FROM
NEW YORK TIMES
May 10, 2006

Teenage Prisoners Describe Hurricane Horrors
By Adam Nossiter

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.