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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-prisons2oct02,1,74
20887.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

A SHATTERED GULF COAST 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 ó not
martial law ó 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 Ö 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 ó 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.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/national/nationalspecial/02jail.html