Within the Orleans Parish Prison jail, thousands of people remained trapped inside as the floodwaters rose higher by the hour.
Panic began to spread as incarcerated people realized that security guards had decided to save their own lives and leave the men locked in the jail to die.
“Nobody there — we was left for dead, man,” recalled Edward “Edgar” Burton, now 48, by phone earlier this month. Burton was trapped inside the Orleans Parish Prison, known as The Old Parish.
As the storm blew in, 6,375 people were held within the city’s 12-building jail complex, more than the entire population held then at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, according to the American Civil Liberties Union report Abandoned and Abused, which documented testimonials from hundreds of people who were in the jail when Hurricane Katrina struck.
The utter failure of New Orleans jailers to protect incarcerated people during the disaster painted a stark picture for those who returned to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, determined to create a more fair justice system that didn’t incarcerate more people than anywhere in the United States.
“I think it humanized who was locked up,” said Sade Dumas, who led the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC) after the storm. “There’s just such a difference between people being locked up behind huge buildings and no one knows what’s happening there. But when we saw so many humans on a bridge abandoned – when we hear the stories of how people were left in the jail and didn’t have the supplies they needed, or even food or direction – it wasn’t numbers anymore.”
Reformers, led by OPPRC, were able to limit the construction of a new jail to one building, with a 1,250 population cap. The Department of Justice stepped in, citing abuse by guards, high levels of violence and sexual assault between incarcerated people, and poor healthcare. A new sheriff, Susan Hutson, was elected, with pledges to run a more humane facility.
But echoes of those pre-Katrina problems have cropped up in recent years and months, with reports of chronic understaffing, brought to public view in May, as guards left their posts during a massive escape, as broken doors and plumbing leaks created fights and flooding in some tiers, and as the jail became increasingly overcrowded – far beyond the limits set by the post-Katrina reforms.
It was far bigger and, most say, far worse in 2005, when the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office basically rented out many of its beds. The state paid per diem payments for its sentenced prisoners, who made up nearly a third of the total, roughly 2,000 people. The jail also kept federal prisoners for an even higher rate. The rest were still in the midst of pretrial proceedings, many held for unpaid tickets or technical violations.
Before the storm, the New Orleans Police Department had even patrolled through the city doing roundups, checking warrants and making petty arrests, booking 300 new people over three days, the ACLU reported. Sheriffs from other low-lying area also brought people from their jails to Orleans, further filling up the city’s lockups.
The jail becomes a death trap
In other parts of the city, as the floodwaters rose from severed federal levees, people climbed to roofs or attics to escape water. But those in the jail couldn’t climb to safety because they were locked into cells.
Some survivors reported the prison cells began to feel like coffins as the buildings began to fill with water mixed with sewerage.
“Man, that place smelled like death,” said Big Whappy, 45, a native of the 13th Ward who was still going through pretrial proceedings. He had been put into a cell on the fifth floor of the House of Detention, where he had weathered the storm and woke to a sunny day, only to watch from the window as the water started to spring up. “As the days passed, you could first see the water by the bumper of a car,” he said. “Then whole cars started to go underwater.”
They asked deputies what was going on. No one could tell them anything.
On the fifth floor, he was out of the reach of floodwaters. But there was no clean water to drink and the air was suffocating. With ventilation systems dead and the jail’s backup power in shambles, indoor temperatures also rose very quickly. On Wednesday, the city’s water system stopped working, so toilets began overflowing. The smell of sewage and sweat was thick. It was miserable. “There really wasn’t no sleeping,” he said.
The food was also running out. On Monday, the day of the storm, they were fed. On Tuesday, they got breakfast and then a piece of bologna and cheese, without bread or any sides. Starting on Wednesday, they got nothing.
Big Whappy had an ex-girlfriend who worked for the sheriff, who was able to get a message to him that his family was okay. But most people had no idea where family members were. All communication was cut. Often, neither phones or walkie-talkies worked. Cell phones with a 504 area code had scarce signals for weeks. There were false rumors of riots and escapes.
Finally, three days after the storm, some remaining deputies put zip ties on their hands and put them on a boat, then took them off at the nearest higher ground, near a jail building. It was hot, with a high of 87 degrees. They were starving and filthy. Worse yet, they didn’t know what would happen next.
“That was the worst time of my life,” he said. “That’s the worst I’ve ever endured in my entire life.”
Water rising in Old Parish
To survive, some found cell keys or figured out ways to breach the locks. “I said, it’s meant for us to live,” said Edward “Edgar” Burton, 48 – a native of the 3rd Ward in Uptown New Orleans, 3rd Ward – who had just recently come back from Angola for a sentence-reduction hearing.
When the storm hit, Burton was held in Orleans Parish Prison, sometimes called Old Parish, where the water tainted with sewerage began streaming into the building. Some people ended up climbing to top bunks to escape the water. But there weren’t enough bunks, because the cells were overcrowded, some to nearly double their official capacity, the ACLU report noted.
Though Burton had been imprisoned for eight years, he had stayed in close touch with his family. But he couldn’t reach them now, to make sure they were okay. “All I was able to think about was my family and my daughter,” he said. “I didn’t even know whether anybody was alive or not. It felt like a lifetime until I got in touch with my people.”
Burton, like other people held in the jail, saw no deputies for days. When a few deputies – along with volunteer rescuers from places like the Department of Fish and Wildlife – finally tried to open doors, cell doors short-circuited, forcing them to use crowbars and other tools to get people out.
“When I saw something that was bolted to the ground start to float, I knew it was bad,” he said. “People were screaming for help, but no one was coming. We thought we were going to drown in there.”
Burton broke a shower bar and used it to smash a window, allowing fresh air to finally circulate through the suffocating tier. “It was three layers of window,” he said. “I set the plastic on fire, hit the corner, hit the center, finally busted it out to get some air.”
He’d had a peach to eat on Monday, the day the storm blew through, but nothing since then. At one point, he broke up a fight about a can of peas. It was pitch-black: no generator, no lights. Despite the heat, there was no fresh drinking water. “We had to drink water from the toilet just to stay alive,” he said.
At some point, no one was arriving from the outside. Burton thought it was his last days, he said. It’s a memory he still cannot shake. As he recalled it earlier this month, he broke down, dropping a few tears.
When rescuers finally arrived, they were surprised to find him and the others in that cell block. “We were told no one was left,” they said.
Sheriff Marlin Gusman has consistently said that there were no fatalities in the OPP complex during the flooding and aftermath. Neither Burton or Big Whappy personally saw anyone die. But in the ACLU report, several deputies and many prisoners witnessed bodies hanging from fences or floating in water.
Those brought in to transport OPP prisoners from the city had no organized plan. Hundreds of incarcerated people were pulled from flooded tiers, cuffed, and packed onto buses with no idea where they were going.
Some were taken to bridges or highway overpasses, told to sit back to back in large groups, and held outside for hours in flaming heat with no shade, food, or water. Troops sometimes fired rubber bullets or pepper spray at people who moved or asked to go to the bathroom. A few were attacked by dogs.
Others were shipped directly to state prisons like Angola, Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, and Bossier Parish jail.
The water had shut down the jail’s data system and no one had papers identifying themselves. Though prisons and jails usually sort people by charges at intake, that didn’t happen at all. Former cop Len Davis, who had received a death sentence in early August, was shipped to Hunt and placed in an open yard along with people held on charges ranging from traffic warrants to murder. Armed Department of Corrections guards watched them from outside the fence and threw sandwiches over the fence to feed them.
Prison guards came from across the country to ‘help’
“None of the wardens knew who they had – this was pre-trial, post-trial people, people in treatment programs. People who were recently arrested and hadn’t even been to magistrate court to get a bond set. Just everybody under the sun,” said Phyllis Mann, who led defense lawyers looking for displaced prisoners. They ended up interviewing 4,000 people out of roughly 8,500 people who had been incarcerated in jails within the disaster area. Beyond dealing with their cases, the lawyers called families, and got people clothes.
Some of the guys were transferred to a defunct private prison in Jena. Officials brought in guards from all over the country, from private prisons and state prisons, Mann said. “There was no chain of command, no procedures.” At some places, she said, “guards were good and kind.” And other places, that wasn’t the case.
The phones weren’t working, so Mann and anyone who was part of her team would have to travel from her homebase in Alexandria to Baton Rouge and other cities just to file a document with the court. Outside her house’s front door, she kept a little brown lunch sack filled with keys, so that lawyers, social workers, investigators – anyone who came to help – could grab a key to her house or office.
After being rescued from the Orleans Parish jail complex, many of the men were transferred to Angola. “I ain’t know what to expect,” Big Whappy said, referring to confusion and uncertainty of being transferred to another facility. “They was helpful… they was trying to make it comfortable once we got there,” he said, noting that he’d rather forget the days before they arrived. “Everything before that was a get-it-how-you-live situation,” he said. “That was bad.”
Burton was moved from jail to jail and wasn’t able to talk to anyone in his family for at least a week, he said. Finally, he was able to speak with his mother, who’d been brought with other family members to Arkansas. “I recall she was so happy, to the point where she was in tears and my mama don’t normally get like that.”
For many, the coming months were nightmares turned to reality. Legal records were lost or destroyed. Court dates vanished. People jailed on minor charges were now basically held hostage, because they couldn’t show anyone their paperwork to show that they were being incarcerated long after their court-ordered release dates.
“When a person has been sentenced and they have served out their full sentence and they are not released—that is a violation of the Constitution,” Mann said, noting that a team of lawyers was determined to find everyone who had been transferred from OPP – and to determine why they hadn’t been released or, in some cases, if they should have even been arrested at all. “All of those things happened to people,” she said.
Lawyers had to stay a step ahead of the state Department of Corrections, which seemed to be thwarting the defense of people moved from Orleans. “We eventually resorted to filing habeas corpus petitions in the parish where the person was presently incarcerated but then the Department of Corrections would move those people before the petition could be heard, and then argue that there was no jurisdiction,” Mann recalled.
Some people who had already bonded out of jail remained in custody for months or even longer, due to the damages from the flooding and from Hurricanes Katrina and then Rita, which delayed releases. It took nearly a year after the storm for the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court to re-open , in June 2006. Early that month, on June 5, 2006, the old court building began its first trial since Katrina .
Still, even by the time the courts reopened, thousands of those held in the Orleans Parish jail were still locked up without clear charges. Still, the team worked with thousands of people to get them to the right places. “I think we got some people out who would’ve been stuck for a long, long time,” Mann said. “I think we got the courts and the Department of Corrections to find a way to get back into working order much earlier than they would have.”