Prison guards accused of abusing inmates in Louisiana
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By DAVID ROHDE and CHRISTOPHER DREW The New York Times - Published: October 2, 2005
Lawyers for inmates in Louisiana say that prison guards have been engaging in abuse of some of the nearly 8,000 prisoners who have been 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 in New Orleans left prisoners locked in their cells while floodwaters rose to their necks, and that others engaged in systematic beatings and sexual 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. The criminal justice system in the region has been paralyzed by the flooding.
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 at least 19 inmates taken after being evacuated have complained of beatings and sexual abuse.
"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. Laborde said all prisoners had been evacuated safely from jails affected by the floods, and that no bodies had been found. But she said her department would send a team on Monday to investigate the reported beatings there.
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.
Prisoners in Jena complained in the affidavits that guards had been dragging them from their cells by the hair and 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 correctional officers sent to the area after the hurricane, had participated in the abuse.
"I'm afraid for my safety," read one hand-written note lawyers say was smuggled to them last week by a Jena prisoner named Keith Dillon. "It's going to be worse when y'all leave. I was beaten 9-28-05."
Tom Antenen, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Corrections, said that 10 New York City corrections officers were working in Jena. He said no officers had reported problems there.
"All the reports have been positive," 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," 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."
The Jena facility is a former juvenile detention center that was closed in 2000 after a federal investigation found systematic abuse occurring there. It was re-opened 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.
Other inmates interviewed by the lawyers said 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 the day before the storm for public drunkenness and resisting arrest.
He said that guards ordered prisoners into their cells, locked the doors and then left the facility. After power went out on Monday afternoon, floodwaters then began to gradually fill his cell, eventually reaching up to his neck.
"Just imagine, you're in your cell, the lights out and the water was rising," he said. "The deputies were nowhere to be found. They completely abandoned us."
Bright said that the floodwaters stopped rising Monday night and 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 trying to pry cell doors off their hinges, he said. He said that when he left the jail four inmates were still stuck inside their cells.
"One guy was in a diabetic coma," he said.
In a report released last week, Human Rights Watch said they feared that some prisoners may have drowned in their cells and called for an investigation into whether prisoners were abandoned. The group said that as many 300 prisoners were missing from city jails, but it is unclear whether they were found.
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.
Gusman said it "would have been impossible" to evacuate so many inmates as the storm approached. He said reinforcements from the state Corrections Department arrived on Tuesday, and they built scaffolding to enable the inmates to climb down from the overpass near a spot that was dry enough for buses to pick them up.
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He said that most of the inmates were evacuated by Wednesday. 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 the neck-high waters.
Quantonio Williams, 31, an assistant office manager who had been picked up on a marijuana possession charge, said guards locked him in his cell when floodwaters reached knee level in the jail where he was held in New Orleans.
The guards then left and returned after prisoners took over a control room and freed themselves.
He complained that during the subsequent three day evacuation, guards drank water for themselves but gave none to prisoners as they sat in open sun or on buses. When he finally arrived at a state prison in Hunt, La., hundreds of prisoners were placed in a field, tossed sandwiches over a fence and forced to go to the bathroom in the field.
Laplombe said that the important factor was that no prisoners perished during the evacuation. "We were there for transportation and to save lives," she said.
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