Last summer, after 10 men escaped from the Orleans Justice Center, two words appeared in chalk outside the jail: “To easy.” Officials pointed to staffing shortages and infrastructure failures—and the recent indictment of Sheriff Susan Hutson raises more questions in the public’s mind.
But those explanations and questions stop short of the real story.
“To easy” wasn’t just a phrase about the escape. It was a diagnosis—the predictable outcome of decades of local, state, and federal neglect of New Orleans’ children.
Maybe that neglect seemed obvious to me because I attended and taught in the city’s public schools after Hurricane Katrina.
The jail escape coincided with the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, prompting national comparisons of whether New Orleans is better or worse off today.
The most irrefutable evidence sits in our jails: nine of the 10 escapees began school after the historic event. Most came from the high-poverty low-lying areas of town that flooded the worst, leaving families displaced.
“To easy” wasn’t just a phrase about the escape.
It was a diagnosis—the predictable outcome
of decades of local, state, and federal neglect of New Orleans children.
The instability within local schools was, and continues to be, government-made. “When government decisions destabilize families and communities, the psychological impact on children is profound and lasting,” notes Tulane University psychology professor Stacy Overstreet, an expert on trauma in children.
For me, this is personal. Katrina decimated 80% of my hometown in 2005, causing hundreds of deaths and widespread displacement. I was 10 years old when Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast. The tragedy of being a refugee in your own country takes a toll on everyone, but especially children. As New Orleans children returned back to school, no one screened us for trauma, though many of us had missed entire years of school while displaced or had attended classes in schools where we were mocked and ostracized. Some kids fought. Others withdrew into themselves. Each of us was hurting.
The escapees from the jail were there, starting as traumatized students in schools and, without sufficient resources, eventually moving into the courthouse as teens and adults.
To characterize them as individual failures ignores the broader reality: they were shaped in a system marked by chaotic school reforms and little stability anywhere else. Political priorities outweighed the well-being of children, teachers, and caregivers.
Trying to meet the needs of students who need so much
I came home after college to teach because I believed, naively, that I could reverse the impact of this neglect. Even though my first year was over a decade after the storm, my students and their families still faced abysmal conditions. From the start, I learned that teaching was less about content and more about meeting the conditions students faced daily. Children cannot learn unless their basic needs are met.
So, many schools tried to meet those needs. We used student and parent data to build therapeutic peer groups addressing hunger, homelessness, grief, addiction, and incarceration. Schools provided food during breaks and clothing for caregivers. I personally ran an after-school track team and organized a career day to provide positive school experiences for my students. It wasn’t perfect, but we saw something rare: academic growth alongside increased self-esteem and stability.
But there was, and continues to be, more need than resources. Without enough counselors, interventionists, and stable programs, our children are forced to survive by any means: stealing food from grocery stores and breaking into cars for warm and safe places to sleep. After decades of neglect, the criminal legal system conveniently intervenes, criminalizing the subhuman conditions these children struggle to survive in.
I witnessed these conditions frequently. One of my fifth graders was one of 12 children. As the eldest girl in her mother’s house, she was responsible for her younger siblings. After track practice I often dropped her home to a house with little furniture and even less food. When she entered sixth grade her grades plummeted. Her parents had a new baby and at 12 years old she was responsible for a newborn.
The East as a Case Study
Before the storm, New Orleans East — my neighborhood — was burgeoning and equipped with the essentials: grocery stores, medical facilities, and retail centers that met the community’s needs. However, during my home visits (seeing students at their homes) a decade later, the reality for my students and their families was starkly different.
Many lived and still live in dilapidated housing with unreliable access to clean water and no functional street lighting. They’re also geographically disconnected: living miles away from quality food sources and necessary medical care. Now, a prevailing narrative labels students from the East as poor and violent, as if the realities are personal, not systemic failures. That is perhaps the most damaging blow.
There are hundreds of students across the city living in these same conditions. As I heard story after story from my students, I began to realize that our school could not address the full weight of their childhood traumas and under-resourced education. No school could. These situations had been created by our government due to a refusal to invest in scientific-backed solutions for its people, from family planning to high-quality housing to economic opportunity.
Many of these young people entered school with great potential. They were curious and enthusiastic. But their anxieties and burdens wore them down, as they and their families shouldered them alone.
Instead of taking the next step, to become students learning nursing or literature or construction, they became young people permanently entangled in the state’s penal systems. Years later, many have felonies. Others are dead. Some have made headlines as escapees or as defendants in sensationalized court cases.
Systemic and even generational neglect
These stories are difficult to tell, but they are common in classrooms across the city. Since schools are increasingly judged by test scores and performance metrics, it’s become more advantageous to push out poor kids and under-performing students, than to lift them up.
Caring educators often represent the last chance to help a child go in a different direction before the system takes hold.
But some young adults are already there. And instead of trying to rehabilitate its citizens, the escape proved political theater was a priority. It was more convenient to label the adults in these jails as problems — to flatten Black, Southern, and underclass identities. Part of the blame needs to be placed back on those who decry young people and crime while cutting the very preschool classes and food-pantry assistance needed to stabilize our children.
Stories about who these individuals are, what they were denied, and what they endured are longer and more complex. Often, if you look closely at their lives, you see a pattern of systemic neglect that existed way before they were born. In some families, it’s generational neglect. To help our kids stay out of the well-known school-to-prison pipeline, they require resources.
Louisiana: scaling back key investments for children
It is vital that we recognize how environmental and economic factors shape the educational landscape and work toward meaningful solutions. Despite culturally competent teachers and curriculum, the state’s structural neglect is too great to solve the issues in their classrooms. The state is not rising to the challenge. We’re currently spending less per student than the national average. And over the last three years, Louisiana has scaled back key investments that keep children and our cities safer: early childhood education, food security, mental health professionals, and education.
Among school personnel, the first people to be cut conduct the very interventions proven to improve outcomes — academic recovery, early childhood support, and targeted services.
If that safety net didn’t catch those kids, another net is ready. As our education systems struggle, Louisiana is simultaneously incarcerating more kids, with youth prison populations have surging by nearly 50% in recent years.
No governor, sheriff, district attorney, or attorney general is solely responsible for these issues or can fix this system alone. Louisiana citizens must watch the legislative sessions and vote but we also must pay attention to the grandstanding we do about crime without investing in the infrastructure to fix it. Together policies and civic action shapes what comes next for our children and their futures.
“To easy” wasn’t just a comment about the mechanics of escape. It was an indictment of a system that has, for decades, made it far too easy for children to fall through the cracks — and far too hard for them to find their way out.
Julienne Louis-Anderson is a former educator who writes about the intersection of culture and politics with education and human development. She is also a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
Photographer’s note: The photos used throughout this piece are used to portray the general situation of New Orleans children post-Katrina, not the circumstances of the children pictured.
