Voice Post:

[camwyn]

Comments

[hangingfire.livejournal.com]

Conversation on some friendslocked comments on my blog:

Me: I'd pay good money to see Nagin deck Bush.
Friend: Hell, I'd post Nagin's bond.

Good luck. If you find yourself up Austin way, feel free to get in touch.

[silly-dan.livejournal.com]

Hi,

This Torontonian, and a Massachusetts expat I know, and probably everyone else I know, just wanted to say that it's wonderful what you're doing. Thanks.

[northstar83.livejournal.com]

You rock. You really do!

[zsero.livejournal.com]

That should be Bush decking Nagin. It's Nagin's screwup, not Bush's. He's the mayor, Blanco's the governor, between them they shouldn't have let things get to the state that they had to call in the feds. When did disaster prevention and recovery become primarily a federal responsibility? It's your city, you prepare a real evacuation plan, including provision for the people with no transport. And when you call three mandatory evacuations a year, expect that people will get tired of listening to them, and when the big one hits they'll be at home, so have a plan B. And when you release all the prisoners, and tell the police not to bother the looters because rescuing people takes priority, what do you think is going to happen?

Sorry I'm late.

[aberrantangels]

And when you call three mandatory evacuations a year, expect that people will get tired of listening to them, and when the big one hits they'll be at home, so have a plan B. And when you release all the prisoners,

Your source for either of these claims, please?

Re: Sorry I'm late.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

The 3 mandatory evacuations a year is from a friend who lived there all her life until about 3 years ago, and arrived back on the Wednesday before the hurricane. "Thank G-d we decided to evacuate. I was adamant not to evacuate. We had just schlepped 2 babies all the way from Australia and N.O. has about 3 mandatory evacuations declared a year, so I wasn't all that into it [...] I can see why people chose not to evacuate. The only reason I came around in the end was that I figured it would be more uncomfortable if we lost electricity for several days than to endure schlepping the kids through an evacuation. Luckily I changed my mind in time." 3 a year may not be a precise figure, but I trust my correspondent's veracity.

As for prisoners being released, it was in all the news reports.

Re: Sorry I'm late.

[aberrantangels]

3 a year may not be a precise figure, but I trust my correspondent's veracity.

Good for you. I'm in more of a "trust but verify" mode at the moment, I'm afraid. I lived within driving distance of N.O. from August 1978 to August 2002 (which would mean I left the area about the same time as your friend), and I don't recall hearing about even one mandatory evacuation that wasn't linked to an actual hurricane. In fact, I only remember there being calls for evacuation in 1998, when it looked for all the world like Georges was going to hit the city (right up until it made its actual landfall, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast where I was living at the time).

As for prisoners being released, it was in all the news reports.

Then naturally, you'll have no difficulty whatsoever providing me with a link to one of the news reports it was in.

I saw something that reminded me of you.

[aberrantangels]

As for prisoners being released, it was in all the news reports.

Maybe, but it's beginning to look like there was more to the story than the Liberal Media were saying:

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are asking for an accounting of more than five hundred people who were in the prison before the flood, but are not on the list of those evacuated....

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.

« September 18, 2005 - September 24, 2005 |
September 29, 2005

Jeanne d'Arc:
"They left us there to die."

As the flood waters rose, hundreds of prisoners in New Orleans were simply abandoned:

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmates' 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.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are asking for an accounting of more than five hundred people who were in the prison before the flood, but are not on the list of those evacuated.

Who were these prisoners?

Democracy Now! has some information:

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.

As far as I can tell, the only mainstream news source that has picked up this story is the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which focuses more on the "struggle...to keep destructive and desperate inmates at bay" than on the humanitarian issues:

..."There were some inmates who acted out, but I'd say 99 percent acted responsibly," Short said.

Acting responsibly apparently means laying down and quietly dying, not trying to get the hell out of there, or help others survive.

So it appears we were both wrong: you for believing that Nagin threw open the prison gates and said "Go forth, my loyal shvartser legions, and pillage and rape in the name of St. Willie Horton"*, and me for believing that anyone said "Go forth and try to not drown."

* My apologies if there is any actual difference between what you were actually thinking and that representation of what you were thinking, but I couldn't see it from outside your head.