that violence, substance abuse, and poverty do to schools, neighborhoods, and families.

The good news is that as the floodwaters receded, the city's system's failures were exposed both locally and nationally. Members of Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, working on direct disaster relief, began hearing tales of terrible abuse and mistreatment at OPP and Camp Greyhound, the city's temporary makeshift jail at the Greyhound station. Stories of police brutality and abuse in the aftermath of Katrina followed. As a result, Safe Streets/Strong Communities was born, a new organization whose mission would be to transform the local criminal justice system into something safer, more humane, and less costly than it has been and to hold those in power accountable for corruption, abuse, brutality, and misconduct.

Safe Streets/Strong Communities emerged out of a common understanding among scores of progressive individuals and organizations that as New Orleans' criminal justice system is rebuilt, existing criminal justice institutions will use the fear of crime to increase and consolidate their institutional power. This drive by police, prosecutors, and the OPP to expand their power can only be counteracted by a strong, unified, community-driven campaign to rebuild a democratic and transparent criminal justice system that is focused on public safety rather than political power.

Barry Gerharz is an attorney and the legal coordinator for Safe Streets/Strong Communities. Recipient of a 2004 Reprieve Fellowship to work as an advocate for the wrongfully convicted in Louisiana, he successfully pushed for a state compensation statute. Before this statute was passed, Louisiana's wrongfully convicted were given just ten dollars upon their release.

Seung Hong is a freelance journalist and Communications Director for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, currently on loan as Communications and Policy Coordinator to Safe Streets/Strong Communities. He is a native of Bremerton, Wash., but was raised in New Orleans.

Resources: Safe Streets/Strong Communities (www.neworleansnetwork.org/node/358); Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (www.jjpl.org); Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (www.fflic.org); ACLU Katrina press release (www.aclu.org/prison/gen/22370prs20051208.html).

This article is from the March/April 0306toc.html">March/April 2006 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0306gerharzhong.html

Posted by lois at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

Katrina and The Second Disaster: A Twenty-Point Plan to Destroy Black New Orleans

KATRINA AND THE SECOND DISASTER:
A Twenty-Point Plan to Destroy Black New Orleans
By Robert D. Bullard

As reconstruction and rebuilding move forward in New Orleans and the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast region, it is clear that the lethargic and inept emergency response after Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that overshadowed the deadly storm itself. Yet, there is a "second disaster" in the making-driven by racism, classism, elitism, paternalism, and old-fashion greed. The following "Twenty-Point Plan to Destroy Black New Orleans" is based on trends and observations made over the past three months. Hopefully, the good people of New Orleans, Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, and the United States will not allow this plan to go forward-and instead adopt a principled plan and approach to rebuilding and bringing back New Orleans that is respectful of all of its citizens.

1. Selectively Hand Out FEMA Grants. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is being consistent in the slow response in getting aid to Katrina survivors. FEMA's grant assistance program favors middle-income households. Make it difficult for low-income and black Katrina survivors to access government assistance. Direct the bulk of the grant assistance to middle-income white storm victims. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and several other legal groups have sued FEMA over its response and handling of aid to storm victims. FEMA has referred more than two million people, many of them with low incomes, to the Small Business Administration (SBA) to get the loans.

2. Systematically Deny the Poor and Blacks SBA Loans. Screen out poor and deny black households disaster loans. The New York Times editorial summed up this problem: "The Poor Need Not Apply." The Small Business Administration has processed only a third of the 276,000 home loan applications it has received. However, the SBA has rejected 82 percent of the applications it received, a higher percentage than in most previous disasters. Well-off neighborhoods like Lakeview have received 47 percent of the loan approvals, while poverty-stricken neighborhoods have gotten 7 percent. Middle-class black neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city have lower loan rates.

3. Award Insurance Claims Using the "Wind or Water" Trap. Because of the enormity of the damage in the wake of Katrina, insurance companies will categorize a lot of legitimate wind claims as flood or water-related. The "wind or water" problem will hit black storm victims hardest because they are likely to have their insurance with small companies-since the major firms "redlined" many black neighborhoods. Most rebuilding funds after disasters comes from private insurance-not the government.

4. Redline Black Insurance Policyholders. Numerous studies show that African Americans are more likely than whites to receive insufficient insurance settlement amounts. Insurance firms target black policyholders for low and inadequate insurance settlements based on majority black zip codes to subsidize fair settlements made to white policyholders. If black homeowners and business owners expect to recover from Katrina, then they must receive full and just insurance settlements. FEMA and the SBA cannot be counted on to rebuild black communities.

5. Use "Greenbuilding" and Flood-Proofing Codes To Restrict Redevelopment. Requiring rebuilding plans to conform to "greenbuilding" materials and new flood-proofing codes can price many low- and moderate-income homeowners and small business owners out of the market. This will hit black homeowners and black business owners especially hard since they generally have lower incomes and lower wealth.

6. Apply Discriminatory Environmental Clean-up Standards. Failure to apply uniform clean-up standards can kill off black neighborhoods. Use of full-scale cleanup of white neighborhoods to residential standards, while allowing no cleanup or partial cleanup (industrial standards) of black residential neighborhoods. Failure to cleanup black residential areas can act as a disincentive for redevelopment. It could also make people sick. Use the argument that black neighborhoods were already highly polluted with background contamination "hot spots" exceeding EPA safe levels pre-Katrina and thus need not be cleaned to more rigorous residential standards.

7. Sacrifice "Low-Lying" Black Neighborhoods in the Name of Saving the Wetlands and Environmental Restoration. Allow black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East to be "yielded back to the swamp" while allowing similar low-lying white areas to be rebuilt and redeveloped. This is a form of "ethnic cleansing" that was not possible before Katrina. Instead of emphasizing equitable rebuilding, uniform clean-up standards, equal protection, and environmental justice for African American communities, public officials should send mixed signals for rebuilding vulnerable "low-lying" black neighborhoods.

8. Promote a Smaller, More Upscale, and "Whiter" New Orleans. Concentrating on getting less-damaged neighborhoods up and running could translate into a smaller, more upscale, and whiter New Orleans and a dramatically down-sized black community. Clearly, shrinking New Orleans neighborhoods disproportionately shrinks black votes, black political power, and black wealth.

9. Revise Land Use and Zoning Ordinances to Exclude. Katrina can be used to change land use and zoning codes to "zone against" undesirable land uses that were not politically possible before the storm. Also, "expulsive" zoning can be used to push out certain land uses and certain people.

10. Phased Rebuilding and Restoration Scheme That Concentrates on the "High Ground." New Orleans officials are being advised to concentrate rebuilding on the areas that remained high and dry after Katrina. These areas are disproportionately white and affluent. This scenario builds on pre-existing inequities and "white privilege" and ensures future inequities and "white privilege." By the time rebuilding gets around to black "low-lying" areas, there is not likely to be any rebuilding funds left. This is the "oops we are out of funds" scenario.

11. Apply Eminent Domain as a Black Land Grab. Give Katrina evacuees one year to return before the City is allowed to legally "take" their property through eminent domain. Clearly, it will take much longer than a year for most New Orleanians to return home. This proposal could turn into a giant land grab of black property and loss of black wealth they have invested in their homes and businesses.

12. No Financial Assistance for Evacuees to Return. Thousands of Katrina evacuees were shipped to more than three-dozen states with no provisions for return-equivalent to a "one-way" ticket. Many Katrina evacuees are running short of funds. No money translates into no return to their homes and neighborhoods. Promote the "right to return" without committing adequate resources to assist evacuees to return.

13. Keep Evacuees Away from New Orleans Jobs. The nation's unemployment rate was 5 percent in November 2005. The November 2005 jobless rate for Katrina returnees was 12.5 percent, while 27.8 percent of evacuees living elsewhere were unemployed. However, the black jobless rate was 47 percent in November compared with 13 percent for whites who have not gone back. Katrina evacuees who have made it back to their home region have much lower levels of joblessness. This is especially important for African Americans whose joblessness rate fell over 30 percentage points for returnees. The problem is that the vast majority of black Katrina evacuees have not returned to their home region. Only 21 percent of black evacuees have returned compared with 48 percent of whites.

14. Fail to Enforce Fair Housing Laws. Allow housing discrimination against blacks to run rampant. Katrina created a housing shortage and opened a floodgate of discrimination against black homeowners and renters. In December 2005, the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) found high rates of housing discrimination against African-Americans displaced by Hurricane Katrina. In 66 percent of the tests conducted by the NFHA, 43 of 65 instances, whites were favored over African-Americans.

15. No Commitment to Rebuild and Replace Low-Income Public Housing. Shortly after Katrina struck, even the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spoke of not rebuilding all of the public housing lost during the storm. The HUD secretary's statement is a powerful signal to New Orleans poor that public housing may not be around for them to return to.

16. Downplay the Black Cultural Heritage of New Orleans. Promote rebuilding and the vision of a "new" New Orleans as if the rich Black Culture did not matter or act as if it can be replaced or replicated in a "theme park" type redevelopment scenario. Developers should capture and market the "black essence" of New Orleans without including black people.

17. Treatment of Mixed-Income "Integrated" Housing as Superior to All-Black Neighborhoods. First, there is nothing inherently inferior about an "all-black" neighborhood-or all-black anything for that matter. Black New Orleans who chose to live in neighborhoods that happen to be all-black (whites have always had the right to move in or move out of these neighborhoods) should not be forced to have their neighborhoods rebuilt as "integrated" or "multicultural" neighborhoods. Also, "mixed-income" housing to many blacks conjures up the idea of 10% of the fair market housing units set aside for them. Many blacks are battle-weary of being 10%. New Orleans was 68% black before Katrina-and most black folks were comfortable with that.

18. Allow "Oversight" (Overseer) Board to Manage Katrina Funds That Flow to New Orleans. Take away "home rule" since the billions of Katrina redevelopment dollars that will flow to New Orleans is too much money for a majority black city council and a black mayor to oversee or manage. More important, the oversight board will need to represent "big-money" interests (real estate, developers, banking, insurance, hotels, law firms, tourist industry, etc.) well beyond the purview of a democratically elected city government to ensure that the vision of the "new" New Orleans, "smaller and more upscale," gets implemented.

19. Delay Rebuilding and Construction of New Orleans Schools. The longer the New Orleans schools stay closed, the longer the families with children will stay away. Schools are a major predictor of racial polarization. Before Katrina, over 125,000 New Orleans children were attending schools in the city. Blacks made up 93 percent of New Orleans schools. Evacuated children are enrolled in school districts from Arizona to Pennsylvania. Three months after the storm, only one of the New Orleans 116 schools is open.

20. Hold Elections without Appropriate Voting Rights Act Safeguards. Almost 300,000 registered voters left New Orleans after Katrina. The powerful storm damaged or destroyed 300 of the 442 polling places. Holding city elections pose major challenges regarding registration, absentee ballots, city workers, polling places, and identification for displaced New Orleanians. Identification is required at the polls and returning residents may not have access to traditional identification papers (birth certificates, drivers licenses etc.) destroyed by the hurricane. More than three months after Katrina struck, 80 percent of New Orleans voters have not made their way back to the city, including most African Americans who comprised a two-thirds majority of the population before the storm. Most of the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 New Orleans residents who have made it back are mostly white and middle class, changing the racial and political complexion of the city. Holding elections while the vast majority of New Orleans voters are displaced outside of their home district and even their home state is unprecedented in the history of the United States, but also raises racial justice and human rights questions.

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Robert D. Bullard is the Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.

Posted by lois at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2006

Help Gather Stories for a Human Rights Report on Hurricane Katrina

Help Gather Stories for a Human Rights Report on Hurricane Katrina
U.S. Human Rights Network Collaborative Documentation Project

The Hurricane Katrina disaster has left a path of destruction and serious human rights concerns in its wake. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, and many have not had their rights protected, as defined by internationally recognized United Nations standards for survivors of such situations.

In response to interest in applying international standards to assess the human rights of Hurricane Katrina victims and make policy recommendations to address their needs, the U.S. Human Rights Network is coordinating a documentation project spearheaded by one of its members – the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). Because the displacement is so widespread and groups serving the communities impacted cover many geographic regions, we are joining together as members of the Network in a collaborative effort to share information and document the impact of this disaster as comprehensively as possible.

The Hurricane Katrina Human Rights Documentation Project will:
► Support U.S. Human Rights Network members and other community-based groups in documenting human rights violations affecting those displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

► Gather stories and testimonies to produce briefs, reports, media and other educational materials to support relief services, community organizing and human rights advocacy efforts related to the crisis.

► Provide training and technical assistance on human rights, documentation and analysis for groups interested in participating in the report.

► Urge international observers and institutions to address the human rights needs of Hurricane Katrina survivors and provide monitoring.

► Encourage information sharing and collaboration among those documenting the impact of the disaster.

To learn more about the project and how to participate, please contact Sharda Sekaran at NESRI, 212-253-1771 or sharda@nesri.org.

For those groups generally interested in receiving and posting updates related to research and documentation on human rights and Hurricane Katrina (regardless of participation in the collaborative documentation efforts), the Documentation Caucus of the U.S. Human Rights Network hopes to serve as a clearinghouse for such information. To learn more about the U.S. Human Rights Network’s Documentation Caucus, please contact Cathy Albisa at NESRI, 212-253-1761 or cathy@nesri.org.

The US Human Rights Network was formed to promote US accountability to universal human rights standards by building linkages between organizations, as well as individuals, working on human rights issues in the US.

www.ushrnetwork.org

The National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) promotes a cultural and political commitment to a human rights vision for the United States that ensures dignity and access to the basic resources needed for human development and civic participation.

www.nesri.org

Sharda Sekaran
Associate Director
NESRI - National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
666 Broadway, Suite 625
New York, NY 10012
tel: 212-253-1771
fax: 212-253-1711
sharda@nesri.org
http://www.nesri.org

Statement on Hurricane Katrina Disaster

The National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) extends its deepest sympathies to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. NESRI also expresses serious concern about the failure of government to meet its humanitarian and human rights obligations to the victims. Thousands of people, primarily poor, Black and/or disabled, were not taken into account in the evacuation plan or provided with basic human rights such as clean water, food, medical care and decent shelter for days on end. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the right to permanent housing, education, health, work and a decent standard of living will be assured to all those displaced by the catastrophe. NESRI urges the U.S. government to take immediate corrective action and ensure the full range of human rights of those displaced by Katrina, as required by the United Nations Guidelines on Internally Displaced Persons. NESRI also urges local, state and national officials to undertake a serious inquiry into the human rights conditions that led to the extreme vulnerability of residents.

NESRI Commentary: Disaster Exposes National Human Rights Crisis
The images of survivors struggling through the chaos left in Hurricane Katrina’s wake are so consistent that it is impossible to ignore what they reveal about the state of race, class and human rights in the United States.

Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today Show, said on the air, “The great majority of the people we are seeing suffering right now are black and they are poor. These are the people who don't have a safety net in their daily lives and clearly there was no net prepared to help them in a situation like this. How much of a wake-up call does this have to be for the people of this country?”

As the rest of the world sees this footage, a provocative secret is revealed: the income inequities and scarcity of resources experienced by poor countries are prevalent here, in the world’s most rich and powerful nation, branded as the champion of freedom. For those inundated with our pop culture exports and wealthy national leaders, this is probably hard to believe but here it is, in a form too glaring to ignore.

An even more shocking blow to the U.S. public image is the fact that its poor people, denied their human right to live with security and dignity, are often criminalized and attacked for their desperation. As unaddressed need escalated to the point of catastrophe, government officials promised to show “zero tolerance” to those struggling to withstand the nightmare by following the law of survival and scavenging for sustenance.

The social safety net protecting people from abject poverty in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama wasn’t there before this tragedy and has not emerged in its wake. Moreover, it is increasingly being dismantled across the U.S. Despite the grand façade of national unity, all of us are not treated equally or given adequate resources to survive. Hurricane Katrina has washed away whole cities and exposed this ugly truth. Social and economic disparity is on the rise.

According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2004 was the first time on record that household incomes failed to increase for five straight years. The poverty rate went up to nearly 13%, and income inequality rose to near all-time highs last year. Meanwhile, the average CEO pay rose last year to 431 times what the average worker earned, according to a recent report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and Boston-based United for a Fair Economy.

While economic and social needs are growing, social programs that provide basic services to secure the right to live with dignity are being cut. Take for instance Medicaid, the country’s largest provider of health coverage to the poor, which is now being slashed from state to state, as more and more people cannot afford health insurance. In 2004, according the U.S. Census, the number of people without health insurance climbed 859,000 to reach 45.8 million.

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumers Protection Act, that President Bush signed into law this year, is about to take effect in October. Yet another legislative decision favoring wealthy lenders and creditors over the nation’s poor and middle class, this law to curb people from filing for bankruptcy may add another layer of misery to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, if lawmakers do not intervene soon. Even if disaster survivors become exempt from the provision, its enactment will add to the burden of the many people in the U.S. finding it harder and harder just to get by.

The needs of poor people are frequently misunderstood or an afterthought, rather than seen as a government responsibility to the human rights of its people. In a climate where their existence is swept under the rug, it shouldn’t be surprising that the inability of many to evacuate from the hurricane due to lack of transportation was inaccurately viewed as some sort of baffling choice. Nor is it shocking that disaster relief efforts have shown a remarkable disregard and ignorance of the level of human need.

For those who have been paying attention to poverty in the U.S., the faces of those most devastated by the hurricane are painful to watch but also predictable in their color. Although income insecurity and violations of the fundamental human rights to health, social security, education and other social and economic rights are growing across racial lines, they are most prevalent in communities of color.

If the country were confronted with the images of those most impacted by preventable disease, under-funded schools, incarceration, infant mortality, hunger and homelessness, they would also be overwhelmingly black, brown or immigrant. However, whites are also facing these violations in increasing numbers. These issues are compelling, not only for moral reasons, but also because they are major indicators of state of human rights in the United States, which ultimately affects all of us.

Social and economic inequity brought instability and insecurity well before this catastrophe. In order to prevent future tragedies of this magnitude and protect human rights, we must be better at providing a basic safety net for all. The U.S. should not be forced by events this devastating to recognize the injustice of poverty, a much better target for “zero tolerance” than its victims.

Human Rights and Hurricane Katrina

Summary of UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement
The Guiding Principals on Internal Displacement issued by the Secretary General of the United Nations identify internationally recognized rights and guarantees of persons who have been forcibly displaced from their homes due to a number of factors, including natural disaster. Those who have been displaced from their homes but not crossed international borders are not refugees, but rather “internally displaced persons.”

National authorities are primarily responsible for ensuring the human rights of internally displaced persons; however the guidelines are relevant to intergovernmental agencies, non-governmental agencies and local authorities as well. The following is a summary of the guiding principles that are particularly relevant to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the U.S. gulf region, but does not include all the principles contained in the guidelines:

Ø Internally displaced persons shall enjoy equally all the rights and freedoms as other persons in their country.

Ø Every human being has the right to dignity and physical, mental and moral integrity.

Ø Internally displaced persons have the right to request and to receive protection and humanitarian assistance from national authorities.

Ø Certain internally displaced persons, such as children, especially unaccompanied minors, expectant mothers, mothers with young children, female heads of household, persons with disabilities and elderly persons, shall be entitled to any necessary special protection and assistance.

Ø All internally displaced persons have the right to an adequate standard of living. At the minimum, regardless of the circumstances, and without discrimination, competent authorities shall provide internally displaced persons with and ensure safe access to: (a) Essential food and potable water; (b) Basic shelter and housing; (c) Appropriate clothing; and (d) Essential medical services and sanitation. Special efforts should be made to ensure the full participation of women in the planning and distribution of these basic supplies.

Ø All wounded and sick internally displaced persons as well as those with disabilities shall receive to the fullest extent possible and with the least possible delay, the medical care and attention they require, without distinction on any grounds other than medical ones. When necessary, internally displaced persons shall have access to psychological and social services. Special attention should be paid to the health needs of women, including access to female health care providers and services, such as reproductive health care, as well as appropriate counseling for victims of sexual and other abuses. Special attention should also be given to the prevention of contagious and infectious diseases, including AIDS, among internally displaced persons.

Ø Every human being has the right to respect of his or her family life. To give effect to this right for internally displaced persons, family members who wish to remain together shall be allowed to do so. Families which are separated by displacement should be reunited as quickly as possible.

Ø All internally displaced persons have the right to know the fate and whereabouts of missing relatives, and authorities shall make efforts to obtain and provide this information. Authorities shall inform the next of kin on the progress of investigations on missing relatives and notify them of any result.

Ø The authorities concerned shall endeavor to collect and identify the mortal remains of those deceased, prevent their despoliation or mutilation, and facilitate the return of those remains to the next of kin or dispose of them respectfully.

Ø Grave sites of internally displaced persons should be protected and respected in all circumstances. Internally displaced persons should have the right of access to the grave sites of their deceased relatives.

Ø Competent authorities have the primary duty and responsibility to establish conditions, as well as provide the means, which allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual residence, or to resettle voluntarily in another part of the country. Such authorities shall make efforts to facilitate the reintegration of returned or resettled internally displaced persons.

Ø Special efforts should be made to ensure the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration.

Ø Every human being has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. To give effect to this right for internally displaced persons, the authorities concerned shall issue to them all documents necessary for the enjoyment and exercise of their legal rights, such as passports, personal identification documents, birth certificates and marriage certificates. In particular, the authorities shall facilitate the issuance of new documents or the replacement of documents lost in the course of displacement, without imposing unreasonable conditions.

Ø Authorities have the duty and responsibility to assist returned and/or resettled internally displaced persons to recover, to the extent possible, their property and possessions which they left behind or were dispossessed of upon their displacement. When recovery of such property and possessions is not possible, authorities shall provide or assist these persons in obtaining appropriate compensation.

The Guiding Principles shall be applied without discrimination of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion or belief, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, legal or social status, age, disability, property, birth, or on any other similar criteria.

Posted by lois at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

Hurricane Katrina--New Orleans--Death of an American City

December 11, 2005
Editorial, NY Times
Death of an American City
We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a major American city.

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: Gulf Planning Roils Residents

December 8, 2005, NY Times
Gulf Planning Roils Residents
By BRADFORD McKEE
BILOXI, Miss.

EVER since the water rose over Andrea Harris's white bungalow on Elmer Street during Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Harris has been keeping a scrapbook. It holds three daily prayers, news clippings, the business cards of people who have helped her and angry letters to those who have not - including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she said took two months to deliver trailers. Until then, she and her neighbors lived in tents.

Now her scrapbook is filling with new worries. At a town meeting Nov. 30, Ms. Harris, 43, and her neighbors had gotten their first glimpse of new plans for Biloxi, developed by a state commission organized by Gov. Haley Barbour and a group of architects known as the Congress for the New Urbanism.

The plans made passing references to restoring sleepy older neighborhoods like hers, but focused heavily on remaking Biloxi as a more polished tourist magnet to rival Paradise Island. The plans proposed changing Highway 90 along Biloxi's coast, home to several of its casinos, into a new "Beach Boulevard." They also envisioned recreating a fishing harbor as a "seafood village," with clusters of condominiums, stores and restaurants. And it envisioned a streetcar running through town to shuttle people to new resorts and casinos.

"We want to see the casino activity here go beyond gaming," said Elizabeth Moule, an architect in Pasadena, Calif., and a founder of the New Urbanist group. "You're really competing with Myrtle Beach."

But for homeowners like Ms. Harris, golf courses and shopping promenades are not a priority. "It's like they're making it for Casino Row," she said last week. Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid, and her eyes flashed from exhaustion to fury. "Are you trying to turn this into a Sin City, or what?"

The Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, established in late September, is charged with planning the reconstruction of 11 coastal towns, including Biloxi, along with issuing a broader set of recovery guidelines due at the end of December. The town plans, drawn up in about six weeks, are meant to serve as blueprints for state and local leaders.

The New Urbanists, who organized in 1993, have become controversial for opposing suburban sprawl, instead designing old-fashioned town centers with picturesque streets lined by traditional parks, dense housing and stores. New Urbanism's critics, mostly modernist architects and academics, consider its designs a form of nostalgia catering to developers and rich homeowners, too rigid and retrograde for contemporary needs.

But politicians in the hurricane zone are finding New Urbanism's formulas for rebuilding persuasive. Last week, following Governor Barbour's lead in inviting New Urbanists to develop plans, the Louisiana Recovery Authority said it had hired three firms to develop "a comprehensive regional vision," for areas outside New Orleans hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The firms include those of the leading New Urbanists, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of Miami and Peter Calthorpe of Berkeley, Calif.

This week, KB Home, one of the nation's largest homebuilding companies, announced plans to build up to 20,000 houses across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, near Avondale. KB Home specializes in the type of suburban tract development that the New Urbanist movement opposes.

Ms. Harris knew nothing of the New Urbanists. She went to the meeting hoping for answers to basic questions, such as what the new building codes and flood elevations for Biloxi will be, so she and her neighbors can begin rebuilding their houses.

She found the town meetings had more to do with plans for replacing her neighborhood than restoring it. Lately, she and several neighbors said, surveyors have started showing up daily on her ruined street, some taking pictures of their houses and one bearing a plan that would place a resort on her property. "We were told by the surveyors that a golf course was going to run through my yard," Ms. Harris said.

Like other people in the neighborhood, called Point Cadet, she said she wonders whether city officials will encourage her and her neighbors to stay put and rebuild the houses they own, or whether they will be run off to make the town a tourist playground. Before the storm, Point Cadet was home to several floating casinos. In October, Governor Barbour signed a law that allows casinos to be built on land within 800 feet of the water, rather than restricting them to floating barges. At least one is planned for Point Cadet.

With their hold on Gulf Coast planning, the New Urbanists face their biggest task to date. In the past, many of their developments have been built on virgin sites, or were made to replace run-down public housing in cities. Now they have large areas of 11 badly damaged towns, from Waveland eastward to Pascagoula, to serve as blank slates.

"They're approaching it as if it's raw land," said William Morrish, a professor of architecture at the University of Virginia. In 1993, Mr. Morrish was a founding member of the New Urbanist group but later broke away over what he believed was intolerance toward new eclectic forms of architecture and urban design. "On the issues of transportation and transit, they've done an excellent job," Mr. Morrish said. But he objected to what he said was the New Urbanists' imposing particular architectural styles - namely "neotraditional" styles - in a place like Mississippi.

"A particular style does not promote a certain kind of sustainability or democracy," Mr. Morrish added. "You can't approach building a city like it's a 30-acre development."

Ms. Harris left the meeting unsatisfied. "It's like they just push us away," she said. She found the plans mostly "worried about the beachfront, condominiums, the fishing harbor." She did not like what she heard about plans for housing. "They said 'affordable low-income housing,' " she recalled. "We already own our homes."

Her concerns, she said, have not been alleviated by her mayor, A. J. Holloway, or by William Stallworth, her city council member, both of whom, she said, had turned away from her questions in public meetings.

Mr. Holloway disputed her account. "I never turned my back on anybody," he said. He said he did not know the precise location of Elmer Street. "I do know that Elmer Street won't be a casino," Mr. Holloway said. "But somebody might be surveying. It's not anything the city is doing." Mr. Stallworth was traveling and could not be reached.

Ms. Harris's fears are resounding through Point Cadet's shattered streets as wholesale land clearing by the government rolls slowly westward from the point's eastern tip. Three blocks from the water on Oak Street, Martha Bryant, 44, a licensed contractor, said she is rebuilding her house with her friend, Richard Fredrickson, despite what she sees as resistance from the city.

"They've made my life a living hell since they found out I'm going to move back there," Ms. Bryant said, requiring permits that she found excessive.

She noted that plans for a $400 million Golden Nugget resort with a 60,000-square-foot casino near her home were announced in late November.

"They want to put up an amusement park, a golf course," she said. "I'm east of Oak Street. They're saying everything east of Oak is going to go."

Ms. Bryant, who owns a painting business, erected a multicolored plywood sign on the front of her house that reads: "Hell No I Won't Go."

Her neighbor Elaine Parker, 61, with whom Ms. Bryant made a pact not to sell their houses, hung a protest sign as well. It read: "Now Recruiting Point Cadet Militia People vs. City."

Soon after she hung the sign behind her front fence, a city code enforcement officer came and took it down, she said, for being on city property.

"Of course, you had to be born and raised on Point Cadet to understand the humor in it," Ms. Parker said. Point Cadet has historically been a tough part of town. "We've lost everything, and now are you going to take my sense of humor away from me?"

Ms. Parker asked the enforcement officer whether she could hang the sign on her house, well within her property line. "He said a citation will be issued and you will be put in jail for up to two days," she recalled.

"Can I get 30 days?" she said she asked him. "Because three hots and a cot is more than I got."

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: National Legal Aid Resource Center

National Legal Aid Partners Launch “Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center”
Date Monday, November 07 @ 05:09:02

Tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents face devastating legal problems as they struggle to rebuild their lives in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but many people cannot afford and do not know where to get the legal assistance they need. To help address this problem, four national allies in the legal aid and public defender communities have launched “Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center,” a Web-based clearinghouse of legal aid, pro bono and public defender information for persons affected by the hurricanes and the lawyers and advocates helping them.

Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center, is the result of a partnership among the American Bar Association (ABA), Legal Services Corporation (LSC), National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) and Pro Bono Net.

“So many people have suffered tragedies beyond comprehension as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Sadly, many of those people are from the low-income community whose need for legal assistance has only escalated in the wake of these disasters. The daunting task that many of our legal aid and public defender colleagues face as they prepare to assist a growing number of clients is overwhelming,” said Jo-Ann Wallace, NLADA president and CEO.

Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center offers a significant number of legal aid, public defender, pro bono and referral resources to persons affected by the hurricanes who must navigate a maze of legal, government and insurance issues, and to advocates and lawyers committed to helping them. The site also offers private attorneys information on how they can assist the many legal aid lawyers and advocates in their efforts to serve communities devastated by this unprecedented tragedy.

“LSC and its partners are working tirelessly to ensure that those impacted by Hurricane Katrina and Rita and the lawyers and advocates who support them have the resources they need to rebuild the many lives that have been shattered by the devastation wrought by Katrina and Rita,” said LSC president Helaine M. Barnett. “We intend to increase the number of resources we offer to the Gulf Coast evacuees, but are hopeful that the information presented thus far will provide some relief as the task of rebuilding lives begins.”

“These hurricanes have exacted an enormous human toll, but they also are shaping up to be one of the greatest legal services crises in the history of our country. Persons affected by the hurricanes need legal assistance and the ABA and its members will make sure they have free legal services as long as it takes to help them rebuild their lives,” said Michael S. Greco, president of the ABA.

The template for Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center is based upon one developed by Pro Bono Net to coordinate the New York legal community’s response to the events of September 11th in New York City. Debevoise & Plimpton assisted in the development of the local pro bono section and Mule Design provided design services pro bono. The site focuses on three broad areas of help:

For People Who Need Help
The site provides state by state links and information on how to receive assistance with a number of legal and non-legal problems, including finding a legal aid or pro bono lawyer, locating emergency and temporary housing, filing insurance claims, and understanding their legal rights and what they can do to protect them.

For Legal Aid and Public Defender Programs
Legal aid and public defender lawyers on the front lines can find information and links in a broad array of issues. Some of those resource categories are: Child Welfare; Disability; Food Program Resources; Government and Government Services; Health Law; Housing; Immigration; License / Identification; Prisons; Social Security; State Disaster Manuals; Unemployment Compensation / Unemployment Insurance; and Welfare Resources. These pages also allow for posting of news about specific legal services (civil and defender) programs and individuals that have been affected by the hurricane and that are working hard to rebuild their physical structures as well as their personal and professional lives.

For Pro Bono Volunteers
Lawyers who want to offer pro bono assistance to persons in affected areas may register online through an ABA database that matches lawyers with volunteer opportunities most suited to their expertise and interests. Private lawyers may also find a listing of opportunities to volunteer in numerous states and localities, along with information about lawyer training programs to prepare them to assist persons affected by the hurricane. The site also provides information for lawyers who want to provide assistance to evacuees who have been relocated to other states, including Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, New York and the District of Columbia.

The coordinated substantive response to those in need as a result of Katrina and Rita has been extraordinary. In addition to the Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center, the ABA, LSC, NLADA and Pro Bono Net continue to work hard with a number of substantive support centers and emergency legal assistance experts in ensuring that: local advocacy efforts have the backup needed; volunteer advocates have access to substantive resources to assist their efforts; national advocacy responses are adequate; and substantive communications on cross-cutting issues are effective.
For more information, please visit Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center.

This article comes from PNNOnline
http://www.pnnonline.org

The URL for this story is:
http://www.pnnonline.org/article.php?sid=6319

Posted by lois at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: Congressional Black Caucus Hurricane Relief Bill

Congressional Black Caucus
Katrina Relief Bill
The following is based on a November 3 press release from the Congressional Black Caucus.

All 42 House members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) today introduced HR 4197, the Hurricane Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act of 2005. The bill is designed to provide for the recovery of the Gulf Coast region and for the reunion of families devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

During the press conference, the CBC also called on President Bush and on Democratic and Republican members of the House and Senate to support its comprehensive legislative response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and to make a commitment to eradicate poverty.

A summary of the bill follows:

BILL SUMMARY

HURRICANE KATRINA RECOVERY, RECLAMATION, RESTORATION,

RECONSTRUCTION AND REUNION ACT OF 2005

HR 4197

The bill introduced on November 2, 2005 by all 42 House members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is called the Hurricane Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act of 2005. HR 4197 emphasizes two critical objectives the CBC and many others have considered most important since Hurricane Katrina -- the desire to see the Gulf Coast restored fully and the desire to see the residents of the Gulf Coast reunited with their families. The following is a summary of some of the important provisions of the bill.

Title I – Victim Restoration Fund: Uses the model approved by Congress after the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- having a Special Master make an individual evaluation of the amount each claimant is to receive. Instead of making a determination of the amount due for each claim as a result of death as was the case under the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, however, under the Victim Restoration Fund the Special Master's job would be to determine what compensation is necessary to restore each individual Hurricane Katrina claimant to his or her pre-Katrina condition. The Special Master would be required to offset recoveries to each claimant from collateral sources (insurance, government sources, etc) and would be authorized to accept non-government funds to help reduce the financial burden on the Federal government.
Title II – Environmental Provisions: Requires the EPA to develop, in consultation with state officials, a comprehensive environmental sampling and toxicity assessment plan (CESTAP) including public health assessments and monitoring, training of clean up workers, notification to the public of risks, a step-by-step process for allowing residents to return to their property, a process of compensating those unable to return to their property because of environmental conditions and independent review of determinations.

Title III – Health Provisions:

Subtitle A authorizes grants to rebuild and repair medical facilities destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina and to help close health access and outcome disparities between minorities and others and provides coverage under Medicaid for each survivor of Hurricane Katrina whose income does not exceed 100% of the poverty line.
Subtitle B authorizes 100% Federal payment for states to provide emergency Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits to survivors of Hurricane Katrina who meet eligibility standards regardless of where they are.
Subtitle C provides 100% Federal coverage of unemployment benefits (marked up 25% or $100 per week, whichever is greater) to Katrina survivors for 26 additional weeks.
Subtitle D provides for Federal payment of private health insurance premiums for at least 12 months for employees and employers whose ability to continue payment of premiums was severely impaired as a result of Katrina and prohibits cancellation of policies by insurance providers who receive premium payments under the program.
Title IV – Housing & Community Rebuilding Provisions: Authorizes additional Federal funds for the Hurricane Katrina disaster area for the following purposes and in the following amounts:

Public Housing Capital Funds -- $100 million;
HOPE VI Community Revitalization -- $100 million;
HOME -- $1 billion;
Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) -- $1 billion;
CDBG Section 108 Loan Guarantee Funds -- $10 million;
YouthBuild -- $200 million;
HUD Demonstration Act Funds -- $4.5 million;
Funding for 300,000 additional tenant-based rental assistance (Section 8) Vouchers;
$10 million for Fair Housing Enforcement; and
$10 million for Housing Counseling for families in temporary shelters.
Title IV also prohibits placement of persons displaced by Katrina in substandard housing, provides for more vigorous enforcement of Fair Housing laws, gives people displaced by Katrina preference for HUD inventory and foreclosed properties, and establishes a mortgage payment fund for payment of mortgages similar to the fund authorized under Title III for the payment of private health insurance premiums.

Title V – Education Provisions: To help meet the educational needs of the Katrina areas and evacuees from these areas:

Subtitle B provides additional emergency funding for Child Care
Development Act Block Grants and Head Start Services;
Subtitle C provides additional funding for elementary and secondary schools to help students relocated as a result of Hurricane Katrina and school systems to which they were relocated, to help rebuild and restart the operation of schools in the Katrina areas, to help homeless youth, for community learning centers, for construction, modernization and repair of school facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina and for teacher incentive programs; and
Subtitle D provides loan forgiveness for college students, grants for reconstruction and renovation of colleges damaged by Hurricane Katrina and grants for recruitment and retention of students and faculty at colleges impacted by Katrina.
Title VI – Voting Rights: Provides Katrina evacuees the same absentee ballot and registration provisions available to military personnel and authorizes up to $50 million in grants for the restoration and replacement of election supplies, materials and equipment damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Title VII – Financial Services Provisions: Waives certain regulations, capital requirements, fees and customer identification requirements to facilitate financial transactions for persons displaced by Katrina, provides technical assistance to minority financial institutions and allows CDFI Fund resources to be used for disaster relief in the Katrina areas.

Title VIII – Expanded Opportunity and Small Business Provisions:
Subtitle A reinstates Davis-Bacon wage requirements, sets small and minority business, local (Gulf Coast) business and local employee participation goals in post-Katrina contracting, requires financial incentives to be provided to meet these goals, requires contractors to provide apprenticeship opportunities and reinstates affirmative action requirements suspended by President Bush after Hurricane Katrina.
Subtitle B authorizes additional funding for new SBA disaster loans and increases loan caps on SBA loans to small businesses impacted by Hurricane Katrina, allows the SBA to defer payments and refinance existing loans, authorizes additional funding for business counseling, small business development centers and HubZones and increases the surety bonding threshold for Katrina related procurement contracts.
Title IX – Tax Provisions: Provides tax credits of up to $5,000 for persons or families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who purchase or construct homes in Hurricane Katrina area, increases the low-income housing credit dollar amount and allows the issuance of federally guaranteed, tax exempt bonds for reconstruction of the Katrina disaster area.

Title X – Bankruptcy: Exempts victims of natural disasters from most provisions of the Bankruptcy reform law that recently became effective.

Title XI – Miscellaneous Provisions: Requires FEMA to reimburse entities that performed services that should have been performed by FEMA following Hurricane Katrina if the entity requests reimbursement and allows retroactive purchase of flood insurance by victims of Hurricane Katrina who did not live in a designated flood plain.

Title XII – Eradicating Poverty: Expresses the sense of Congress that the President should present within 6 months a plan to eradicate poverty in the United States within 10 years.

SOURCE Office of Representative Melvin Watt, Web Site: http://www.congressionalblackcaucus.net.


from Black Commentator

Posted by lois at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2005

Katrina:Bill Would Lift Aid Ban for People with Drug Felonies

October 28, 2005
Hurricane Katrina victims with prior drug convictions would be able to get federal benefits like food stamps and student loans under legislation introduced in Congress this week.

The Houston Chronicle reported Oct. 26 that the Elimination of Barriers for Katrina Victims Act, introduced by Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), calls for a three-year suspension of current laws that ban such benefits, along with public-housing assistance, for convicted drug offenders.

"The bill does not affirm or support acts of crime, (but) it should not be labeled or stigmatized," said Lee. "These are individuals who have lost everything and to a great extent are victims."

One such victim is New Orleans resident Antoinette Samson, 31, who said her family cannot get aid in Texas because her husband was convicted of crack-cocaine possession. The Samsons and their three children are currently being housed by a church. "What is there to do?" she said. "I have no money, I don't even have a job."

The measure may face opposition in Congress, although supporters warned that denying aid to drug offenders only encourages them to return to crime.
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October 27, 2005

Black Commentator: The Battle for New Orleans: Only a Real Movement Can Win This War

Issue 156 - October 27 2005

by BC Co-Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble

New Orleans represents a challenge to African Americans, unprecedented since the epic struggles of the Fifties and Sixties. The perverse reality, to which African Americans must rise, is that the man-made disaster in the Gulf provides what may be the last chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the broadest sectors of Black America. Cruel history presents the catastrophe as an unwanted opportunity, a test of Black people’s capacity for the operational unity craved by the vast bulk of African Americans. The pain and anger in Black America is all but universal, and demands collective action, the outcome of which will largely define the true State of Black America as it has evolved over the last two generations.

Let us put it bluntly: If Black America fails to configure its human, organizational and material resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to confront the existence of fundamental, crippling flaws in the African American polity.

There is much reason for optimism. Movements often need monsters, and George Bush and his minions are a horror show. The Katrina debacle plunged Bush’s Black approval rating to 12 percent, as measured by the prestigious Pew Research Center. That’s only slightly above what most pollsters consider the approval category’s irreducible minimum - "about as low as you can go," according to Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies senior analyst David Bositis. Few doubt that the administration’s callous and ineffectual handling of the Katrina crisis ("negligent homicide," charged Black Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney) caused the near-evaporation of Bush’s thin Black support.

(An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier in September showed only two percent of Blacks approved of Bush’s performance. However, the poll included only 89 African Americans, too small a sample to be considered reliable.)

All African American eyes are on New Orleans, that once-flawed, now devastated jewel of the Diaspora whose people have been dispersed to the far corners of the United States: Alaska, Utah and, literally, who knows where, in addition to large Black population centers. The dissolution of a major African American city - far eclipsing in scale the destruction of Black Tulsa in 1921 - has seared the collective Black psyche. The pain and anger in Black America is all but universal, and demands collective action effectively coordinated by those who purport to be leaders. In the process, new leadership - and hopefully, a "new" New Orleans that is fit for mass Black habitation - will emerge.

Reversing the Slide

Until the watershed year of 1965, which saw both passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Watts, Los Angeles rebellion, most Black Americans, especially in the South, were focused on the elimination of Black voter disenfranchisement and legal segregation. The Civil Rights Movement was not propelled by a laundry list of issues - rather, its overarching project was the defeat of Jim Crow.

By the time of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination and passage of the last major civil rights legislation in 1968 (the Fair Housing Act), the Jim Crow project seemed essentially completed - although still requiring years of mopping up operations. However, Black Power projected an additional set of demands, much more complex and varied, and calling forth a murderous government response that added yet another layer of Black grievances. While the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Movement - those African Americans whose circumstances allowed them to walk through newly opened doors - sprinted to higher living standards and elected and corporate offices, mass Black incarceration became the order of the day in every state of the union, ravaging the very fabric of the bottom half of African American society and threatening to destabilize the half that were doing relatively well.

Although the historical Black Political Consensus survived the sea change that followed the death of Jim Crow, the scope of both Black aspirations and grievances expanded dramatically, reflecting the diversity of the upwardly mobile Black sectors’ often frustrated dreams and the multiplying injuries endured by the left-behind, criminalized Black population.

The Black Movement devolved to various sets laundry lists with often radically different orders of priority, depending on which Black sector was doing the listing. Most African Americans can agree on most items on the list - after all, the Black Political Consensus remains intact - but not on which items are most compelling. Thus, the diversity of the forces set loose in the Black polity by the death of Jim Crow, while not centrifugally spinning African Americans out of a common orbit, has resulted in sometimes dramatic mismatches in political priorities among Black sectors.

We have traveled a great distance from the simple elegance of the chant: "What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!"

As a consequence, efforts to forge "unity" across the Black spectrum inevitably produce long lists of the What We Believe and What We Demand type, drawn up in order of the priorities of whichever group or tendency dominates the gathering. Usually, such lists are broadly inclusive, demonstrating that those in attendance respect and share the concerns of their brothers and sisters representing other Black sectors or political schools of thought. However, laundry lists can only lead to operational unity among those who give high priority to the same items. Other, pro forma line item endorsements add up to not much more than a well-meant "Amen."

A Common Focus

There can be no question that millions of African Americans are eager to find their own specific mission within the context of a broad Black movement, as proven beyond doubt by the 1995 and 2005 "Million" rallies - events that drew multiples of the (integrated) 1963 March on Washington crowd. The problem is, these searchers find themselves still without a mission at the end of the rally.

This October’s Million More Movement rally produced a 10-point Issues Statement, while Nation of Islam leader Min. Louis Farrakhan offered his "Covenant with God, Leadership and Our People." Essentially, both documents are generalized versions of the usual laundry lists - useful for their inclusiveness, just as the rally was worthwhile as "a mass reaffirmation of the existence of an African American polity, a form of Black nationhood that yearns for unity and autonomy in the struggle against white supremacy, and for its own sake." (see BC, "MMM: The Quest for a Movement," October 20, 2005).

But most of all, the huge throng wanted an action plan for New Orleans.

"Katrina" was on virtually every speaker’s lips - the crowd-arouser. From Dr. Ron Daniels, of the Institute of the Black World, who reported that 30 heads of national Black organizations had convened to assist the Katrina families; to CME Bishop Henry Williamson, who assured the vast audience that his denomination was deployed in the Gulf region in strength, providing aid and ministry; to the (whacky) songstress Erykah Badu, who made sense to the crowd only when she invoked "Katrina"; to Min. Farrakhan, who proposed a one dollar per week contribution to a Millions More Movement Disaster Relief Fund; to Congressional Black Caucus chairman Mel Watt’s announcement that the CBC would soon introduce "a specific piece of legislation, restoring the families of the Gulf area…a goal that is definable" - speaker after speaker, representing the broadest spectrum of African American sectors, disciplines and political tendencies, made common cause with Black New Orleans.

"Katrina" - shorthand for the tortures inflicted on the helpless by nature and man, and the planned ethnic cleansing of a great Black city - has the potential to ignite a movement much wider and deeper than the campaigns to Boycott South Africa and Free Nelson Mandela, solidarity actions that breathed life into broadly-based Black politics in the Eighties. Katrina touches home and history, friends and family; it revealed the Black condition in the raw. The exodus of multitudes speaks to the Old Testament cultural framework that is wired into the consciousness of even the most secular African American. On the scales of historical group memory and symbolism, the five days of video-taped Black debasement in New Orleans will weigh as heavily on the African American psyche as the dogs and water hoses of Birmingham.

Katrina-related activities have proliferated beyond the countable, to become an obligatory action item on every authentic Black organization’s agenda. The expanding universe of Katrina projects in some respects already resembles the pre-1960 Civil Rights Movement - a focus of all Black people’s deep concern, but inchoate, not yet fully formed.

In a relatively short period of time, the 1950s Civil Rights offensive was transformed into a great engine of social change. In the current era, however, it is the Right that is on the domestic and global offensive. A Katrina-spawned movement will begin, of necessity, as a broad, Black-anchored resistance.

The Fight to Return

Every strata of Black America - all of which were physically represented on the Capitol Mall, October 15 - shared a soul-deep identification with Mtangulizi Sanyika, of the African American Leadership Project, as he outlined the New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights. In abbreviated form, the displaced citizens demand: the right to return; to retain their right of citizenship in the city; the right to shape and envision the future of the city; the right to [fully] participate in the rebuilding of the city; the right to quality goods and services; the right to affordable neighborhoods; the right to be paid a livable wage; the right to increased economic benefits; the right to preferential treatment in…work associated with rebuilding the city; the right to contracting preference; the right to an environmentally clean and hurricane safe city; and the right to preserve and continue the rich and diverse cultural traditions of the city. (See the full text of the document at the bottom of this page.)

The 12-point Bill of Rights fits wholly within the Black Political Consensus, and could serve as a guide to citizens of virtually every American city. Indeed, the document contains most of the elements of BC’s recommendations for urban "democratic development…to preserve and further empower the huge and strategic Black and Brown presence in the central cities" (More on that, below.)

Thus, a true national movement to defend and support the citizens of New Orleans, if sustained, would infuse millions with the lessons and logic of a new urban politics that elevates human and citizenship rights above corporate rights. A movement that is immersed in the language, spirit and values of the New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights would refine and clarify the African American conversation, and also alter the prisms through which non-Black Americans perceive the world. That’s what real movements do; it’s what the Civil Rights Movement did. In a real sense, the New Orleans document takes the rights gained by the decades-ago movement to what Black folks used to call "a higher level."

However, the Bush regime recognizes none of these rights - not for New Orleans citizens, nor for people anywhere on the planet. Rushing like a storm surge, the Bush men and the corporations they serve saw the breach of the city’s levees as a grand opportunity to flood the region and nation with reactionary rollbacks of citizen and worker protections, to impose by "emergency" measures Hard Right programs that could not pass congressional muster.

Bush Bum-rushes the Gulf

"Whether or not by design, the administration has used the tragedies of hurricanes Katrina and Rita to waive, bend, and break federal laws that protect our civil rights, worker rights, public health and safety, while suspending rules that help small and minority-owned businesses," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), in a letter to key congressional committees.

Among the administrations offenses against law and decency:

Cutting wages for construction workers in the Gulf states by indefinitely suspending the Davis- Bacon Act, which guarantees workers are paid the region’s prevailing or average wage. Suspending wage protections for Gulf Coast workers allows all contractors, regardless of whether or not the work relates to cleanup and reconstruction, to pay as little as $5.15 hour.
Ignoring federal procurement practices, which has resulted in the award of several multi-million dollar no-bid contracts that hurt local small, minority, and women owned businesses.
Denying equal opportunity employment initiatives for workers in the Gulf states through an exemption from some existing Affirmative Action Program (AAP) requirements for new federal contractors dealing with Hurricane Katrina relief.
Exploiting the hurricane to create a private and religious school voucher program that could allow federal money to be used to promote employment discrimination.
Allowing a temporary waiver of environmental protections in the Gulf Coast region and supporting additional environmental suspensions at the expense of the health and safety of Katrina survivors, particularly the poor, disabled, and minority populations.
Rebuilding segregated and inaccessible housing.
Enforcing immigration laws during search and rescue.
The latter outrage demonstrates the Bush men’s pure, devilish cynicism and howling racism. While allowing reconstruction contractors to import low-wage, non-citizen workers from Latin America, Homeland Security’s immigration agents conduct raids that single out Latino-looking residents of emergency shelters.

Having failed to get congressional approval for a federal school voucher program except in the colony of Washington, DC, Bush seeks to establish a de facto national voucher system by dispensing half a billion dollars to private schools that enroll the far-flung children of displaced families.

Thwarted over the years by the U.S. Supreme Court in their jihad against affirmative action, the Bush crowd decrees that such programs will be cleansed from the Gulf by emergency fiat.

Bush policy is the precise opposite of the New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights. The lines of struggle have been drawn in the muck left by Katrina.

Wade Henderson, speaking for the LCCR and 60 other civil rights, labor and advocacy organizations, declared: "Instead of directly meeting the rebuilding challenges created by Katrina, the administration has chosen the moral equivalent of a Trojan Horse."

Little George Wallace, standing in the Alabama schoolhouse door in 1963, seems tame by comparison. At least Governor Wallace was faithful to some version of the rule of law, albeit perverted. Bush recognizes no law, at home or abroad. His regime’s lawlessness has created a host of allies for a new Black movement to call on, should it choose to - from a far longer list than was ever available to Dr. King.

For Whom Katrina Tolls

"If New Orleans is rebuilt as an enterprise zone, private investors will wait for the government to clean up the mess and then build luxury condos to replace affordable housing. They'll turn New Orleans into a theme park, with its former residents unable to afford to come back." - Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. in the Chicago Tribune, October 11, 2005.

It does not have to be that easy. But the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans will surely be accomplished in the absence of a mass Black movement, mobilizing elements of all African American classes and disciplines, the broadest range of large and small organizations, and the forging of strategic alliances with non-Blacks.

Activists should understand that the Battle for New Orleans will take place over years - and that the Bush-corporate assault is well-advanced. In a brilliant article first posted on the website of the Clark-Atlanta University-based Environmental Resource Center, EJRC director Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, a Katrina survivor who directs the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University, spelled out what the nascent movement is up against:

"Hurricane Katrina has opened the floodgate of land speculation and redevelopment scenarios that plan ‘for’ rather than plan ‘with’ the storm victims. What gets built and redeveloped (and for whom) and who participates in the re-building process are major economic justice issues. A small group of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks have divided up ‘pre-completed’ no-bid contracts. A predatory form of ‘disaster capitalism’ exploits the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering."
The Right’s "radical social and economic engineering" cries out for a massive Black response that is equally sophisticated and comprehensive - and backed by masses of fired-up people. The liberation of a once-great Black city from the grip of land pirates acting in concert with the federal government, is no easy task. However, the struggle must be joined, since the outcome may well decide the fate of urban - and therefore Black - America.

Katrina hurled New Orleans into a kind of time machine, instantly fast-forwarding the city to an advanced stage of the gentrification process. The "Negro-removal" stage was skipped entirely, courtesy of the floodwaters. In real-time cities, poor and working people drift away house by house, block by block, with very little drama, to points…unknown. An incremental exile, a piece by piece theft of community, then a final, anti-climactic fait accompli.

In maddening contrast, the Katrina drama has fixed our attention on the sheer precariousness of the Black condition. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, we see the future of our cities - and we ain’t in it. A specter from the urban future screams at us in the present, in the form of a quarter million displaced African Americans and a valuable hole where a cultural center of Black America used to be.

Suddenly, Black folks are waking up, shaking - and universally angry.

Where There’s a Will, There Must Also Be a Plan

The collective Black human and material infrastructure is exponentially more developed than in 1955, when the African American working poor of Montgomery, Alabama sustained a bus boycott that humbled Jim Crow in the former capital of the Confederacy; or in the years that followed, when a tiny group of progressive Black preachers embarrassed a racist superpower in the eyes of the world, forcing Uncle Sam to leave his white supremacist clothes in the closet; or in 1964, when mere hundreds of young people invaded the fortress of Mississippi with virtually no money in their pockets and little backup during Freedom Summer.

The best and the brightest of the era were at the core of activism, but there were not many of them, and even less cash. The resources that Blacks and their allies can bring to bear in the Battle for New Orleans are on a different order of magnitude than 40 years ago. At long last, and at such high cost to the people of the Crescent City, one senses a general Black will to struggle.

A true national movement has as many components as the polity, itself. The Battle for New Orleans will require lawyers, researchers, city planners, architects, social scientists, psychologists, financiers, educators, pension fund managers, liberation theologians, culture workers, athletes, medical practitioners, criminal justice experts, chefs, t-shirt designers, micro- and macro-organizers, as solid a front of Black politicians as can be assembled - and hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers in struggle.

A vision of the new New Orleans is also required- a full-blown counter-vision to the condo-studded "theme park" corporate blueprint, one that will inspire both those displaced from the city and the African American movement at-large.

In BC’s final edition of the five-part series, "Wanted: A Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves" (July 29, 2004), we sketched some of the steps that must be taken, and questions that must be answered in the quest to build a healthy city, a place that exists for the benefit of those who live there. Much the same process applies to the task of rebuilding and restoring New Orleans under the auspices of its largely displaced citizens.

"We must present the fullest picture of the [new] city’s demographic, physical, and economic layout and activity: where different populations live; how dollars move; where people work, and what types of work they do; where they shop; how they move around the city; what public or private institutions anchor which neighborhoods, and what activity do they create; what is the state of the housing stock, and where; how many businesses exist; who owns them, and who do they employ, and where do the employees live; what is the state of infrastructure (streets, water, sewage, phone and cable telecommunications, mass transit lines, etc.), and who does the infrastructure serve; what are the physically attractive (and, therefore, valuable) sites and vistas, and who owns/controls them; how are police deployed; where are the schools…?"
If African Americans fail to develop a plan for New Orleans, they will have no effective role in the final product of reconstruction, whatever the exertions of a reinvigorated Black movement.

Black America is challenged to make Katrina/New Orleans the center of gravity around which an inclusive African American movement revolves - a unifying nexus and vision that draws together organizations and previously unaffiliated individuals, especially youth, in common cause. There are plenty of tasks for us all.

African American Leadership Project & The New Orleans Local Organizing Committee & The Greater New Orleans Coalition of Ministers

New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights’
1. All displaced persons should maintain the "Right of Return" to New Orleans as an International "Human Right." A persons’ socioeconomic status, class, employment, occupation, educational level, neighborhood residence, or how they were evacuated should have no bearing on this fundamental right. This right shall include the provision of adequate transportation to return to the city by the similar means that a person was dispersed. THE CITY SHOULD NOT BE DEPOPULATED OF ITS MAJORITY AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND LOWER INCOME CITIZENS, and must be rebuilt to economically include all those who were displaced.

2. All displaced persons must retain their right of citizenship in the city, especially including the right to vote in the next municipal elections. Citizen rights to the franchise must be protected and widely explained to all dispersed persons. The provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 should be examined and enforced in this regard.

3. All displaced persons should have the right to shape and envision the future of the city. Shaping the future should not be left to elected officials, appointed commissions, developers and/or business interests alone. We the citizens are the primary stakeholders of a re-imagined New Orleans. Thus, we MUST be directly involved in imagining the future. Provisions must be included to insure this right.

4. All displaced persons should have the right to participate in the rebuilding of the city as owners, producers, providers, planners, developers, workers, and direct beneficiaries. Participation must especially include African-Americans and the poor, and those previously excluded from the development process.

5. In rebuilding the city, all displaced persons should have the right to quality goods and services based on equity and equality. Disparities and inequality must be eliminated in all aspects of social, economic and political life. It should be illegal to discriminate against an individual due to their income, occupation or educational status, in addition to the traditional categories of race, gender, religion, language, disability, culture or other social status.

6. In rebuilding the city, all displaced persons should have the right to affordable neighborhoods, quality affordable housing, adequate health care, good schools, repaired infrastructures, a livable environment and improved transportation and hurricane safety.

7. In rebuilding the city, workers, especially hospitality workers should have the right to be paid a livable wage with good benefits.

8. In rebuilding the city, African-American should have the right to increased economic benefits and ownership. The percentage of Black owned enterprises MUST dramatically increase from the present 14%, and the access to wealth and ownership must also be dramatically improved.

9. In rebuilding the city, African-Americans and any displaced low income populations should have the right to preferential treatment in cleanup jobs, construction and operational work associated with rebuilding the city.

10. In rebuilding the city, the right to contracting preference should also be given to Community Development collaboratives, community and faith-based corporations/organizations, and New Orleans businesses that partner with nonprofit service providers and people of color. No contracts should be let to companies that disregard Davis-Bacon, Affirmative action and local participation. Proposed legislation to create a "recovery opportunity zone" should specifically include Community Development organizations and minority firms as alternatives to the no bid multi-national companies. Over the last 30 years, such firms have demonstrated their capacity to successfully build hundreds of thousands of quality affordable housing, and neighborhood commercials and businesses and service enterprises.

11. In rebuilding the city, priority must be given to the right to an environmentally clean and hurricane safe city, rather than the destruction of Black neighborhoods or communities such as the lower 9th ward. Priority must also be given to environmental justice, disaster planning and evacuation plans that work for the most transit dependent populations and the most vulnerable residents of the city.

12. In rebuilding the city, priority must be given to the right to preserve and continue the rich and diverse cultural traditions of the city, and the social experiences of Black people that produced the culture. The second line, Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, creative music, dance foods, language and other expressions are the "soul of the city." The rebuilding process must preserve these traditions. THE CITY MUST NOT BE CULTURALLY, ECONOMICALLY OR SOCIALLY GENTRIFIED. INTO A "SOULLESS" COLLECTION OF CONDOS AND tract home NEIGHBORHOODS FOR THE RICH. We also respectfully request that the CBC initiate its own Commission to thoroughly investigate all aspects of the physical and human dimensions of the Katrina disaster.

Spokesperson: Mtangulizi Sanyika, AALP Project Manager can be reached via Email: WAZURI@AOL.COM.

Posted by lois at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2005

Post-Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans Narcs Itching to Make More Busts

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/408/nonarcs.shtml
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans doesn't have the money to prosecute its current prisoners, prisoners whose sentences have been completed are being held weeks beyond their release date, the city still can't find 169 prisoners missing since the storm, and doesn't have a prison to keep them in (the Amtrak station is serving as a makeshift jail) if it does find them. The police department has seen 250 officers desert their posts during the flood, four officers charged with brutality, and others accused of looting. Oh, and the chief of police resigned.

But none of that is stopping the New Orleans Police Department's Vice and Narcotics Squad. In an interview this week with the Kansas City Star, head narc Capt. Tim Bayard said his 48-officer unit stayed intact throughout the crisis. The spirit of police camaraderie within the unit was so high that the entire squad, including women, shaved their heads in a statement of solidarity. "Even the women shaved their heads, ya know?" Bayard explained. "We have a dedicated bunch here."

This week, after weeks of dealing with the hurricane and its aftermath, the drug squad is itching to get back in business. Using storm-damaged Wagner's Meat Market on Claiborne Street as their station, the narcs gathered to get their orders from Bayard.

It was time to get out and bust some dopers, Bayard told his eager squad. "Stay together. Hunt in packs. And I want to drive this point home: Get in touch with your snitches. Let's get something going... If you got bad guys you can deal with, set it up. I'd like to get back to doing real police work again."

"Alright!" came the chorus of replies.

New Orleans may be recovering from the terrible damage of Hurricane Katrina, but some of its residents will soon suffer new damage inflicted by prohibition's war without end.

Posted by lois at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: Courts' Slow Recovery Begins at Train Station

October 14, 2005
NY Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
The inmates, bleary from trying to sleep on a fenced-in chunk of pavement outside the bus and train station in New Orleans, parade upstairs to the makeshift courtroom, their hands in white plastic cuffs. The prosecutor hustles up from his office - a k a the Taste of New Orleans gift shop - where his file folders now share the display window with bottles of hot sauce and plastic ladles that say "Cooking with Jazz."

The magistrate judge, Gerard J. Hansen, is making do behind an old desk, briskly setting bail for some of the 1,100 people arrested in the metropolitan area since Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29.

When one man steps up, accused of looting an odd mix of boat batteries, a drill, antifreeze, 23 bags of coffee and 53 bottles of alcohol, all found in his car, the judge greets him with a touch of sympathy and $25,000 in bail. "I can understand the alcohol," the judge says, but he adds, "I don't think you were taking all that out of your house, sir."

The bail hearings, which began at "Camp Amtrak" recently, are the first step toward reviving one of the nation's busiest criminal justice systems, a crucial component to bringing residents and tourists back to a city with a potent subculture of guns, drugs and crime.

But it could be weeks before the city's jails, police headquarters and courthouses are repaired, before witnesses can be found and jury trials begin again.

Even then, problems will remain. Floodwaters deluged evidence rooms, destroyed the police crime laboratory and wiped out courthouse computer systems. Officials have had to reconstruct from thick printouts the charges lodged against more than 6,000 inmates before they were evacuated in small boats and scattered among 39 state prisons. Judges say about 800 who were in jail on minor charges, including some who normally would have been held for just a night or two for public drunkenness, were held for two to three weeks amid the confusion.

Court officials have suspended speedy-trial rules and delayed all but the most urgent proceedings until at least Oct. 25. And the city has said it can no longer pay its share of the operating expenses for the courts and the local prosecutor, forcing both to lay off dozens of workers.

"People say 'come hell or high water,' but both came for us," Judge Calvin Johnson, the senior judge on the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, said in an interview.

Even when trials resume, the first will be simple cases in which defendants are willing to be tried by a judge and police officers are the main witnesses. One big problem, judges say, is picking a jury that is a cross-section of this city when no one knows who will move back and who will not.

"That is a big question mark," said another criminal court judge, Frank A. Marullo Jr., who took his turn on the temporary bench the other day wearing a bright red polo shirt and a dark windbreaker, a far cry from judicial robes. "The city we used to have is not the city we have anymore."

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that many inmates were being treated unfairly. But many awaiting trial are being patient, said Tilden H. Greenbaum III, the director of the Orleans Indigent Defender Program.

"Sooner or later, we're going to have to start making noise about it," Mr. Greenbaum said. "But given the magnitude of what everybody's been through, now is not the time to push."

Law enforcement officials say they are moving as quickly as possible, because they recognize that keeping order in the streets is as critical to bringing residents and tourists back to New Orleans as restoring electricity and cleaning toxic residues.

The spasm of looting in the days after Hurricane Katrina focused the nation's attention on a harsh side of New Orleans. Away from the gaudy mirth on Bourbon Street and the graceful homes in the Garden District, many of the city's poor neighborhoods have a desperate quality, with more than one-quarter of the city's 450,000 people living in poverty.

"It's like two different worlds," said Charles E. Smith, a supervisory special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who grew up in a New Orleans housing project. "When we need a break, we make plans to go to an island or take the family to Disney World. But a majority of these people can't get away, so they get away with alcohol and drugs."

Police officers say the drugs and the multitude of guns often lead to brazen crimes. A few days after the storm, one looter shot another in the head in a fight over a flashlight in a dark clothing factory, officers say. And federal authorities have indicted a man for shooting at a rescue helicopter, one of several incidents in which emergency workers were fired on.

"We do have our hard-core criminal element that is not afraid of dying, that is not afraid of prison," Eddie Jordan, the Orleans Parish district attorney, said in an interview.

That is still true after the storm. Some of those arrested for violating the city's post-Katrina curfew have been found with marijuana and cocaine in their cars. The police SWAT team recently arrested two men driving around with an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle - and papers indicating they had just returned from a shelter in Houston.

Burl Cain, the warden at the Angola state prison who is in charge at the temporary jail, said that when officials arrived for their first look at the station in early September, they had to chase away looters trying to crack into the Greyhound and Amtrak safes. The 1,100 people from the metropolitan area who have passed through the jail include nearly 450 arrested in New Orleans for minor offenses and about 200 for serious crimes.

Inmates are held in chain-link pens behind the station, under a canopy where the buses once pulled up. Each cell has a portable toilet, like those at construction sites. Inmates eat packaged military meals - "Sometimes we make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for them," Mr. Cain said - and sleep on the pavement. Each day, buses haul most of them to a state prison near Baton Rouge, where they either make their bail or wait for a court date.

On Wednesday, Robert Davis, the man who was videotaped being beaten by police officers, was at the temporary courtroom, pleading not guilty to charges including public intoxication and resisting arrest.

Fears of further looting have swelled the jail population. Talking angrily through the jail fence one afternoon, Charles Johnson, 17, said he had been arrested outside his grandmother's house for driving without a license.

"The officer was going to let me go, but then he saw a brand-new printer in the car," Mr. Johnson said. "I'd gotten it out of the house. I have a lot of computer stuff, but he figured I'd stolen it."

In the temporary court the next morning, Municipal Judge Paul N. Sens assigned Mr. Johnson a hearing date in January and released him. About 15 others were sentenced to community service for curfew violations, trespassing or public intoxication. "You have an opportunity to help the city recover," Judge Sens told them.

Judge Sens said in an interview that when Hurricane Katrina hit, 800 of the city's 6,200 inmates were serving time for or awaiting trial on minor offenses. He said he was able to release 130 on Sept. 15 and most of the rest over the next week.

The senior municipal and criminal court judges have sought help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in salvaging some flooded evidence and in repairing the damaged courts. Marlin N. Gusman, the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff, said he hopes to have the first two of his 10 jails repaired by Oct. 17, though more than half of his 1,100 employees have not returned to work.

Mr. Jordan, the district attorney, and the judges said the city's failing finances pose another threat. The city normally supplied about one-third of the prosecutor's budget and split court expenses with the state. But city officials have said they cannot provide any money for the rest of the year.

Mr. Jordan said he has already laid off 37 people from his support staff and he might have to let some of his 90 prosecutors go.

"It's a Catch-22," Judge Marullo said. "We need people to come back. But in order to bring people back, and to have people visit New Orleans, we've got to have all the elements of the system, from the police to the courts, working to keep them safe."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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October 12, 2005

Family Members and Prisoners Share Nightmare After Katrina

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 11, 2005

FAMILY MEMBERS AND PRISONERS SHARE NIGHTMARE AFTER KATRINA

Broad Coalition Calls for Independent Investigation of OPP Evacuation, Amnesty and Real Public Safety Models for New Orleans

WHAT: A JOINT PRESS CONFERENCE called by Critical Resistance, Families & Friends of Louisiana s Incarcerated Children, People s Hurricane Relief Committee, and the Southern Center for Human Rights
WHERE: Orleans Parish Prison
2800 Gravier street
WHO: Ortegas Coleman, who was imprisoned at the Greyhound Bus Station
Ms. Miranda Smith, whose son was evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison
Althea Francois, whose daughter was evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, People's Hurricane ReliefCommittee
Xochitl Bervera, Friends and Families of Louisiana s Incarcerated Children
Vanita Gupta, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Lisa Kung, Southern Center for Human Rights
Nick Trenticosta, New Orleans Civil Rights Attorney
Tamika Middleton, Critical Resistance
Members of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus will attend

WHEN: 11:00 am, Wednesday, October 12, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, LA They won’ t let my daughter out of prison, even though she was supposed to have been released weeks ago, says Althea Francois. This is a long time for us to be separated I m worried sick about her. And I know there are thousands of families in the same situation.

Stories like Ms. Francois have galvanized a broad coalition of human rights organizations, community groups, Orleans Parish prisoners, and their families, who will gather on Wednesday in front of the now infamous Orleans Parish Prison (OPP). The press conference will take place during Critical Resistance s Delegation on Safety and the Status of Prisoners, which is calling attention to charges that prisoners were left to drown in locked jail cells, hundreds more were arrested for the crime of trying to feed themselves after Katrina, and thousands have had their cases thrown into legal limbo post-Katrina.

The press conference will share personal stories of prisoners left to rising floodwaters without food or water in locked jail cells at Orleans Parish Prison, of arrest and imprisonment at the makeshift jail now set up at the New Orleans Greyhound bus station, and of individuals who would have been released from jail or prison but for Katrina.

Members will demand an independent investigation into the evacuation of OPP and amnesty for those arrested for trying to feed and clothe themselves post-Katrina, while calling for real public safety in a rebuilt New Orleans. Rising from the devastation of Katrina, we have an amazing opportunity to rebuild a truly new and genuine system of public safety for New Orleans, said Xochitl Bervera, Co-Director of Families and Friends of Louisiana s Incarcerated Children.

Along with lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Center for Human Rights, the press conference will include personal stories from mothers whose children were left to drown in chest-high water at Orleans Parish Prison, and Ortegas Coleman, who was one of hundreds imprisoned at the makeshift jail set up in the New Orleans Greyhound Bus Station.

Pointing to additional recent accounts of police beatings, Katrina s aftermath reflects the was we as a nation increasingly deal with social ills: police and imprison primarily poor Black communities for crimes that are reflections of poverty and desperation, said Tamika Middleton,

New Orleans-based Organizer with Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization whose mission is to end society’s use of imprisonment as an answer to social problems.

Louisiana has had the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the U.S. Blacks are grossly over-represented, making up 72% of the state prison population, while only representing 35% of the total population This emphasis on law and order has historically had a devastating impact on the people of New Orleans, Middleton continued. Locking people up in this crisis is cruel mismanagement of city resources and counters the outpouring of the world support and concern for all survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Posted by lois at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2005

Liberal Hopes Ebb in Post Storm Poverty Debate

Beware! Infuriating to read.
October 11, 2005

By JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 - As Hurricane Katrina put the issue of poverty onto the national agenda, many liberal advocates wondered whether the floods offered a glimmer of opportunity. The issues they most cared about - health care, housing, jobs, race - were suddenly staples of the news, with President Bush pledged to "bold action."

But what looked like a chance to talk up new programs is fast becoming a scramble to save the old ones.

Conservatives have already used the storm for causes of their own, like suspending requirements that federal contractors have affirmative action plans and pay locally prevailing wages. And with federal costs for rebuilding the Gulf Coast estimated at up to $200 billion, Congressional Republican leaders are pushing for spending cuts, with programs like Medicaid and food stamps especially vulnerable.

"We've had a stunning reversal in just a few weeks," said Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. "We've gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn't actually happening."

Mr. Greenstein's comments were echoed by Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut: "Poor people are going to get the short end of the stick, despite all the public sympathy. That's a great irony."

But many conservatives see logic, not irony, at work. If the storm exposed great poverty, they say, it also exposed the problems of the very policies that liberals have supported.
"This is not the time to expand the programs that were failing anyway," said Stuart M. Butler, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group influential on Capitol Hill.

While the right has proposed alternatives including tax-free zones for businesses and school vouchers for students, Mr. Butler said, "the left has just talked up the old paradigm: 'let's expand what's failed before.' "

Doubt about the effectiveness of some programs is only one factor shaping the current antipoverty debate. Another is political muscle: poor people do not make campaign contributions. Many do not even vote.

A third factor is the federal deficit, which leaves little money for new initiatives. And a fourth is the continuing support for tax cuts, including those aimed at the wealthiest Americans, which further limits spending on social programs.

Indeed, even as he was calling for deep spending cuts last week, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, who leads the conservative caucus, called tax reductions for the prosperous a key to fighting poverty.

"Raising taxes in the wake of a national catastrophe would imperil the very economic growth we need to bring the Gulf Coast back," Mr. Pence said. "I'm mindful of what a pipe fitter once said to President Reagan: 'I've never been hired by a poor man.' A growing economy is in the interest of every working American, regardless of their income."

Economic growth is crucial to reducing poverty, but the effect of tax rates is less clear. In 1993, President Bill Clinton raised taxes on upper-income families, the economy boomed and poverty fell for the next seven years. In 2001, President Bush cut taxes deeply, but even with economic growth, the poverty rate has risen every year since.

In 2004, about 12.7 percent of the country, or 37 million people, lived below the poverty line, which was about $19,200 for a family of four. The figure was 7.8 percent among whites, 24.7 percent among blacks and 21.9 percent among Hispanics.

Hurricane Katrina gave those figures a face as no statistic can.

"As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region," with "roots in a history of racial discrimination," President Bush said in a Sept. 15 speech from New Orleans. Using the language of the civil rights movement, Mr. Bush pledged "not just to cope, but to overcome."

But liberal critics say his policies will have the opposite effect.

The week before his speech, Mr. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, a 1931 law that prohibits federally financed construction jobs from paying wages less than a local average. The administration argued that the suspension, which applied only to storm areas, would benefit local residents by stretching financial resources.

Critics said the savings would come at the expense of needy workers.

Likewise, the president suspended rules requiring federal contractors to file affirmative action plans, which his allies called cumbersome.

"He talks about lending a helping hand to the poor and disadvantaged," Jared Bernstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research and advocacy group in Washington, said of Mr. Bush. "But these policies push the other way, toward lower wages and less racial inclusion."

In another dispute, the president has taken on a senior member of his own party, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Mr. Grassley wants to expand Medicaid to cover all the poor who survived Hurricane Katrina, including many adults who did not previously qualify. The expansion would last five months, though it could be extended, and the federal government would cover the costs.

While most Democrats support the measure, the Bush administration strongly opposes it, arguing that evacuees would be served faster through more modest changes in existing state programs.

In part, the dispute has the feel of a proxy war about the larger fate of the program, which the administration has sharply criticized.

A similar proxy war has played out in housing policy after the Senate voted to house evacuees through the Section 8 program, which offers poor people subsidies for private housing. Critical of the program's cost, the administration instead created a parallel voucher program for hurricane evacuees.

In budget battles, the storm had one immediate effect: delaying the $35 billion in spending cuts ordered in last spring's Congressional budget resolution. About $10 billion over five years was expected to come from Medicaid and about $600 million from food stamps.

The delay occurred after some lawmakers said it was wrong to cut safety net programs with so many storm survivors seeking aid.

But the pendulum is swinging the other way. Concerned about the storm's costs, a group of 100 House conservatives released a list of suggested spending cuts totaling $370 billion over five years.

And President Bush weighed in last week, saying, "Congress needs to pay for as much of the hurricane relief as possible by cutting spending."

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa, wants to increase the cuts in the budget bill to $50 billion, from the $35 billion agreed on last spring. Senate leaders are also talking of new cuts, though they have not announced a numerical goal.

As they search for spending cuts, neither chamber has turned away from the $70 billion package of tax reductions authorized last spring. Mr. Greenstein, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says those tax cuts come on top of two others, passed in 2001, that are scheduled to take effect in January and that benefit the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Greenstein argues that the logic of shared sacrifice requires the tax cuts to be reconsidered. But most Congressional Republicans disagree, including Mr. Pence, the conservative leader.

"To allow tax cuts to lapse is a tax increase," Mr. Pence said, "and the economy would suffer."

Some conservatives say the storm, in exposing the depth of poverty, gives them a chance to push their own solutions to the problem, like school vouchers or subsidies to help poor people accumulate assets.

"What we've done for the poor hasn't worked," said Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a conservative policy group. "People are going to say, 'How did these people get into this circumstance in the first place?' It gives us an opportunity to really turn over a new leaf."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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October 03, 2005

Katrina- Evacuated Inmates at One Prison Allege Abuse by Guards

Evacuated Inmates at One Prison Allege Abuse by Guards
By Henry Weinstein
Times Staff Writer

October 2, 2005

Louisiana legislators have asked state officials to investigate charges that prisoners who were evacuated to a rural facility due to Hurricane Katrina are being physically abused by guards. Many of the evacuees have been awaiting trial or are being held on misdemeanor charges.

Spokeswoman Pamela LaBorde of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections said the agency took the allegations "very seriously" and would send staffers to the north-central Louisiana prison Monday to start an inquiry.

State Rep. Karen R. Carter of New Orleans said in a telephone interview Saturday from Baton Rouge that she had been assured by the head of the Louisiana State Police, Col. Henry Whitehorn, that he would conduct a thorough internal investigation of the situation at Jena.

Carter said she and another legislator called Whitehorn on Friday night and Saturday after getting reports of inmate abuse at Jena. The reports were relayed by Ted Shaw, chief lawyer for the legal defense fund of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. Shaw was in Louisiana meeting with lawmakers about a host of civil rights concerns after the hurricane.

Simultaneously, a group of veteran Louisiana defense lawyers has asked the Justice Department to investigate the situation at Jena and to transfer inmates out to protect them.

"The inmates who are now being housed at the Jena facility appear to be in severe and immediate danger of being seriously injured or killed by the guards at that facility," said attorney Phyllis Mann of Alexandria, La., in a statement sent Friday to the Justice Department.

Mann, a leader in the Louisiana Criminal Defense Lawyers Assn., and four other attorneys said they had sent detailed statements to Justice's civil rights division describing interviews they had conducted with hundreds of inmates in recent days at Jena.

The lawyers said the inmates told of being beaten, subjected to racial invective, having their heads rubbed in mace and vomit, and being taunted by guards who told them there was nothing they could do about their treatment because they were living under martial law. A state of emergency — not martial law — has been declared in Louisiana.

Maj. Brad Rogers, who is in charge at Jena, had no comment Saturday on the allegations.

Shaw, the NAACP lawyer, who heard about Jena from Mann, said that if the inmates' allegations were true, "this is an extraordinarily serious violation of constitutional civil rights."

The defense attorneys who interviewed inmates individually at Jena in recent days said the stories seemed credible. "The stories the inmates related to me were very consistent and very disturbing," said David Park, an attorney with the Innocence Project of New Orleans.

Christine Lehman of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center interviewed prisoners for two days last week. "Of all the inmates I interviewed … almost all said that they had been physically abused themselves or had seen others physically abused."

Mann, who has visited evacuated inmates at several prisons, said a number expressed disgruntlement about issues including an inability to reach family members. However, she said, Jena was the only facility where serious abuse was alleged.

She and the other defense lawyers said they saw evidence of beatings and abuse — such as swollen eyes, bruised heads, welts and deep handcuff marks.

Mann said she had been unaware that Jena was in use until Sept. 20, when inmates at a prison in Winn told her about it. She was participating in an effort by the Defense Lawyers Assn. to locate the 8,500 inmates from New Orleans and the surrounding parishes who had been taken to 38 facilities around the state after Katrina.

At the Winn prison, Mann said, she met nearly two dozen men who had been moved there from Jena and "a frightening narrative began to emerge." The spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections said that 60 prisoners were moved to Winn on Sept. 2 after "an inmate disturbance" at Jena.

Mann received permission from state officials to send attorneys to Jena on Tuesday.

Attorney Rachel I. Jones, who interviewed more than 100 inmates, said many asked her whether they had any rights under the "martial law" that Jena officials had allegedly told them was in effect.

Jones said the vast majority of those evacuated from the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center to Jena were pre-trial detainees. Dozens are being held on municipal charges, such as public intoxication, attachments for failure to pay court fees and minor traffic violations. Many are being held on misdemeanor charges, past their predetermined release dates, or on charges never accepted by a district attorney.

Some inmates "slipped desperate notes into my hand," she said.

A Justice Department spokesman in Washington said he did not know whether any department official had received the Louisiana lawyers' reports.

For many years, Jena was used to house juveniles, but the facility was closed in 2000 after a federal lawsuit revealed serious abuse of the youths kept there.

LaBorde said the facility was being used now because of the emergency and was staffed by Louisiana corrections officials and volunteers from other states.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-prisons2oct02,1,7420887.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

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September 29, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality In New Orleans

September 29, 2005
Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans
By JIM DWYER and CHRISTOPHER DREW
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 25 - After the storm came the siege. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, terror from crimes seen and unseen, real and rumored, gripped New Orleans. The fears changed troop deployments, delayed medical evacuations, drove police officers to quit, grounded helicopters. Edwin P. Compass III, the police superintendent, said that tourists - the core of the city's economy - were being robbed and raped on streets that had slid into anarchy.

The mass misery in the city's two unlit and uncooled primary shelters, the convention center and the Superdome, was compounded, officials said, by gangs that were raping women and children.

A month later, a review of the available evidence now shows that some, though not all, of the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations, the product of chaotic circumstances that included no reliable communications, and perhaps the residue of the longstanding raw relations between some police officers and members of the public.

Beyond doubt, the sense of menace had been ignited by genuine disorder and violence that week. Looting began at the moment the storm passed over New Orleans, and it ranged from base thievery to foraging for the necessities of life.

Police officers said shots were fired for at least two nights at a police station on the edge of the French Quarter. The manager of a hotel on Bourbon Street said he saw people running through the streets with guns. At least one person was killed by a gunshot at the convention center, and a second at the Superdome. A police officer was shot in Algiers during a confrontation with a looter.

It is still impossible to say if the city experienced a wave of murder because autopsies have been performed on slightly more than 10 percent of the 885 dead.

[On Wednesday, however, Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state's medical incident commander for Hurricane Katrina victims, said that only six or seven deaths appear to have been the result of homicides. He also said that people returning to homes in the damaged region have begun finding the bodies of relatives.

[Superintendent Compass, one of the few seemingly authoritative sources during the days after the storm, resigned Tuesday for reasons that remain unclear. His departure came just as he was coming under criticism from The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which had questioned many of his public accounts of extreme violence.]

In an interview last week with The New York Times, Superintendent Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: "We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."

On Sept. 4, however, he was quoted in The Times about conditions at the convention center, saying: "The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they're being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets."

Those comments, Superintendent Compass now says, were based on secondhand reports. The tourists "were walking with their suitcases, and they would have their clothes and things taken," he said last week. "No rapes that we can quantify."

Rumors Affected Response

A full chronicle of the week's crimes, actual and reported, may never be possible because so many basic functions of government ceased early in the week, including most public safety record-keeping. The city's 911 operators left their phones when water began to rise around their building.

To assemble a picture of crime, both real and perceived, The New York Times interviewed dozens of evacuees in four cities, police officers, medical workers and city officials. Though many provided concrete, firsthand accounts, others passed along secondhand information or rumor that after multiple tellings had ossified into what became accepted as fact.

What became clear is that the rumor of crime, as much as the reality of the public disorder, often played a powerful role in the emergency response. A team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state trooper's report that a mob of armed, marauding people had commandeered boats. It turned out to be two men escaping from their flooded streets, said Farol Champlin, a paramedic with the Acadian Ambulance Company.

On another occasion, the company's ambulances were locked down after word came that a firehouse in Covington had been looted by armed robbers of all its water - a report that proved totally untrue, said Aaron Labatt, another paramedic.

A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes, said Maj. Gen. Ron Mason of the 35th Infantry Division of the Kansas National Guard.

"It's part of human nature," General Mason said. "When you get one or two reports, it echoes around the community."

Faced with reports that 400 to 500 armed looters were advancing on the town of Westwego, two police officers quit on the spot. The looters never appeared, said the Westwego police chief, Dwayne Munch.

"Rumors could tear down an entire army," Chief Munch said.

During six days when the Superdome was used as a shelter, the head of the New Orleans Police Department's sex crimes unit, Lt. David Benelli, said he and his officers lived inside the dome and ran down every rumor of rape or atrocity. In the end, they made two arrests for attempted sexual assault, and concluded that the other attacks had not happened.

"I think it was urban myth," said Lieutenant Benelli, who also heads the police union. "Any time you put 25,000 people under one roof, with no running water, no electricity and no information, stories get told."

Crimes of Opportunity

The actual, serious crime began, in the recollection of many, before the catastrophic failure of the levees flooded the city, and much of it consisted of crimes of opportunity rather than assault. On the morning of Monday, Aug. 29, in the half hour or so that the eye of Hurricane Katrina fell on the city - an illusory moment of drawn breath, sunshine and fair breezes - the looters struck, said Capt. Anthony W. Canatella, the police commander in the Sixth District.

Using a chain hitched to a car, they tore open the steel doors at the back of a pawn shop called Cash America on Claiborne Avenue. "Payday Advances to 350," read a sign where the marquee would have been.

"There was nothing in there you could sustain your life with," Captain Canatella said. "There's nothing in there but guns and power tools."

The Sixth District - like most of New Orleans, a checkerboard of wealth and poverty - was the scene of heavy looting, with much of the stealing confined to the lower-income neighborhoods. A particular target was a Wal-Mart store on Tchoupitoulas Street, bordering the city's elegant Garden District and built on the site of a housing project that had been torn down.

The looters told a reporter from The Times that they followed police officers into the store after they broke it open, and police commanders said their officers had been given permission to take what they needed from the store to survive. A reporter from The Times-Picayune said he saw police officers grabbing DVD's.

A frenzy of stealing began, and the fruits of it could be seen last week in three containers parked outside the Sixth District police station. Inside were goods recovered from stashes placed by looters in homes throughout the neighborhood, said Captain Canatella, most but not all still bearing Wal-Mart stickers.

"Not one piece of educational material was taken - the best-selling books are all sitting right where they were left," Captain Canatella said. "But every $9 watch in the store is gone."

One of the officers who went to the Wal-Mart said the police did not try to stop people from taking food and water. "People sitting outside the Wal-Mart with groceries waiting for a ride, I just let them sit there," said Sgt. Dan Anderson of the Sixth District. "If they had electronics, I just threw it back in there."

Three auto parts stores were also looted. In a house on Clara Street, Sergeant Anderson picked his way through a soggy living room, where car parts, still in their boxes, were strewn about. On the wall above a couch, someone had written "Looters" with spray paint.

"The nation's realizing what kind of criminals we have here," Sergeant Anderson said.

Among the evacuees, there was gratitude for efforts by the police and others to help them get out of town, but it was clear that some members of the public did not have a high opinion of the New Orleans Police Department, with numerous people citing cases of corruption and violence a decade ago.

"Don't get me wrong, there was bad stuff going on in the streets, but the police is dirty," said Michael Young, who had worked as a waiter in the Riverwalk development.

French Quarter Is Spared

As the storm winds died down that Monday, small groups that had evacuated from poor neighborhoods as far away as the Lower Ninth Ward passed through the historic French Quarter, heading for shelter at the convention center.

"Some were pushing little carts with their belongings and holding onto their kids," said Capt. Kevin B. Anderson, the French Quarter's police commander. He said his officers gave food, water and rides. "That also served another purpose," he said. "That when they came through, they didn't cause any problems."

The jewelry and antique shops in the French Quarter were basically left untouched, though squatters moved into a few of the hotels. Only a small grocery store and drugstores at the edge of the quarter were hit by looters, he said. From behind the locked doors of the Royal Sonesta hotel on Bourbon Street, Hans Wandfluh, the general manager, said he had watched passers-by who seemed to be up to no good. "We heard gunshots fired," Mr. Wandfluh said. "We saw people running with guns."

At dusk on Aug. 29, looters broke windows along Canal Street and swarmed into drugstores, shoe stores and electronics shops, Captain Anderson said. Some tried, without success, to break into banks, and others sought to take money from A.T.M.'s.

The convention center, without water, air-conditioning, light or any authority figures, was recalled by many as a place of great suffering. Many heard rumors of crime, and saw sinister behavior, but few had firsthand knowledge of violence, which they often said they believed had taken place in another part of the half-mile-long center.

"I saw Coke machines being torn up - each and every one of them was busted on the second floor," said Percy McCormick, a security guard who spent four nights in the convention center and was interviewed in Austin, Tex.

Capt. Jeffrey Winn, the commander of the SWAT team, said its members rushed into the convention center to chase muzzle flashes from weapons to root out groups of men who had taken over some of the halls. No guns were recovered.

State officials have said that 10 people died at the Superdome and 24 died around the convention center - 4 inside and 20 nearby. While autopsies have not been completed, so far only one person appears to have died from gunshot wounds at each facility.

In another incident, Captain Winn and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann, the assistant SWAT commander, said they both shot and wounded a man brandishing a gun near people who had taken refuge on an Interstate highway. Captain Winn said the SWAT team also exchanged gunfire with looters on Tchoupitoulas Street.

The violence that seemed hardest to explain were the reports of shots being fired at rescue and repair workers, including police officers and firefighters, construction and utility workers.

Cellphone repair workers had to abandon work after shots from the Fischer housing project in Algiers, Captain Winn said. His team swept the area three times. On one sweep, federal agents found an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle, Captain Winn said.

For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken. "We investigated one incident and it turned out to have been shooting on the ground, not at the helicopter," said Maj. Mike Young of the Air Force.

Nathan Levy contributed reporting from Austin, Tex., for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

Hurricane Katrina: Inquiry Opens on Whether New Olreans Police Looted

September 29, 2005

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The police department said Thursday it is investigating about a dozen officers suspected of looting during the lawlessness that engulfed the city after Hurricane Katrina.

News reports in the aftermath of the storm put officers at the scene of some of the heaviest looting, at the Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. Some witnesses, including a Times-Picayune reporter, said police were taking items from shelves.

''Out of 1,750 officers, we're looking into the possibility that maybe 12 officers were involved in misconduct,'' police spokesman Marlon Defillo said.

He rejected the use of the term ''looting,'' and said authorities were investigating ''the possibility of appropriation of nonessential items during the height of Katrina, from businesses.''

Earlier this week, the city's police superintendent, Eddie Compass, resigned after weeks of criticism about the department's conduct during Katrina and its aftermath. On the same day, the department said about 250 police officers could face discipline for leaving their posts without permission during the crisis.

Meanwhile, business owners started streaming back into newly reopened sections of the city Thursday morning at Mayor Ray Nagin's invitation, some vowing to rebuild, some saying they were pulling out.

The areas thrown open to business owners were: the French Quarter; the central business district; and the Uptown section, which includes the Garden District, a leafy neighborhood of antebellum and Victorian mansions. The neighborhoods escaped major flooding during Katrina.

Under the mayor's plan, residents of those neighborhoods will be allowed to return on Friday, a move that could bring back about one-third of the city's half-million inhabitants.

At Igor's, a pub and coin laundry in the Garden District, owner Halina Margan returned after Katrina and never left, despite Hurricane Rita's threat last week. She was ready to open for business on Thursday.

''It's lonely here. We need people,'' she said.

Blues music poured out the door of Slim Goodies diner, where by 10 a.m., owner Kappa Horn had already served pancakes, bacon and eggs over easy on plastic plates to more than 100 people.

''This is the first hot meal I've had in a month,'' said George Wichser, a Tulane University police officer who rode out the storm on campus.

Mary Russo parked her car in front of Shanty Too, her niece's boarded-up boutique on chic Magazine Street, and started to cry. Her niece could not bear to come, so Russo and other relatives were there to close the shop for good and bring anything salvageable to her other store closer to Baton Rouge.

''I just can't believe this has happened to the city,'' Russo said. ''So much of this could have been avoided.''

The mayor is pushing aggressively to reopen the city despite concerns raised by state and federal officials.

Serious health hazards remain because of bacteria-laden floodwaters, a lack of drinkable water and a sewage system that still does not work, said Stephen L. Johnson, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency.

''There are a whole lot of factors that need to be weighing on the mayor's mind,'' Johnson said.

He said the EPA was not taking a position on Nagin's plan. But he refused to answer when asked if he would allow his own family to return to New Orleans.

Federal officials said it would take at least another year to clean up all the hurricane debris in Louisiana.

Katrina's death toll in Louisiana rose to 923 on Thursday, up from 896 the day before, the state health department said.

------

Associated Press writers Julia Silverman and Amy Forliti in New Orleans, and Doug Simpson in Baton Rouge contributed to this report.

Posted by lois at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2005

Katrina: Left to Die in a New Orleans Jail

Left to Die in a New Orleans Prison
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on September 28, 2005, Printed on September 28, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/26073/
Editor's Note: The following is a transcript of an interview between Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, and members of the group Human Rights Watch. Amy Goodman: It has been nearly one month since Hurricane Katrina ripped through the southern coast of the United States, decimating communities in Mississippi and Louisiana. These past weeks, we have reported on the horrors faced by people in New Orleans, in particular as they struggled to survive. One story we have looked at is the fate of those held in prison as the hurricane hit the city. Weeks later, there are still serious questions about what happened inside facilities like the Orleans Parish Prison. The group Human Rights Watch has just issued one of the first independent analyses investigating what happened in the jails. The group alleges that in one facility the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of prisoners.The group also says that there are some 517 prisoners unaccounted for and is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the Orleans Sheriff's Department. We're joined now by Corinne Carey. She's a researcher for Human Rights Watch. Welcome to Democracy Now! Corrine Carey: Thanks. It's great to be here.

Goodman: Well, you've just recently returned from Louisiana. Tell us what you found?
Carey: We went down to investigate claims that we had been hearing that prisoners were abandoned in one of the facilities -- Templeman III is the name of the building -- and that some inmates had seen inmates left in their cells while they were on their way out, when they were finally evacuated Thursday and Friday of the week after the storm.
So the first thing that we did was [ask] for a list of prisoners that were held at Orleans Parish Prison prior to the storm hitting, and then we also obtained a list from the Department of Corrections of all offenders that had been evacuated from New Orleans. We went through that list and came up with 517 people who were still unaccounted for.
We're certainly not saying that those people drowned in the facility, but there are credible reports from inmates of being left in that facility in locked cells. And so we'd like to know from the Orleans Sheriff and from the Department of Corrections what happened to those 517 people.
Goodman: What are some of the stories that you have heard in your questioning?
Carey: It's clear to us from talking to inmates in that facility -- and other lawyers in Louisiana have talked to well over 1,000 prisoners at this point -- that by Monday when the storm hit, guards were no longer in the facility. The inmates were left to fend for themselves during the storm.
The most disturbing thing is that the water began to rise in many of the buildings. Some inmates tell us that the water had come up to their chest level, and they were still in locked cells. Some other inmates helped them get out of those cells and escape the floodwaters to higher levels of the facility. They were also left there without any food or water for up to four days. There was no air circulation, and the toilets had started to back up. So the stench was unbearable for these prisoners.
They started to break windows to let the air in, but also to let people outside know that there were still people in this building that had begun to flood.
Goodman: We're joined also on the telephone by Dan Bright. He's a former resident of New Orleans, detained in the Orleans Parish Prison, building Templeman III, the night before Hurricane Katrina struck, now relocated to Grand Prairie, Texas. Can you tell us what the Templeman III building is, Dan? Dan Bright: The Templeman III building is a receiving cell. You go there, and they hold you until they put you into a steady housing development. And like she was saying, we were strictly abandoned. They just left us. When we realized what was going on, it was too late.
It was total chaos. The water was up to our chest. You had guys laying in the water trying to climb to the top of their bunks. You had older guys who didn't have any medicine who we were trying to help. And the way we got out was we had to kick the cell door for maybe like an hour or two. And the cell doors, they sits on this hinge. You have to kick it off the hinge. And when you kicked it off the hinge you have to slide out the door.
And Templeman III is...two levels. You had an upper level and bottom level. The guys on the bottom level was totally stuck in this water. Lights was out. So we had to get out on the top level and come down and help those guys. And the police, they had left.
Goodman: Wait a second. You're saying that the police, the guards, were gone?
Bright: The guard was gone.
Goodman: There were only the prisoners?
Bright: There was only -- that's us.
Goodman: And you were locked in.
Bright: Right. Correct.
Goodman: And so how did you escape?
Bright: Well, we had to kick -- like I said, we had to kick the cells, maybe [for]hours. You had to squeeze out of the cells. We found pipes, anything that we could find to pry the cells open downstairs to help the guys downstairs. We broke the windows to try to signal for help. No one came to our rescue.
Goodman: So you made your way out of the windows?
Bright: We made our way out of the cells and to...the lower levels where most of the water was at. And we broke that window and climbed out. The dorm was made strictly like a college dorm, just like two cells into one. You have to forgive me -- I'm kind of still groggy, because I'm just getting up. So I'm trying to explain myself the best I can.
Goodman: Thank you. So, some of you made it out. What about people who were locked in cells?
Bright: They couldn't get out. We couldn't help all of them.
Goodman: Could you hear them?
Bright: Yeah, they were trying to get them out. We couldn't help everybody. The water was constantly rising.
Goodman: So when you got out, what did you do?
Bright: When we got out, they had maybe like ten deputies outside the building with boats.
Goodman: They had deputies outside the building but none of the deputies inside the building to help you?
Bright: None. It was like, if you get out, you get out. It's not too bad. So when we got out, they took us to a bridge, what's called an overpass bridge, and they just put us on these boats, brought us to this bridge and left us there for maybe like three days without food or water or anything. They just left us there.
Goodman: Could you see the jail from where you were on the overpass?
Bright: Right. Yeah. You stare at guys in the windows trying to get their attention. They wasn't even paying attention. They had guys burning stuff, putting up signs, trying to get any kind of help they could get.
Goodman: They were burning things to get people's attention?
Bright: Right.
Goodman: What were the signs they were putting up that you could see from the overpass?
Bright: Help signs.
Goodman: Saying "Help?"
Bright: Yes. You had guys burning blankets trying to get their attention. The helicopter would pass over. Guys would burn sheets up or blankets or something to try to get their attention also.
Goodman: So you're saying helicopters would fly over. They would see the burning sheets. You were with deputies on the bridge. They could see like you could see?
Bright: Right.
Goodman: So what did they say, when you said there are men still in there?
Bright: They didn't say anything. These -- most of the deputies had, you know, just gone. They didn't even bother to try to help us. And not only that, they had -- these same deputies were stealing property, our personal property. My daughter was trying to telephone me and find out where I was at, and a deputy answered my phone.
Goodman: Your daughter called, and the deputy answered your cell phone?
Bright: Correct.
Goodman: Did you ever get your personal property back?
Bright: No.
Goodman: Did any of the men?
Bright: No, ma'am.
Goodman: Did you --
Bright: All of the guys was complaining about what was missing. Phones, their jewelry. You know. Watches. Stuff like that.
Goodman: Dan Bright, we're also joined by Neal Walker. He is a Director of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, speaking to us from Houston. He interviewed 48 prisoners last Wednesday. Can you describe the whole facility, Neal? Dan Bright, locked in Templeman III, but describe what is the rest of it, Templeman I and Templeman II. Neal Walker: Orleans Parish Prison, for your listeners, is really not a prison. It's a jail. It's a temporary detention facility. Other parts of the country you refer to county jails. We call them parish prisons in Louisiana. Orleans Parish Prison is, in fact, one of the country's largest jails, although New Orleans was far from one of the country's largest cities before the storm. At any given time, there would be 7,500 to 8,000 prisoners being held at Orleans Parish Prison. Now, some of these prisoners were in fact serving misdemeanor sentences, and others were picked up for parole violations, but the vast, vast majority of the prisoners being held at Orleans Parish Prison were pretrial detainees. They had only been charged. They had not been tried and convicted. Now, the complex itself includes not only the facility known as Orleans Parish Prison, the original old jail facility, but it describes a complex of other detention buildings, as well, including the house of detention, Templeman I, II, and III, and central lockup, which is a one-story facility where prisoners are processed after their arrest. And I heard accounts of that building being completely underwater. The prisoners were looking at it from the windows at Templeman III and could see that central lockup was completely underwater.
Goodman: Completely underwater?
Walker: Right.
Goodman: How many men?
Walker: I don't know how many men were in central lockup at that time. Again, that's -- you know, if you get booked where they bring you, the booking officers will bring you to central lockup, where you'll be fingerprinted, and as Dan was saying, your property will be removed and inventoried and then stored. And apparently, according to what Dan was saying, the prisoners don't go to their cells with their property. It's put in lockers, but it sounds like these deputies got into the lockers and got the prisoners' property. But those prisoners are only held at central lockup for, you know, a matter of hours as they're being processed. And then they go off to one of the other detention centers.
Goodman: And so, the story that you have heard Dan Bright tell, that you've just heard the report from Corrine Carey, in your talking with scores of men, how much does that resonate? How many times did you hear that same story?
Walker: You hear a very similar story from everybody who was housed where Dan was held. I mean, there were other prisoners held in different places. You know, they were locked into their cells, not able to get out. I understand in the house of detention that the guys were literally not able to get out their cells at all, and in Templeman, prisoners were able to grab shower rods and break out the windows in an attempt to gain some attention from whoever they could get to see them. But I -- you know, the stories are very consistent that floodwaters were rising, that the deputies had fled the jail, that there was no food, there was no water. The power went off, I think, sometime early Monday morning when the storm hit, and they went Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with no food. I heard one prisoner who said that water was being distributed in basins, but it looked to be as polluted as the water that was coming out of the faucets. I heard accounts of some prisoners being interviewed with ugly white sores all over their -- the skin that was exposed, and these prisoners had reported drinking the floodwaters, although I didn't see any prisoners with those sorts of infections myself.
Goodman: And Neal Walker, we're going to break for stations to identify themselves, and we'll come back to this discussion about where have all of the prisoners gone? Human Rights Watch has calculated over 500 are at this point unaccounted for, just judging from the dockets before and after the hurricane. We'll also be joined by Phyllis Mann, who has been investigating this story and speaking to scores of prisoners, men who were farmed out to different prisons, and women as well, hundreds, who were brought from the jail to Angola, the maximum security prison for men. [break]
Goodman: We continue the investigation into where have all of the prisoners gone after Hurricane Katrina. We are talking specifically about the Orleans Parish Prison. Our guests are Corrine Carey, researcher for Human Rights Watch. They have just put out a report "Imprisoned and Abandoned." We are also joined by Dan Bright, one of the people who was detained in the Orleans Parish Prison the night before the hurricane struck, now relocated to Texas. Phyllis Mann will join us in a minute, of Alexandria, Louisiana, criminal defense lawyer, also Neal Walker, director of Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. Corinne Carey, from your investigation, when were the authorities called to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison?
Carey: The Orleans Parish sheriff, Marlin Gusman, didn't call for assistance from the State Department of Corrections until midnight on Monday after the eye of the storm had hit and the prison had already began to flood. Other area parish prisons had called for assistance on Saturday and Sunday to start evacuating their inmates. And all of their inmates have been -- had been evacuated safely at that point.
Goodman: Now, the position of the sheriff, the Orleans sheriff, is a very powerful one in New Orleans.
Carey: In every parish it's one of the most powerful positions to hold, yes.
Goodman: And the attorney general is the former parish sheriff?
Carey: Yes. Charles Foti was the Orleans Parish sheriff before he became attorney general.
Goodman: Did he design the evacuation plan?
Carey: We have not been able to find the evacuation plan. We heard reports that the evacuation plan was on a website. A Department of Corrections spokesperson told us that it was on the website, but it has since been removed. So we actually, though we have made inquiries, don't know what the evacuation plan was. In any event, the Orleans Parish sheriff didn't follow any evacuation plan, nor did he fortify the institution to allow people to ride out the storm with food, water and other supplies.
Goodman: So, he called on Monday night, and then what happened?
Carey: Monday at midnight. The Department of Corrections then began to start evacuating prisoners. It seems to us they started on Wednesday and finished on Friday although things are very confusing, and there are a number of different buildings in that complex.
Goodman: We're talking about thousands of prisoners?
Carey: Over 6,000 prisoners. And prisoners from area -- other parish prisons were evacuated to Orleans Parish Prison.
Goodman: To the flooded prison?
Carey: Prior to the flood. Yes. They were evacuated to the prison. And so, you had people -- you had a prison that was already at capacity, and then you had maybe 2,000 more prisoners from area prisons brought in. So, that's why when you hear Dan Bright talking about breaking out of cells, there were prisoners in common areas. They were in recreational areas, they were in visiting areas. So they were not locked down, and they were able to grab pipes and break them in the absence of guards and help the other inmates break out of their cells and break the windows.
Goodman: So, Dan Bright, when did you make it to the overpass? What night was it? Or what day?
Bright: It was Tuesday morning.
Goodman: Tuesday morning. How long did you stay on the overpass?
Bright: It was Tuesday night. Sunday, I went down.
Goodman: So you broke out on Tuesday?
Bright: Right. After the storm had passed. And when we got out to central lockup area, back to the central lockup area, these were the other guards waiting for us outside with the boats. So they took us from central lockup area to the bridge. It was nighttime. The city was completely dark. We stood on the bridge until maybe like two days, two-and-a-half days.
Goodman: Two-and-a-half days.
Bright: Yeah. No food, no water. We couldn't stand up. They made us sit down. We couldn't even get up and urinate. We had to urinate on ourselves. They didn't even want us standing up.
Goodman: You said you urinated on yourselves because you couldn't stand. Were you chained?
Bright: Excuse me?
Goodman: Were you chained?
Bright: No. They didn't have any chains. They didn't have anything. They were just rushing us -- as we broke out and thought we were trying to get to our families or whatever. We weren't trying to escape. We were just trying to get away from that prison. When we got out, they snatch us, put us on airboats and bring us to the bridge.
Goodman: So you stayed there for two days, no food. Water?
Bright: No water. No food. They had water. But they wasn't giving us any.
Goodman: And how many of you were there?
Bright: It was a lot. I would say maybe like -- I couldn't tell. It was over 400. It was a lot of us.
Goodman: And then after those two days, what was it? Thursday or Friday?
Bright: It was Thursday when they moved us. They put us on the buses. And they brought us to this place, another jail called Hunt's Correctional Center.
Goodman: Near Baton Rouge.
Bright: Right. And they just put all of us in this one huge gate and made us sit on a field. And they left us there.
Goodman: Sitting on the field?
Bright: Right. You had to sleep on the wet grass. They didn't have anywhere we could urinate or defecate. We had to do that out in the public. You know. They gave us one blanket. We had -- that was it. You had to sleep on the wet grass. You had -- we didn't have hot food. We didn't have cold water. In fact, they come once a day and throw peanut butter sandwiches over the gate. They wouldn't even come in the gate. They would just throw it over the gate.
Goodman: They threw the sandwiches at you.
Bright: Correct. They were throwing them over the gate.
Goodman: And then you would race for them.
Bright: Right, we would fight over sandwiches. You know, it wasn't -- there wasn't any order in this yard. In fact, you had -- the entire prison system was in there. You had guys with life sentences. You know, all kind of guys that wasn't supposed to be around one another. You had federal prisoners in there. They even had this guy Len Davis in there.
Goodman: Who is Len Davis?
Bright: He was convicted -- he was a cop. He was an NOPD police officer, convicted for all the murder of a female. He was on death row.
Goodman: He was a New Orleans Police officer on death row, and he was in there in the field with you?
Bright: Right. He was back down here trying to get some time back, and he got caught up when the storm came. So they drove him in there, too.
Goodman: Neal Walker, what do you know about this?
Walker: Well, the first thing I can tell you is that the New Orleans Police Department is one of the most violent and corrupt police departments in the country, and Dan's absolutely right. There are two police officers on the New Orleans Police force who are actually on death row, and I have heard other accounts that Len Davis, the police officer he is referring to, was in fact on that football field, if that's what it was, where the prisoners were evacuated to upriver at the Hunt's Correctional Facility.
Goodman: I want to bring Phyllis Mann into this conversation, attorney from Alexandria, Louisiana, who has been working non-stop since the hurricane, identifying people who were brought up to the Rapides Parish Prison in your area. These stories that you are hearing, you have been interviewing hundreds of people, men and then women at Angola. Are these similar to what you have heard? Phyllis Mann: They're completely similar to what I have heard. I have personally interviewed or overseen the interviewing of over 2,400 men and women between September 7 and as late as last night. And these are men and women who were at the various facilities in Orleans and the others, as Corinne referred to, that were brought to Orleans from other affected parishes. These people didn't have a chance to talk to each other. Like Dan describes, it was complete pandemonium in Orleans. As people got out of the various buildings that comprised the Orleans Parish complex there, you know, some of them spent one day on the bridge, some of them spent three days on the bridge. From there, they were randomly loaded into buses, and there was no rhyme nor reason as to who got on what bus. And they -- most of them went through Hunt Correctional and spent time on that football or soccer field or whatever it was. Some of them were there for two or three days. I saw large numbers of people who were badly, badly sunburned as a result of being out in the elements at Hunt Correctional while they waited. And then these people again randomly got distributed to in excess of 35 facilities throughout the state, and some of them are prisons, some of them are private prisons. Many, many of them are parish jails operated by local sheriffs in each parish. And as I have gone from place to place and talked to different people who had been held, they are all telling remarkably consistent stories. And many of these people have not even seen television at the point that I have talked with them. You know, it would be a week or two weeks after the hurricane, and they still had not been able to watch television to know what had happened there. So, for all of these people to tell such remarkably consistent stories, to me, is a very serious indication of the truth of what they're saying.
Goodman: Dan Bright, what happened after you left Hunt? When were you taken from there somewhere else? Or were you?
Bright: They took me to Rapides Parish. You had to wait in line in this football field to try to get on the bus. So, it took up to maybe like two days to a week. Fortunately, I was able to get on the bus like two-and-a-half days after. I went to Rapides Parish, where I met Miss Mann. And I can tell you it was a whole lot better.
Goodman: Was it around Sunday that you made it there?
Bright: Yes. It was a whole lot better living conditions from where I just came from.
Goodman: And how did you ultimately get out?
Bright: Out of the Rapides Center?
Goodman: How did you get out of jail? How did you end up being free?
Bright: Ms. Mann and a bunch of more attorneys, Ben Cohen, filed a habeas corpus for all of your misdemeanor charges, because they were violating our rights. We hadn't seen the judge. You know, most guys had served the sentence that was no more than 30 days, so they had to let us go. The D.A.s were still trying to fight that. That's another issue, though.
Goodman: Phyllis Mann, explain that process. Filing the writ of habeas corpus. And who were these men who were in there?
Mann: Sure. There were 199 people who had been evacuated to the Rapides Parish Detention Center. The warden and the sheriff here in Rapides Parish quickly allowed us to come in and sit down and interview those men and gather their case information. And then that was compiled into a list of the people who had already served whatever time they were supposed to serve. For example, there was one man who was in jail for reading tarot cards without a permit and was supposed to have been released prior to August 29th when the hurricane occurred, but did not get out and was still sitting there. Dan was another of those men. Some of them were in on what we call municipal charges, which are basically city violations. They're not even misdemeanors. And Ben Cohen and Marcia Widder filed a state habeas corpus action, which is the kind of pleading that you file -- it basically means, you know, to produce the body. You're requiring the person who is holding someone to produce them in court and then prove whether or not they are legally holding them. That action was filed on behalf of quite a large number of men. Nineteen of them were released when the hearing was held. But this is a long, slow process for us to have to do this on behalf of each of the over 8,000 people who are currently being held.
Goodman: Corrine Carey of Human Rights Watch, your final comment?
Carey: Sure. I just wanted to add that we have also spoken with corrections officers who say the same kinds of things. They saw prisoners hanging out of the windows. They saw the signs. And they, too, have concerns. It's hard to describe, but the corrections officers, many of them, feel that that were abandoned at the jail, as well. It's really a failure to evacuate. The corrections officers and the inmates were put in jeopardy. The inmates happened to be locked in their cells.
Goodman: And so, now what happens? How does the accounting take place. For example, have the authorities gone into the prison at this point to look into the cells where men perhaps couldn't get out?
Carey: A spokesperson from the Orleans Parish sheriff's office said that the sheriff had gone into the jails to inspect for damage. We don't know. We contacted FEMA to see whether anyone from the federal agencies had been in, and we haven't gotten response from them. The State Department of Corrections has not been in, as far as we last knew, to inspect the facility. What we would like is we would like the Department of Justice to do an investigation of their own. We need to know what happened in that jail, whether there were bodies left and whether there were any casualties.
Goodman: Again, the number of unaccounted-for prisoners?
Carey: There were 517 the last we checked, 130 of them being from Templeman III, the building that we have talked about today.
Goodman: And guards, any missing guards?
Carey: Not as far as we know, but the thing about the guards is that they were left on the overpass bridge. They were not transported to other facilities. They made their way in small groups of their own to shelters, to the stadium, to the Convention Center. They were not -- there's no keeping track of where the guards went from there. They didn't go with the prisoners.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now! © 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/26073/

Posted by lois at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2005

Essential Facts About the Victims of Hurricane Katrina

ResourceShelf’s DocuTicker
Essential Facts About the Victims of Hurricane Katrina
Source: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
http://www.cbpp.org/9-19-05pov.htm

Posted by lois at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

Rap about Katrina

Bass Is Loaded, did a rap song, Louisiana 2005, about the hurricane. You can listen to it online at http://www.myspace.com/bilc

Posted by lois at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2005

Katrina--Rescue Came from the Grass Roots---Not FEMA

Black Commentator
Rescue Came from the Grass Roots:
The People, Not FEMA, Saved Themselves
by Bruce Dixon, BC Associate Editor

http://www.blackcommentator.com/151/151_dixon_katrina.html

From her Atlanta home, former Gulf Coast resident Latosha Brown and a few friends watched the man-made catastrophe unfold in the wake Hurricane Katrina.

"We kept expecting to see the National Guard, the government, the Red Cross, somebody to do something. The idea that our leaders would allow people to fend for themselves two, three, five days with no food, water, medicine or help from outside - we just couldn't get our minds around it.

"People were dying by the hundreds in New Orleans, and more folks we knew in Mississippi, in Alabama were hurt, missing and homeless or hungry. You've got two choices when you see something like that. Choice one is to feel defeated. Choice two is to be pro-active and do something about it. There were about six of us in my living room at that moment, all movement vets. We called around to see what we could make happen ourselves.

"The first folks to send a couple of vans of food and supplies was TOPS, The Ordinary Peoples Society, a prison ministry in Dothan AL founded and staffed by ex-offenders. They organized food from a food bank, pooled their money to get additional goods and moved it to Mobile where they connected with a second organization of formerly incarcerated brothers down there to distribute it while they went back to Dothan for more. That's why we tell everybody now that it was felons who were the first to feed, the first to respond to need, the first to get up and do something. They didn't wait for permission or for a contract. That's real leadership."

The Real Leaders

Rev. Kenneth Glasgow of Dothan Alabama and Paul Jackson of Mobile each spent a decade in prison. Both are part of a network of black civic and religious organizations that have fought for years to restore the right to vote to over 200,000 former prisoners in Alabama, most of them African American men. Glasgow and his organization hustled food and got the first vans on the road southbound to the gulf. Jackson and his organization met the vans and guided them to where the need was greatest. "We started going into the projects," said Glasgow. "We went to Orange Grove and other places, somewhere the water had reached second floor windows, but nobody had seen FEMA or the Red Cross. We just started targeting areas where nobody else was coming."

The former prisoners found small and medium sized black churches in the affected area who also hadn't been contacted by the Red Cross or any government agency but who'd mobilized their own members to begin feeding their neighborhoods. The ex-offenders began sharing their supplies, their contacts and their information about unmet needs with these community partners. By the second food and water trip south, the former prisoners were bringing families out of flooded and devastated areas back to safety and temporary housing, and soon the ex-felons were driving in shifts with vans moving both ways around the clock.

Abandoned by the Government

Brown and her friends imagined that by their second or third trip south, local or federal officials, the National Guard or someone in authority would be on the scene to feed people, to evacuate the sick, homeless and injured, restore essential services, assess the damage and generally do what governments of modern and civilized societies are expected to do. But in Gulf Coast Alabama and Mississippi, just as in New Orleans, it didn't happen.

"When we realized this wouldn't be over in a couple days, we hit the phones again," Latosha Brown told BC. "We asked for help from community and civic organizations we'd worked with, from churches we knew, from businesses and individuals and doors just flew open. It was amazing. One friend was able to get $10,000 worth of food donated, but it sat there all morning because we had no way to move it. A brother in the community, a truck driver stepped up and volunteered to get it down to the Gulf Coast for gas money. Paul Jackson down in Mobile got us a warehouse to receive goods being sent, and somebody's supervisor on the job lent a forklift and driver. We found more vans in other places, and on the fourth day our group in Selma working with a local church opened up a shelter for a hundred people. Every truck and van that carried supplies down brought families out on the way back, including a number of Cambodian and Vietnamese families."

"The black churches tapped their own networks," said Paul Jackson of One For Life in Mobile. "Donations, supplies and volunteers came from churches all over Mississippi and Alabama. We got help from churches in Minnesota, Maryland and Virginia that arrived in black neighborhoods before anybody from FEMA or the Red Cross. Still, even after the arrival of official help we kept finding pockets of mostly black people bypassed or ignored by FEMA and the Red Cross.

This should have been no surprise. Much of the National Guard was in Iraq. FEMA never demanded that Red Cross officials leaders expand their personal network of contacts across the tracks into Black Biloxi, Black Mobile, Black Gulfport and Black Pascagoula. So well stocked and well-supplied Red Cross operations sat in white churches only a short distance from predominantly black areas which had not been reached by any private or government relief agency before black churches and black ex-offenders and black grassroots organizations took matters into their own hands.

Ex-Offenders are First Responders

"We didn't get as much help from the Red Cross as we expected," Latosha Brown told BC, "and at first we put it down to them just being overwhelmed. But the pattern we saw of them failing to notice the needs in our community when they were just so close, failing to partner with those on the ground doing work in those areas when they have no problem accepting donations from black people was really disturbing.

"I flew down to Gulfport on my own dime, partly to meet with local Red Cross officials. It was a real disappointment to be in a place where all these supplies and resources were concentrated, and see them make very little effort to partner with their own neighbors, with black churches, with the formerly incarcerated brothers and others who were on the ground serving the neighborhoods where we knew the need was so great.

"I never answer my cell phone during meetings, but somehow the spirit told me I should answer it during this particular meeting, this one time. It was some of our people driving the vans. Three of our vans on the way north out of the flooded areas were loaded with evacuees, but no cash and about to run out of gas somewhere in Mississippi. They were calling me because they knew I might have a credit card. I was in a meeting with several Red Cross bigwigs but I couldn't get any of them to help gas up our guys on the road, not a one. We got next to no help from the Red Cross that day. On the way out they offered us a couple cases of juicy juice and some overripe bananas. I wanted to cry."

Whether Brown cried that day or not, the coalition of churches, community organizations, business people, former prisoners and others engaged in grassroots relief effort soldiered on. By September 15th they had moved $100,000 worth of food and supplies to affected areas, gained access to eight buses, had evacuated over a thousand people and were helping supply and run four shelters. Through contacts with realtors and builders they were arranging temporary and permanent housing for families, and funneling volunteers from dozens of churches to affected areas to assist in cleanup. A week later, just before this article's press time, SOS After Katrina had secured the cooperation of the National Medical Association, the premiere organization of African American physicians to provide medical services to some evacuees and persons in affected areas.

"We call ourselves SOS After Katrina" said Latosha Brown. "That stands for Saving Our Selves, cause if we don't who will?"

What is a Government for?

Brown and the coalition of organizations that make up SOS Katrina know that taking care of citizens is still the responsibility of government, and they vow to stick around for the political fight to make that happen. But since it did not happen this time, they stepped up. The Red Cross did not fulfill its responsibility to serve the whole community. SOS After Katrina and the black church will continue to struggle with them - not against them, but with them, to help fix this too. Again, if we don't fight to save ourselves, who will?

The same Thursday night that BC interviewed Latosha Brown President Bush spoke to the nation from New Orleans. The president's hypocritical lip service to the right of the city's evacuated residents to return and to remain, was followed by a $50 billion dollar pledge and a wage of cost-plus, no-bid contracts to corrupt military contractors that included Halliburton and Bechtel. This, and the suspension of the 70 year old Davis-Bacon Act, allowing federal contractors to further lower the already low prevailing wages in the region are just the beginning. The good people at OMB Watch put it like this:

"The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has unveiled a vast plan for using the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast as an excuse for broad rollbacks of federal protections, including environmental, worker health and safety, and minimum wage standards..

"The president's recent speech announcing the White House's plan for reconstruction of the region included reference to a "Gulf Coast Opportunity Zone." Though Bush gave little detail of what such an opportunity zone would entail, the Heritage Foundation report using the same language details a vast give-away to corporate special interests and a full-scale repeal of health and safety protections.

If the Heritage Foundation and the Bush Administration have their way the Gulf states will be the scene of more crimes against public safety, health and prosperity in the months and years to come. They are not the least bit ashamed to tell us so, and some of the first legislative proposals along this line were submitted September 15.

We have seen grassroots black leaders in our churches and community organizations answer the call to pull together a people's relief effort in response to the government's failure to plan and provide for its citizens in crisis.

The question now is whether members of our established black political leadership are willing to relentlessly expose the root causes of these failures and make sure they never happen again. What will black political leadership do to protect us and the nation from Bush's cynical "Gulf Coast Opportunity Zone"? What good are institutions like the Congressional Black Caucus if they do not offer real alternative visions, hold public hearings, educate the public, and campaign for concrete remedies. Unity of the caucus would be nice, but clarity and an opposing vision of what the Gulf coast must look like, what America must look like are far more important at this time.

The grassroots leadership has stepped up. Now it's time for members of the Congressional Black Caucus to find their voices. So far, the contrast between the can-do spirit of our churches and community organizations, and yes, our organized ex-offenders and what we hear from most of our black faces in high places is glaring, obvious and a little sad.

The web site of SOS After Katrina is www.sosafterkatrina.org Some of the organizations included in SOS After Katrina are: Alabama Coalition on Black Civic Participation,
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
The Ordinary Peoples Society
One For Life
Southern Christian Leadership Council
Black Leadership Forum
The Hip Hop Caucus
Clergy Who Care, Birmingham AL
Circle of Love Fellowship Ministries
The Hip Hop UN
NAACP, Mississippi Chapter
National Medical Association, Jackson MS chapter
Center for Pan Asian Community Service
Students and student leaders at the Atlanta University Center

Congregations of dozens of large and small churches in several states Bruce Dixon can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackcommentator.com.

Posted by lois at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2005

New Orleans: Katrina: Prisoners and Guards

9/23/05, Times Picayune
Prison became island of fear and frustration
As floodwaters rose, inmates and guards were in it together

'It was a wild ride,' chief deputy says
By Michael Perlstein
Staff writer
When New Orleans plunged into darkness and spiraling chaos in the days after Katrina passed, Orleans Parish Prison, a 6,400-inmate city-within-a-city, plunged even deeper, bringing the complex of concrete lockups perilously close to a security and humanitarian meltdown.

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."
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tporleans/archives/2005_09_23.html#082074

Posted by lois at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)

Katrina--New Orleans Organizers Call for Amnesty

New Orleans organizers call for amnesty

by Rose Braz

New Orleans – On the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans organizers from national grassroots organization Critical Resistance are demanding amnesty for those arrested during the aftermath of Katrina and for an accounting of what happened to prisoners during the evacuation of New Orleans.

“We mourn all the victims of Katrina, including those hidden victims who were locked up in Orleans area jails during the storm and those who have been imprisoned indefinitely in its aftermath,” said Critical Resistance Southern Regional Director Tamika Middleton, who was based in New Orleans.

“Thousands of people in New Orleans area jails have been separated from their families and do not know whether their loved ones are alive or dead, while hundreds of others have been refused the right to call their loved ones, held at gunpoint on freeway overpasses or are now locked up inside a sweltering New Orleans bus depot,” continued Middleton.

“Nearly 230 people have been booked in a makeshift jail set up in a Greyhound Station, the vast majority for the ‘crime’ of feeding and clothing themselves during the hurricane,” added Jordan Flaherty of Critical Resistance New Orleans.

“Our schools are closed and people have been left without food, water or shelter, but somehow this city has the means to open a jail? Locking people up in this crisis is a cruel mismanagement of city resources and counters the outpouring of the world’s support and concern for all victims of Hurricane Katrina,” continued Flaherty.

According to Lisa Kung of the Southern Center for Human Rights, “When people in the Orleans Parish Prison were finally evacuated, they were scattered to over 30 facilities throughout the state.” Kung also noted that “despite knowing a levee break would put everyone in the jails in danger, there was no evacuation plan for the people locked up in New Orleans. The right to safety and dignity demands an evacuation plan in case of a levee break. Those basic rights were ignored by officials on all levels, and people who had no way to escape the floodwaters were left without a way out.”

Organizers are also calling for a complete accounting of what happened to Orleans area prisoners amid disturbing reports that indicate that some prisoners may have been left behind to drown.

Meanwhile, on the streets, residents who lost everything are now confronted with martial law. “We met two grandmothers whose 16-year-old grandsons were handcuffed and taken away for allegedly pushing to get on busses that finally arrived after they had spent four days on the freeway overpass. Their grandmothers have not seen them since,” reported Xochitl Beverra of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children.

“On this Day of Prayer and Remembrance, we demand amnesty for prisoners in New Orleans,” said Tamika Middleton, who was evacuated from New Orleans. “Prisoners in New Orleans must be returned to their families to heal from this crisis.”

Critical Resistance is a national grassroots organization whose mission is to end society’s reliance on imprisonment as an answer to social, political and economic problems. Critical Resistance’s Southern Regional Office, located in New Orleans Mid-City neighborhood, was destroyed in the hurricane. Family members attempting to locate their loved ones who were in Orleans area jails may call the Louisiana Department of Corrections at (225) 342-3998. For more information, you can also contact Xochitl Beverra at (504) 606-8846.

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Posted by lois at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

Louisiana: 16 women prisoners released from Angola held

By PENNY BROWN ROBERTS

Advocate staff writer

A New Orleans federal judge freed 16 prisoners Thursday who had more than served their time.
U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey ordered the release of female inmates evacuated from the Orleans and St. Bernard parish prisons after Hurricane Katrina and housed in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola beyond their scheduled release dates.

The late afternoon hearing stretched into two hours as the judge and lawyers hatched a plan for finding the convicts transportation or shelter from the approaching Hurricane Rita.

"My job under the Constitution is to not let people stay in jail who are not supposed to be there," Zainey said. "But as a humanitarian, I think we're all concerned about what happens to them once they're let go."

The women were among 94 who filed suit Tuesday against Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gusman, Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan and other law-enforcement agencies, demanding their freedom.

Most are being held on minor misdemeanor offenses, such as public drunkenness, trespassing, disturbing the peace, prostitution or lewd conduct.

The state Department of Public Safety and Corrections planned to release the 16 women Thursday night, give each $10 and buy them bus tickets to the adjoining state of their choice or take them to shelters.

Zainey also ordered the future freeing of two women whose release dates are approaching. But Zainey declined to free 13 others who still have pending charges against them.

Two inmates already had been freed by another judge, and the prison records of another woman couldn't be located to determine whether she could be released.

Still at issue are 60 prisoners, many claiming they've never had the opportunity to post bond or make an initial appearance before a judge. A hearing has been scheduled for Monday to determine their fate.

All told, Hurricane Katrina forced authorities to evacuate about 8,200 inmates from Orleans and Jefferson parishes to state prisons and parish jails.

The hurricane shut off access to inmate records several weeks ago, keeping many behind bars longer than normal. Prisoners left the flooded jails without identification, delaying their release.

The corrections department already has set free more than 200 inmates from Orleans, St. Bernard, Plaquemines and other hurricane-ravaged parishes whose release dates have passed. It provided cash and transportation or shelter to those people as well.

Zainey said he will "continue to monitor the situation to ensure these people don't fall through the cracks. I don't want people that aren't supposed to be in jail in jail."

Click here to return to story:
http://2theadvocate.com/stories/092305/new_released001.shtml

Posted by lois at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwater

This is horrible but sadly not horrible beyond belief.
New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters
Officers Deserted a Jail Building, Leaving Inmates Locked in Cells
(New York, September 22, 2005)—As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail, Human Rights Watch said today.

Inmates in Templeman III, one of several buildings in the Orleans Parish Prison compound, reported that as of Monday, August 29, there were no correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates. These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level.

“Of all the nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst,” said Corinne Carey, researcher from Human Rights Watch. “Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling.”

Human Rights Watch called on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the Orleans Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, and to establish the fate of the prisoners who had been locked in the jail. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, which oversaw the evacuation, and the Orleans Sheriff’s Department should account for the 517 inmates who are missing from list of people evacuated from the jail.

Carey spent five days in Louisiana, conducting dozens of interviews with inmates evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, correctional officers, state officials, lawyers and their investigators who had interviewed more than 1,000 inmates evacuated from the prison.

The sheriff of Orleans Parish, Marlin N. Gusman, did not call for help in evacuating the prison until midnight on Monday, August 29, a state Department of Corrections and Public Safety spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. Other parish prisons, she said, had called for help on the previous Saturday and Sunday. The evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison was not completed until Friday, September 2.

According to officers who worked at two of the jail buildings, Templeman 1 and 2, they began to evacuate prisoners from those buildings on Tuesday, August 30, when the floodwaters reached chest level inside. These prisoners were taken by boat to the Broad Street overpass bridge, and ultimately transported to correctional facilities outside New Orleans.

But at Templeman III, which housed about 600 inmates, there was no prison staff to help the prisoners. Inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch varied about when they last remember seeing guards at the facility, but they all insisted that there were no correctional officers in the facility on Monday, August 29. A spokeswoman for the Orleans parish sheriff’s department told Human Rights Watch she did not know whether the officers at Templeman III had left the building before the evacuation.

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmate’s last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench.

“They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation.

As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

“The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I'm scared. I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was crying.”

Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells.

Inmates broke jail windows to let air in. They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Apparently at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows.

”We started to see people in T3 hangin' shirts on fire out the windows,” Brooke Moss, an Orleans Parish Prison officer told Human Rights Watch. “They were wavin' em. Then we saw them jumping out of the windows . . . Later on, we saw a sign, I think somebody wrote `help' on it.”

As of yesterday, signs reading “Help Us,” and “One Man Down,” could still be seen hanging from a window in the third floor of Templeman III.

Several corrections officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the prison, even though the facility had been evacuated during floods in the 1990s.

“It was complete chaos,” said a corrections officer with more than 30 years of service at Orleans Parish Prison. When asked what he thought happened to the inmates in Templeman III, he shook his head and said: “Ain't no tellin’ what happened to those people.”

“At best, the inmates were left to fend for themselves,” said Carey. “At worst, some may have died.”

Human Rights Watch was not able to speak directly with Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gussman or the ranking official in charge of Templeman III. A spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department told Human Rights Watch that search-and-rescue teams had gone to the prison and she insisted that “nobody drowned, nobody was left behind.”

Human Rights Watch compared an official list of all inmates held at Orleans Parish Prison immediately prior to the hurricane with the most recent list of the evacuated inmates compiled by the state Department of Corrections and Public Safety (which was entitled, “All Offenders Evacuated”). However, the list did not include 517 inmates from the jail, including 130 from Templeman III.

Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

From: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/09/22/usdom11773.htm

© Copyright 2003, Human Rights Watch 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA

Posted by lois at 07:57 PM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2005

Friends & Families of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children Katrina Update

Dear Friends and Allies,

It has been 22 days since the storm hit, 3 weeks since the levee broke, 20 days since we began witnessing on national TV, the images of thousands of forgotten people fighting to survive and being abandoned by those whose job it was to rescue. Sometimes it feels like it all happened yesterday. Sometimes it feels like years have passed in these last three weeks. There are no more people suffering and dying in the superdome and out on the causeway, but the nightmare is hardly over.

This brief update of what FFLIC has been observing, experiencing and doing is being sent out via a listserve. You are receiving it if you have called or emailed with donation offers, support, words of solidarity or offers to volunteer. We apologize if anyone would prefer not to receive these - please unsubscribe by sending an email to fflic.mayfirst.org if you do not want to receive any more. You can also have others join by sending an email to that same address.

Thanks to you all

First, of all we want to say thank you to all of you who have supported, donated, and volunteered. We cannot express fully enough how much your solidarity means to us as individuals and as an organization. If we have neglected to return your call or get back to you with a thank you email, please know that we sincerely apologize! It has taken us a minute to get organized and we know some people may have not received the prompt response they should have. Please know that we appreciate every dollar, every computer, every box of paper, every word of encouragement.

Finding Folks

FFLIC is now working with Critical Resistance and Communities United to have volunteers all over the country go shelter to shelter with information for anyone who has a loved one who was locked up or detained in the affected areas when the storm hit. We have volunteers in Arizona, California, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, etc. We are talking with people, collecting information, and helping folks call the hotline and facility numbers to locate where their family members are and speaking directly to them or leaving them messages. If you are interested in volunteering with us to help us help folks find their family members, please contact Daniel Horowitz de Garcia at Daniel@cuapj.org.

Going shelter to shelter, here’s what we can tell you about some of what we’ve discovered:

Some shelters are well organized, providing needed services, with staff who are respectful and caring of the survivors. Houston’s convention center was a good example of this. Some are dirty, mis-managed, with racist and unpleasant staff. At the River Center in Baton Rouge, we witnessed dinner being served – a hot dog, a bag of chips and an apple. We also witnessed the National Guardsmen patrolling the sleeping quarters, two at a time with huge AKs slung over their shoulders. The woman who I was helping find her son as her grandson played around us asked me, “why are they here? Are we in prison?” We hear that many Red Cross staff in Lafayette and Lake Charles have been fired and replaced after serious complaints of prejudice and disrespect. One volunteer said she wouldn’t be surprised if folks just got fed up and started rising up against the Red Cross authorities.
All around Louisiana and Texas, local responses to Katrina survivors vary from welcoming to hostile. In Houston, we saw signs and expressions of sympathy and support. In Lake Charles the city is planning to put a fence around the shelter and has doubled law enforcement in areas like the mall and popular restaurants. The theme of treating survivors like prisoners has been repeated over many of our visits and observations. In St. Louis, they just skipped the middle step and created a shelter out of an abandoned prison.
We have been in touch with several of our long time members, for those who know them: Ms. Mathews now has an apartment in Houston after several weeks in the Astrodome, Ms. Flora is safe in Jackson, MS. Ms. Sabrina should be flying out with her 2 sons to Colorado Springs, and Ms. Cortez and Mr. Minoo are both safe. We are still searching for others. If anyone would like to send support to these individuals, please let us know. We are keeping a list of what people need and can get that information to you.
Those who are left in the shelters right now are the folks who have no where else to go. Many are planning on staying there until they can go back to New Orleans. Many are separated from families that are in shelters as far away as Massachusetts, Los Angeles and San Antonio, TX.
People have harrowing, horrifying, overwhelming and inspiring tales of surviving the storm, surviving the evacuation, saving lives, watching loved ones die. It is important that these stories be told and heard. It is important that people know the extent of what went wrong and how people paid the price for it.
We continue to hear the stories of young people and adults locked up who were not evacuated but who had to break free from their cells, sometimes leaving others behind in chest high water that was rising. We continue to hear nothing from state officials that addresses this issue and commits to investigating who was responsible and what will be done to determine how many prisoners lost their lives.
FFLIC’s Hurricane Relief Fund

Our fund is finally being put to good use! We are helping folks with housing, transportation and basic necessities. We have raised over $10,000 thanks to the generosity of dozens of people across the country. We have been moved to tears by the letters and notes which accompany the checks apologizing for not sending more, not being able to do more. Our collective sense of powerlessness is profound. We are determined to overcome it and make something of this tragedy.

Moving Forward
There is so much to do. Hopefully, by next week, we will have an office set up and operating in Lake Charles, Louisiana. We cannot stop with simply gathering the information, finding our members, and helping families reconnect. The fight for a transformed juvenile justice system must continue, but not in isolation. This disaster has illuminated that the racism and oppression which have fueled the juvenile and criminal justice systems in this state for years are the very same which abandoned people to die in our city after the storm hit. For these reasons, we must figure out how to continue to build membership and channel the rage, and righteous indignation that people have into a movement that demands justice on every level – in the short, medium, and long term. FFLIC has joined with Community/Labor United (CLU) to strategize how to do this in a unified, powerful way. For those organizers who would like to come down and support us, please stay in touch with us, we will soon have a clearer sense of all that needs to be done and how to begin the doing.
Last Notes
As folks know, FFLIC is a project of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a legal and advocacy organization dedicated to transforming Louisiana’s juvenile justice system. JJPL and our Board of Directors have been incredibly supportive of and generous about FFLIC’s work in this crisis while also trying to continue on with the JJ reform work that has been years in the making. We want to invite anyone who would like to donate to JJPL and FFLIC’s efforts, to designate on your checks whether you are making a donation to “JJPL and FFLIC” overall or specifically for the “JJPL/FFLIC Hurricane Relief Fund” which goes to fund the immediate needs of displaced families and children with whom FFLIC is working. JJPL/FFLIC Hurricane Relief Checks can be still sent to:

920 Platt Street, Sulphur, LA 70663.

Checks to JJPL may be sent to Sonji Hart at: 392 Sisters Rd., Ponchatoula, Louisiana, 70454.
Thank you all – with love and respect,
Xochitl, Gina, Grace and Kori

FFLIC Staff
Visit our website for articles and information at www.fflic.org

Posted by lois at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2005

LA: DOC Hotline operating for people to locate adults and youth incarcerated in prisons/jails

Good news: there's now a DOC hotline... Sept. 9
ated to 35 different facilities throughout the state. Most are n
Dear folks with loved ones who were OPP or the youth detention centers in the New Orleans area, (Those without a loved one in OPP or youth detention, please forward in any way you think may help reach individuals who have folks locked up in Orleans/Jefferson.)

Adults who were in OPP, Gretna, or other parish jails. About 8000 people locked up in Orleans (including pre-trial, boot camp, DOC prisoners, parish prisoners, etc.) evacuow in DOC prisons (including private contract prisons). Others went to Sheriffs' prisons throughout the state. There was apparently no rhyme or reason on who ended up where. The DOC set up a hotline today for families to call. Folks looking for their people should call (225) 342-3998 or (225) 342-5935 to locate where your loved one is now located. The hotline should be taking calls from 7:00 am - 10:00 pm, but it is not yet fully staffed. The DOC has said that they will only tell family members where their loved one is located, and will not have any other information (release date, case status, etc.). You should be allowed to give a message to your loved one. We do not know whether & how this official hotline will work. If you are having problems with the hotline, please contact me (preferably by email, if you're able). We still have not been able to find out how many of the 6000+ OPP prisoners are accounted for, and are hearing disturbing accounts of the evacuation of OPP. If you have any first or second person accounts, please send/forward here to my email lkung@schr.org mailto:lkung@schr.org.

Youth in detention All youths held in Bridge City Center for Youth (BCCY) are accounted for and are now held at Jetson Correctional Center. Call Jetson at (225) 778-9000 and ask for John Anderson, Michael Gaines, Ricky Wright, or Linda London. Family members should demand that their child be brought to the phone immediately and be allowed to talk to their family. Youths held at the Youth Study Center, Plaquemine Detention Center, St. Bernard Center, Terrebonne Detention Center, and Riverde Detention Center have been routed to placements in other parts of the state. Family members should call Perla at (225) 287-7988 or (225) 328-3607 (cell) or Stacey at (225) 287-7955 to find out where their child is located. Ask Perla for a phone number, call, and demand that they be permitted to speak to their child immediately on the phone. FFLIC has not confirmed that all youths have been accounted for. Adults arrested post-Katrina. The official word is that about 125 felony arrests have been processed through the "Camp Greyhound" jail, and that folks are being sent to Hunt Correctional. Youth arrested post-Katrina We do not yet know where people age 16 or under who were arrested during the general evacuation are being held.
Please help. If your city has a shelter, small or large, please go into the shelter and post the attached informational flyer. Call your local newspaper and ask them to run the hotline information. Distribute these hotline phone numbers in any way you can. The DOC currently does not have any plan for distributing the hotline numbers.

Thanks to everyone.

Lisa Kung

Southern Center for Human Rights

Atlanta, GA 30303

(404) 688-1202 ext. 225

(404) 688-9440 (fax)

(213) 595-5127 (cell)

Posted by lois at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

LA: DOC Hotline operating for people to locate adults and youth incarcerated in prisons/jails

Good news: there's now a DOC hotline... Sept. 9
ated to 35 different facilities throughout the state. Most are n
Dear folks with loved ones who were OPP or the youth detention centers in the New Orleans area, (Those without a loved one in OPP or youth detention, please forward in any way you think may help reach individuals who have folks locked up in Orleans/Jefferson.)

Adults who were in OPP, Gretna, or other parish jails. About 8000 people locked up in Orleans (including pre-trial, boot camp, DOC prisoners, parish prisoners, etc.) evacuow in DOC prisons (including private contract prisons). Others went to Sheriffs' prisons throughout the state. There was apparently no rhyme or reason on who ended up where. The DOC set up a hotline today for families to call. Folks looking for their people should call (225) 342-3998 or (225) 342-5935 to locate where your loved one is now located. The hotline should be taking calls from 7:00 am - 10:00 pm, but it is not yet fully staffed. The DOC has said that they will only tell family members where their loved one is located, and will not have any other information (release date, case status, etc.). You should be allowed to give a message to your loved one. We do not know whether & how this official hotline will work. If you are having problems with the hotline, please contact me (preferably by email, if you're able). We still have not been able to find out how many of the 6000+ OPP prisoners are accounted for, and are hearing disturbing accounts of the evacuation of OPP. If you have any first or second person accounts, please send/forward here to my email lkung@schr.org mailto:lkung@schr.org.

Youth in detention All youths held in Bridge City Center for Youth (BCCY) are accounted for and are now held at Jetson Correctional Center. Call Jetson at (225) 778-9000 and ask for John Anderson, Michael Gaines, Ricky Wright, or Linda London. Family members should demand that their child be brought to the phone immediately and be allowed to talk to their family. Youths held at the Youth Study Center, Plaquemine Detention Center, St. Bernard Center, Terrebonne Detention Center, and Riverde Detention Center have been routed to placements in other parts of the state. Family members should call Perla at (225) 287-7988 or (225) 328-3607 (cell) or Stacey at (225) 287-7955 to find out where their child is located. Ask Perla for a phone number, call, and demand that they be permitted to speak to their child immediately on the phone. FFLIC has not confirmed that all youths have been accounted for. Adults arrested post-Katrina. The official word is that about 125 felony arrests have been processed through the "Camp Greyhound" jail, and that folks are being sent to Hunt Correctional. Youth arrested post-Katrina We do not yet know where people age 16 or under who were arrested during the general evacuation are being held.
Please help. If your city has a shelter, small or large, please go into the shelter and post the attached informational flyer. Call your local newspaper and ask them to run the hotline information. Distribute these hotline phone numbers in any way you can. The DOC currently does not have any plan for distributing the hotline numbers.

Thanks to everyone.

Lisa Kung

Southern Center for Human Rights

Atlanta, GA 30303

(404) 688-1202 ext. 225

(404) 688-9440 (fax)

(213) 595-5127 (cell)

Posted by lois at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

New Orleans: This is Our America

"We looked at the pictures of the Superdome and saw a sea of dark faces, and it seems impossible to conceive that a country half a century after Brown v. Board is still so segregated. And we say this is America? Yet shock is hardly in order, when the face of the urban poor is still so overwhelmingly black, when segregation is still a way of life in almost every major city. One in four African-Americans lives in poverty. More than 70 percent of the nation's black students now attend predominantly minority schools, and the prisons into which those classrooms all too often feed are equally unequal."

The Cavalier Daily, Charlottesville, VA
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Opinion
New Orleans: This is our America

Katie Cristol, Cavalier Daily Columnist

The words come in a drumbeat:Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, in a heartbroken opinion editorial, laments that "I've cried a lot of tears the past few days as I watched television -- to see somebody lying dead outside the convention center. This reminded me of Somalia. But this is America."

"This is a shell-shocker. I never saw anything like this in Afghanistan. I can't believe this is America," said U.S. Army Veteran Warren Ezell, voicing a refrain repeated among his brother and sisters in arms, home from the perils of the Middle East to destruction of Katrina.

And average Americans helplessly chant the questions, at an utter loss. "This is America? People have been dying on the streets of New Orleans -- on American soil -- with no food and water?" reads a letter to the editor in the Detroit Free Press.

This is America?

It's become a mantra of sorts in the two weeks since Hurricane Katrina. We shake our heads at the newspapers, the televisions, and, heartbroken, ask if this can be America. People dying for want of food, water and proper medical attention, exploited by those criminals who capitalize on the chaos and sold short by those officials entrusted with alleviating it, do not fit in our national self-image. This is America?

Through the scripted noise of sanctimonious government talking points about people choosing to ignore the warnings to evacuate came the truth that people who desperately wanted to get out couldn't get out. And we say this is America? But this chasm of rich and poor, where socioeconomic standing determines who lives and who dies, is exactly what America looks like on a daily basis. Katrina hit right before payday; in a country where a third of workers survive paycheck to paycheck, how could we have possibly expected efficacy out of an evacuation plan that depended on an individual's access to a car and a full tank of gas?

Census figures released two weeks ago show that poverty rates have increased for the fourth year in a row, up 12.7 percent since 2003, to 37 million Americans living in poverty, and Katrina has merely exposed a truism in modern America: Being poor is a health hazard. Low-wage workers disproportionately represent the uninsured, and Americans at the bottom end of the earnings spectrum are almost five times as likely to be in fair to poor health as towards the middle and top. Poverty doubles the risk of dying from heart disease. Cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment. The dead bodies floating down flooded New Orleans streets are casualties of being poor, and so are hundreds of other Americans each year.

We looked at the pictures of the Superdome and saw a sea of dark faces, and it seems impossible to conceive that a country half a century after Brown v. Board is still so segregated. And we say this is America? Yet shock is hardly in order, when the face of the urban poor is still so overwhelmingly black, when segregation is still a way of life in almost every major city. One in four African-Americans lives in poverty. More than 70 percent of the nation's black students now attend predominantly minority schools, and the prisons into which those classrooms all too often feed are equally unequal.

The newspaper photo captions that call white people leaving decimated storefronts "survivors" and black people doing the same "looters" are merely reflecting the way our criminal justice system looks at race. African-Americans make up 15 percent of drug users and 37 percent of prisoners incarcerated for drug use; how absurd to expect that crimes of hurricane-induced desperation should be judged any differently. Our nation's cities are characterized by patterns of segregation and gentrification. A disaster of this magnitude in New York, Washington, D.C. or Chicago would yield the same demographic group left behind.

It would be unforgivably callous to belittle the suffering of those whose lives were devastated or cut short by Hurricane Katrina. The fact that misery and inequity exists on such a vast scale in this country should not lessen our sympathy for everyone -- regardless of race, class, or privilege
-- affected by this unprecedented tragedy. Yet as we sift through the wreckage of the Gulf Coast, searching for responsibility and accountability in order to prevent this sort of disaster from happening ever again, we'd be well served to remember that this sort of disaster happens every day in miniature.

We have got to stop saying "this is America" as though it's part of the question of how could this happen, because it's not. It's the answer. Yes, this is America laid bare, and the outpouring of grief for what has happened to our nation should not stop at the water's edge.

Katie Cristol's column usually appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp?ID=24101&pid=1326

Posted by lois at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

Hurricane Katrina - More information for people who have loved ones incarcerated in LA

Hello Everyone,
I was given this website information to pass along to everyone. It doesn't matter what state you are in if there are people in your area that were evacuated or anyone who has roots to Louisiana this would be an avenue to finding their loved ones. Please all of you make copies of this and take it to the shelters in your area, post it in supermarkets, post offices, wherever you can think of some of these people might go to. If any of you can get the loved ones full name DOC# and where they were housed before the disaster. Get this information to me and I will make the phone calls necessary. I have alot of members that are willing to help with the calling.
Also Louisiana CURE will be having their monthly meeting tomorrow night. Tuesday, September 13, 2005, at the Bishop Tracy Center, in Baton Rouge, La. The address is 1800 Acadian Thrwy. The meeting will be more of a support group meeting that we will be in discussion as to how we as a group can help these families reunite.
We will have a couple of people there to give us general information. This will not be a question and answer type of meeting. These people have been in meetings from the start of all this nightmare and are tired and need to get some rest, But they have agreed to meet with us to relay this information.
Please let anyone you know about this meeting and I will relay the results via e-mail to those that cannot make the meeting.
You are all in my prayers, and I leave you with this thought. God did not make this happen, he allowed it to happen. He is only preparing us for the end times. His prophecy is coming to pass.
In God's Time,
Claudia Boudreaux email: carouselhorse55@bellsouth.net
Executive Director
Louisiana CURE
The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://www.lacdlkatrinarelief.blogspot.com/

Posted by lois at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

Are You Searching for Someone Who Was In Prison When Katrina Hit?

ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR SOMEONE WHO WAS
IN PRISON WHEN KATRINA HIT?

If you had a family member locked up in Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) or Jefferson Parish Detention Center when Katrina hit, call the DOC hotline at (225) 342-3998 or (225) 342-5935 to locate where your loved one is now located. The hotline is taking calls from 7:00am – 10:00pm.

No matter where your family member was locked up when Katrina hit, you can also call these numbers to tell your loved one where you are and how you are doing.

If these numbers are not working or if the person you talked to could not help you, call Lisa at the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) at (404) 688-1202 ext. 225, or email lkung@schr.org.

For children and youth locked up at Youth Study Center, Plaquemine Detention Center, St. Bernard Detention Center, Terrebone Detention Center, Rivarde Detention Center, or any other youth detention facility, call Perla at (225) 287-7988 or (225) 328-3607 to locate where your child is being housed, and/or to tell your child where you are. Ask Perla for the phone number of the facility where your child is now located, call the facility, and ask to speak to your child.

For parents of children locked up at Bridge City Center for Youth when Katrina hit, call (225) 778-9000 and ask to talk to your child.

If these numbers are out of date or if the person you talked to could not help you, call Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) for help: Grace (337) 513-7039 or Xochitl (504) 606-8846, or email us at familiescantwait@yahoo.com, xochitl@mediajumpstart.org.

Updated: 09/09/05

Posted by lois at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2005

A Legal System in Shambles

September 9, 2005
NY Times

By PETER APPLEBOMEand JONATHAN D. GLATER

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 8 - At Rapides Parish Detention Center 3 in Alexandria, which normally holds convicted felons, there are now 200 new inmates who arrived hot, hungry and exhausted on buses this week after being evacuated from flooded jails in New Orleans.

They have no paperwork indicating whether they are charged with having too much to drink or attempted murder. There is no judge to hear their cases, no courthouse designated to hear them in and no lawyer to represent them. If lawyers can be found, there is no mechanism for paying them. The prisoners have had no contact with their families for days and do not know whether they are alive or dead, if their homes do or do not exist.

"It's like taking a jail and shaking it up in a fruit-basket turnover, so no one has any idea who these people are or why they're here," said Phyllis Mann, one of several local lawyers who were at the detention center until 11 p.m. Wednesday, trying to collect basic information on the inmates. "There is no system of any kind for taking care of these people at this point."

Along with the destruction of homes, neighborhoods and lives, Hurricane Katrina decimated the legal system of the New Orleans region.

More than a third of the state's lawyers have lost their offices, some for good. Most computer records will be saved. Many other records will be lost forever. Some local courthouses have been flooded, imperiling a vast universe of files, records and documents. Court proceedings from divorces to murder trials, to corporate litigation, to custody cases will be indefinitely halted and when proceedings resume lawyers will face prodigious - if not insurmountable - obstacles in finding witnesses and principals and in recovering evidence.

It is an implosion of the legal network not seen since disasters like the Chicago fire of 1871 or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, events in times so much simpler as to be useless in making much sense of this one.

"There aren't too many catastrophes that have just wiped out entire cities," said Robert Gordon, a professor at Yale Law School who teaches legal history.

The effects on individual lawyers vary, from large firms that have already been able to find space, contact clients and resume working on cases, to individual lawyers who fear they may never be able to put their practices back together. But the storm has left even prominent lawyers wondering whether they will have anything to go back to.

William Rittenberg, former president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a lawyer for 35 years in New Orleans, said he had spent the time since the storm living like a gypsy with his wife and two dogs, moving from Columbus, Miss., to Houston to San Antonio. Mr. Rittenberg said that his firm's main client had been the teachers union for the New Orleans schools, but that there is no way to know when or if school will resume this year.

"I really don't know if I have a law practice anymore," he said.

Some logistical issues are being addressed as the courts scramble to find new places to set up shop. The Louisiana Supreme Court is moving its operations from New Orleans to a circuit court in Baton Rouge. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is moving to Houston, and electronic technology has allowed lawyers and courts to save files and documents in a way that would have been impossible in the past.

But the biggest immediate problem is with criminal courts in southern Louisiana, with thousands of detainees awaiting hearings and trials who have been thrust into a legal limbo without courts, trials, or lawyers.

So in Alexandria, a city in central Louisiana, in a scene repeated at prisons and jails throughout the state, Ms. Mann said she and other lawyers had interviewed all 200 inmates, and the criminal defense lawyers' organization was painstakingly trying to compile a registry of prisoners and lawyers. The goal is to put them together, though many of the prisoners do not yet have lawyers and many of the lawyers are scattered across the country.

Ms. Mann said that some prisoners, no doubt, were accused of serious crimes, but that most had been arrested on misdemeanor charges like drunkenness that typically fill local lockups. Most were either awaiting hearings or had not been able to make bond and were awaiting trial, which, for many, had been set for the day the hurricane hit.

"I talked to one guy who was arrested for reading a tarot card without a permit," she said. "These are mostly poor people. They haven't been in contact with their family. They have no word at all. A lot of them are pretty devastated. You had a lot of grown men breaking down and boohooing when you talked to them. The warden said they hadn't had food or water for two or three days. So a lot of them were just grateful to be out of the sun, in an air-conditioned place where they could find food and a shower and a mattress."

In addition to the logistical problems of setting up courts, finding a place to meet, and getting judges, lawyers and evidence, a major question looms about how to pay for the defense of indigent detainees. Louisiana has been in a low-grade crisis for years over the issue, and currently two-thirds of the money to defend those too poor to afford lawyers comes from court costs for traffic and parking offenses.

But with the evacuation of New Orleans and its environs, none of that money will be available.

Legal officials say that without a quick resolution of the problem the state may be forced to apportion cases to public defenders on a level that makes adequate representation impossible or to free prisoners rather than violate their constitutional right to a speedy trial.

More than a week after the storm, not all the news is bad. Some law firms, particularly larger ones with offices outside New Orleans, have reorganized with remarkable speed, saving records electronically, finding new space and housing for lawyers in Baton Rouge Lafayette, Houston, or other areas.

Lawyers at McGlinchey Stafford, a firm of about 200 lawyers based in New Orleans and with offices in Baton Rouge and other cities, were among the lucky ones. The lawyers, support staff and their families left New Orleans in advance of the storm as partners in its Baton Rouge office worked to find them housing and office space, said Rudy Aguilar, managing partner of the firm.

After the storm, Mr. Aguilar said, the firm put two college students whose parents worked for the firm on a plane to Chicago to buy computers for the new office space. The students rented a truck and drove the computers back to Baton Rouge for the new office, which by Labor Day was up and running, he said.

Within days, Rick Stanley of Stanley, Flanagan & Reuter, an 11-lawyer litigation firm had people working in borrowed space in offices in Baton Rouge and Lafayette and at homes in Jackson, Miss., and Amarillo, Tex. On Labor Day, Mr. Stanley signed a lease for new space in Baton Rouge on the hood of his car in a Home Depot parking lot.

"The Monday of the storm," he said, "I was in a state of shock, realizing the whole way of life we knew had passed away, and Tuesday I just said we need to get back up and running, and we did."
And some say, with the perverse logic of the law, Hurricane Katrina - months from now, when people return home - will spawn an unimaginable flood of legal issues. Beth Abramson who is organizing pro bono efforts for the state bar anticipates a torrent of legal issues having to do with ruined property, insurance, environmental issues and countless other concerns.

Michelle Ghetti, a law professor at the Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge said some courts and lawyers moved faster than she could have imagined to shift operations and resume business. On the other hand, the legal issues posed by the storm multiply almost daily.
"Someone just mentioned child molesters," Ms. Ghetti said. "There's a registry in which people are supposed to be notified where they are. But for all we know, they're in shelters or being taken into people's homes.
"New things come up every day. I think this storm is going to produce more legal issues and complications than anyone has ever imagined."
Peter Applebome reported from Baton Rouge for this article and Jonathan D. Glater from New York.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)

8,200 Prisoners Evacuated After Katrina

Thursday, September 8, 2005
8,200 prisoners evacuated after Katrina

By T.J. Scott
tjscott@thenewsstar.com
The evacuation of prisoners from southern Louisiana has been com-pleted with the number of prisoners moved ‹ originally estimated at 5,000 ‹ swelling to 8,200. The transfer is probably the largest mass prisoner movement in recent U.S. history.

Approximately 1,200 inmates were transported to facilities in northeastern Louisiana with available bed space, and more are expected. Pam Laborde, spokesperson for the Department of Corrections, catego-rized the situation as temporary. ³This is just to get them out, and get them stabilized,² she said. Inmates are still being shuffled around local institutions to allow fa-cilities to accommodate more. Richland Parish Sheriff Charles McDonald said the Richland Parish Detention Center accepted female inmates from Ouachita Correctional Center on Thursday to allow OCC to make more room for male inmates. Laborde said that it is unlikely the move will require the immediate hiring of additional security or staff in this area. A few parish sheriffs¹ offices have indicated they may eventually have to look at small staff in-creases, but most said that the situation has not exceeded the scope of their existing resources. Warden Johnny Sumlin, of the Union Parish Detention Center, said he does not anticipate taking on more inmates or additional staff. ³It might take a few accommodations, but we can handle it,² he said.

Laborde said sheriff¹s departments, including those in Catahoula, Concordia, East Carroll, Ouachita and Union parishes, have assisted with the evacuations, transportation and housing. Thirty-three officers from the Division of Probation and Parole in Monroe helped with evacuations in the south.
There have been no reports of problems from evacuated inmates by any of the facilities. In fact, most facilities have reported that the behavior of the evacuated inmates has been exemplary ­ matched only by the attitudes and response of existing inmates. Billy McConnell, spokesperson for LaSalle Management, said that they would categorize the evacuated inmates as ³extremely well-behaved² and that his agency has not had problems with them. Inmates at facilities in Claiborne, Concordia, Catahoula, LaSalle, and Ouachita parishes were asked to donate any items they might have to assist the incoming inmate evacuees. McConnell said LaSalle received enough donations from current in-mates to provide for the evacuee inmates. He also reported that a dormitory at one of their facilities received a standing ovation from the evacuated inmates in thanks for all they had done. The first inmates moved were those with health problems and medical needs, followed by female inmates. Among the 2,000 prisoners ex-pected to be evacuated to Angola State Prison, historically an all-male institution, are 500 female inmates. Trusties were moved to another location in the prison. The women will be housed in the trusty dorms and kept separate from the male population. The Reuniting Hearts program at Angola, a program that reunites prisoners with their children, was canceled because of the resulting chaos left by the storm, but the annual Angola Prison Rodeo will still be held in October.

Originally published September 8, 2005

http://www.thenewsstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050908/NEWS/50908002

Posted by lois at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

Gulf Coast Crisis: Legal System?

GULF COAST CRISIS: LEGAL SYSTEM

Can justice be done in midst of a disaster?
Evidence, records likely under water
By Charles Sheehan, Tribune staff reporter

September 9, 2005

Hurricane Katrina uprooted half of all practicing attorneys in Louisiana and upended the state and federal legal system. The storm threatens to disrupt cases ranging from an assault charge against Michael Jackson to the hundreds of suits filed against Merck and Co. for its painkiller Vioxx.

New Orleans is home to the Louisiana Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, and the U.S. District Court and U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, as well as the city's criminal courts building. The evidence room of the Orleans Parish Criminal Courts Building, a massive structure at the corner of Tulane Avenue and Broad Street, is believed to be under water.

As the flooded streets of New Orleans are brought under the control of law enforcement, legal experts are trying to determine how they are going to prosecute cases and how thousands of defendants can get a speedy trial guaranteed to them under the Constitution.

Evidence for an untold number of criminal investigations might be lost, along with records from hundreds of private law firms.

Records from the Court of Appeals may be under water along with a handful of city, district, civil and circuit courts.

Now, legal issues as basic as the constitutional right to a speedy trial are being discussed between judges in broken conversations on cellular phones. At emergency meetings in Baton Rouge, prosecutors and defense attorneys are debating how to alter laws that give judges authority only in stretches of Louisiana where courthouses have been destroyed. The objective is to enable judges to hear cases outside their jurisdictions.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed an executive order this week suspending deadlines for almost all state court proceedings and throwing out statutes of limitations. But legal experts say it will be difficult to get around constitutional issues not covered under the governor's order.

Defendants must be put before a magistrate judge within 72 hours in Louisiana where it is determined if there is probable cause to hold them in custody or require bond. They must be formally arraigned within 60 days.

Of the 8,000 prisoners transferred from flooded prisons, about 4,500 have not had charges filed against them, or they have a trial or an appeal pending, said Julie Cullen, director of the criminal division at the Louisiana attorney general's office.

All of them have the right to a speedy trial, and time is running short.

"There are the short-term concerns and we're dealing with that, but there are long-term ramifications in how we protect constitutional rights of individuals in the midst of a disaster," Cullen said.

Temporary facility

The state has set up a temporary facility near Baton Rouge that has been able to handle the defendants who must go before a magistrate.

Yet the New Orleans infrastructure that supported myriad legal services, private and public, does not exist there, including things as simple as bonding agencies, said David Price, president of the State Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys.

The state Supreme Court, the District Attorneys Association and other legal experts were drafting a series of proposals this week for an executive order that would allow Blanco to override or suspend some statutory requirements, giving the state breathing room, Cullen said.

Those proposals could be on the governor's desk by early next week.

Defense attorneys have played a part in crafting the proposals, but concerns remain for people who were already in jail, or who may have been arrested in the chaotic days after New Orleans' levees broke.

"My concern is that this drags on for a month, two months, who knows," Price said. "People are no longer going to get their day in court, which is their right. At that point, they're just citizens sitting in jail."

Members of the Supreme Court are meeting with district attorneys, the Louisiana attorney general and other experts to determine how to put defendants on trial outside of parishes where they were arrested.

No one is making predictions on when the city will be habitable again, much less when a jury pool could be assembled.

"There is an allowance for a change of venue, but that's typically the defendant asking for that," Price said. "The state could make the argument that it can't get a fair trial in New Orleans because there is no courthouse and no jurors. No one knows."

Federal judges affected

Hurricane Katrina did not limit the disruption to state courts. Laws that prohibit federal judges from doing court business outside their jurisdiction have handcuffed Louisiana's Eastern District judges.

In the face of a catastrophe, Congress acted quickly to remedy that.

The House unanimously passed legislation Wednesday that would allow federal courts to operate outside their jurisdiction in the event of a disaster and the Senate followed suit Thursday.

President Bush could sign the changes into law as early as Friday.

Talk of such legislation began in earnest after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The proposed legislation goes back a couple of years and was intended for use in an emergency," said Dick Carelli, spokesman for the federal courts administrative office in Washington. "Here's your emergency."

Federal judges from Louisiana's Eastern District have scattered to three cities and were awaiting authority from the president.

Hurricane Katrina did much more than destroy courthouses and make jurisdictional boundaries ludicrous.

"There were about 16,000 dues-paying attorneys in Louisiana and half of them were in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes," said Frank Neuner Jr., president of the Louisiana State Bar Association.

Up to eight district attorneys offices were flooded or destroyed, said Pete Adams, president of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association.

"There is going to be a big backlog, that is all that anyone can be sure of," Adams said. "I can't really guess when we will be returning to any sense of normalcy. We're not going to give up, though."

For those in private practice, the return to normalcy may have to be found elsewhere, some attorneys said.

Larry Arcell, 53, an attorney with the New Orleans firm Barker, Boudreaux, Lamy & Foley, left all the records behind in his downtown office. He is tracking down clients using his memory and the Internet in Houston, where he is staying.

----------
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509090158sep09,1,5848767.story?coll=chi-news-hed

csheehan@tribune.com
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

Posted by lois at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

Hurricane Katrina---Donations Needed for Justice Activists Struggling to Rebuild

Here are two oranizaitons that can use your donations:
1. Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC).
2. Critical Resistance. The CR Southeast Regional Office in New Orleans was destroyed by the Hurricane. Tamika Middleton, the South East Regional Coordinator for CR, was unfortunately
living in New Orleans, working directly with the CR New Orleans folks. She is safe and out of there now, but the CR office there was destroyed. The that the national staff is attempting to set up another SE office somewhere else.
Donations can be made through the www.criticalresistance.org

Brothers and Sisters Who Want to Help,

Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) is a 5 year old grassroots statewide organization dedicated to creating a better life for Louisiana’s youth, who are or at risk of being incarcerated. We have offices in New Orleans and in Lake Charles. We have members across the state of Louisiana.

As you can imagine, our whole world has been turned upside down by the course of events in the last week.

We have members in New Orleans who we cannot find. Some were old and sick, some told us they were staying when we called last Saturday, saying “God will take care of me.” In Louisiana right now, there are hundreds of kids locked up who have no idea if their families are alive or not. The youth from the Orleans Parish Detention Center arrived at Jetson Correctional Center for Youth on Wednesday, covered in sewage, starving, dehydrated, having been stranded for days with no water or food.

We want to find our members and the young people our sister organization works with (the Youth Empowerment Project) and their families. We need to find homes for children who are being released but have no homes to return to. We need to get people out of shelters that are treating them like prisoners and into homes or at least hotel rooms with food and water and some security and hope.

We also want the racist, dehumanizing news coverage to stop. We want members and non-members alike to LIVE and stop being blamed for being abandoned and left to die. We want our friends and families to stop being treated like “insurgents” in some kind of war, cast as “looters,” and “thugs,” and told that the people who are supposed to be saving them have the right to “shoot to kill.”

We want people to understand that, in the words of a friend, a hurricane of poverty and racism hit New Orleans a long time ago. The people you see on national TV today, drowning in contaminated water, starving to death, fighting for survival in a situation where no one meant for them to survive – these people have been living this reality for years. Only now, the world is watching. Only now it is happening faster and being photographed by news media that can get in and out of the city even though food and water cannot. Now, in vivi-color, we are all watching the sick truth of how this city, this state and this nation do not care about poor people of color. Worse than don’t care.

We have to do something. It is not in our organizational “mission” to find people homes and reunite incarcerated kids with their families. Nor is it our mission to go shelter to shelter helping people focus the kind of rage and fury that leads to riots into something powerful, productive, and potentially future-altering. But we have cried and yelled and talked about it for days and today we finally pulled out the butcher block and markers and planned.

So many people have written asking for ways they can help and we’re definitely going to need it. If you want to help FFLIC help our families survive the ineptitude and racism has left thousands to die, here are some things you can
do:

1) Donate: Send a check to the “FFLIC Hurricane Relief Fund” to 920 Platt Street, Sulphur, Louisiana, 70663.

2) Volunteer: Come and help us walk through the shelters, find people, help folks apply for FEMA assistance, figure out what needs they have, match folks up with other members willing to take people in. We especially need Black folks to help us as the racial divide between relief workers and evacuees is stark. Email us ASAP if you would like to help with this work.

3) Send supplies for the effort: We don’t need tee-shirts and underwear. We need things like cars, computers, a copy machine, a fax machine. All of these items are going to what we need to have in place to better help our families. To find out exactly what we need, call us at the number below.

4) Organize others to send donations, supplies or come down here and help.

5) If you are of modest means and you can’t volunteer your time, do what you believe gives us strength. Pray, write op-eds or letters to the editor, organize your block, write FEMA and tell them what you think, protest local racist media coverage

We can’t promise you a 501(c) (3) letter to make your donation tax deductible. We are trying are hardest to get this in place soon but its not our priority. We can promise you that every dime will be spent helping the beautiful people of New Orleans who have lost everything they have, survive and resist.

Do not hesitate to email us with questions. PLEASE email all 4 addresses
however:
kdhiggs@hotmail.com, familiescantwait@yahoo.com, deenv_2000@yahoo.com, xochitl@mediajumpstart.org

With hope, rage, and heavy hearts,

FFLIC staff
Gina Womack, Xochitl Bervera, Grace Bauer and Kori Higgs

--
Xochitl Bervera
Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
1600 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd
New Orleans, LA 70113
(504) 522-5437 x248 (w)
(504) 606-8846 (c)

Posted by lois at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2005

Alternatives to Red Cross Giving for Hurricane Katrina

This site has a very long and interesting list of people/organizations doing Hurricane Relief/Rebuilding, etc.

including Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children.
http://www.sparkplugfoundation.org/katrinarelief.html

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Tides Foundation has a Rapid Response Disaster Relief Fund that specializes in relief projects that serve those most in need and most forgotten or disenfranchised from traditional relief organizations:

http://www.tidesfoundation.org/RR_0905.cfm

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New Orleans Network : a way for people to connect with and support the New Orleans evacuees in their area, It will

also be a way for New Orleans refugees to find each other in their exile communities and organize to take back their city and make sure that it is rebuilt in ways that serve ALL New Orleans residents. There will be exile community bulletin boards, discussion boards, resource listings, advocacy how-to sheets, events calendars, etc. They are seeking donations.

http://www.NewOrleansNetwork.org

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Neighborhood Story Project:

They'll spend the next 4 months working with evacuee high school students to document the stories of

people living in the Astrodome. They are in the process of reprinting the original Neighborhood Story Project Books at a print shop in Houston. The original books, each written by a high school student about their neighborhood in New Orleans, were the best-selling books in New Orleans over the summer, behind Harry Potter 6. All remaining copies were destroyed in the flooding.
Anyone who wants to help get their local independent bookstore to take a box of these incredible books to sell as a way to raise money for relief and recovery, and as a way to get out the amazing stories of the people and neighborhoods of New Orleans, please contact: jamieschweser@yahoo.com

Posted by lois at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)