Though they experienced the hurricane in separate OPP buildings, both Dan Bright and the guard say that by Monday night, most OPP officials had fled the scene to save themselves. There was no AC, no ventilation."ĭownstairs, the water rose from the prisoners' ankles, to knees, to waists. "Food and all services had been discontinued. "Our gym was on the ground floor, and the inmates were getting agitated," the guard tells VICE. Below him the terrified prisoners began to riot in the sewage-tainted floodwaters. And we're doing all this in the dark-all you see is the water." Lucky for Bright, he'd been lodged him on the second floor. "You can knock it off its hinge and then slide out the bottom of the cell. "It's on a hinge that slides back and forth," Bright recalls. "The prisoners thought we were all planning to leave them to die locked in there, and I can't say I blamed them for thinking that."īright and his cellmate, a diabetic man, kicked at their own door for two or three hours. With no power, the electric cell doors remained stubbornly shut as the facility filled with water. Then the electricity went off and the water started rising," says Bright, who was being kept inside OPP's Templeton building. "My attorneys and the bail bondsmen were all leaving the city. On VICE News: Indian Workers Awarded $14M In Post-Hurricane Katrina Trafficking Case "When the storm hit, it sounded like the building was gonna come down," the guard recalls. All the lights went out, and the under-ventilated jail became stifling. When Katrina hit on Monday, August 29, OPP's generators failed. We were stationed on the outside of the gymnasium, unarmed, cause no one can bring weapons into OPP." "All of our inmates were put in one big gymnasium at OPP-we'd thought we'd have cells, or structure. Bernard out to OPP the night before Katrina hit," recalls one guard who worked in the jail at the time of the hurricane and asked to remain anonymous since he is still employed by the city's corrections system. "It took us six hours to evacuate about 300 prisoners from St. Katrina soon made extra clear the many drawbacks of over-enthusiastically caging so many people at once. The robust jail and regressive criminal justice policies made for a perfect storm for what was to come.
They were people who couldn't pay traffic tickets, drunk tourists who'd pissed on Bourbon Street, kids caught smoking pot. In August 2005, the majority of OPP's roughly 6,800 prisoners hadn't been convicted of a serious crime. Because OPP earns roughly $25 a day per prisoner from the state, city cops don't do a whole lot of catch-and-release. The grouping of buildings that comprise Orleans Parish Prison render it something of a crown jewel in what some call the world's incarceration capital-Louisiana-and at the time of Katrina, one of America's biggest jails.
Governor Kathleen Blanco added that the storm was "very serious," and "we need to get as many people out as possible." In spite of this, Sheriff Marlin Gusman announced, " The prisoners will stay where they belong." He had generators, he said, and a loyal staff, so the city's inmates would hang tight. Sunday was deceptively peaceful, as Katrina whirled closer and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the first-ever mandatory evacuation of the city.
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