[Mb-civic] Fw: Guantanamo on the Mississippi/unreal

[AARON RUSSO]

I opened the file.. thanks.. look at this.. what has happened to america?..aaron
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar06/Flaherty11.htm<http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar06/Flaherty11.htm>

Guantanamo on the Mississippi 
by Jordan Flaherty 
www.dissidentvoice.org<http://www.dissidentvoice.org/>
March 11, 2006

Sometimes the injustices here in New Orleans leave me numb.  But the
continuing debacle of our criminal justice system inspires in me a sense of
indignation I thought was lost to cynicism long ago.  Ursula Price, a staff
investigator for the indigent defense organization A Fighting Chance, has
met with several thousand hurricane survivors who were imprisoned at the
time of the hurricane, and her stories chill me. "I grew up in small town
Mississippi," she tells me.  "We had the Klan marching down our main
street. But still, I've never seen anything like this." 

Safe Streets, Strong Communities, a New Orleans-based criminal justice
reform coalition that Price also works with, has just released a report
based on more than a hundred recent interviews with prisoners who have been
locked up since pre-Katrina and are currently spread across thirteen
prisons and hundreds of miles. They found the average number of days people
had been locked up without a trial was 385 days. One person had been locked
up for 1,289 days.  None of them have been convicted of any crime. 

"I've been working in the system for the while, I do capital cases and I've
seen the worst that the criminal justice system has to offer," Price told
me. "But even I am shocked that there has been so much disregard for the
value of these peoples lives, especially people who have not been proved to
have done anything wrong." As lawyers, advocates, and former prisoners
stressed to me in interviews over the last couple of weeks, arrest is not
the same as conviction. According to a pre-Katrina report from the
Metropolitan Crime Commission, 65% of those arrested in New Orleans are
eventually released without ever having been charged with any crime. 

Samuel Nicholas (his friends call him Nick) was imprisoned in Orleans
Parish Prison (OPP) on a misdemeanor charge, and was due to be released
August 31.  Instead, after a harrowing journey of several months, he was
released February 1. Nick told me he still shudders when he thinks of those
days in OPP. 

"We heard boats leaving, and one of the guys said 'hey man, all the
deputies gone,'" Nick relates. "We took it upon ourselves to try to
survive. They left us in the gym for two days with nothing. Some of those
guys stayed in a cell for or five days. People were hollering, 'get me out,
I don't want to drown, I don't want to die,' we were locked in with no
ventilation, no water, nothing to eat. Its just the grace of god that a lot
of us survived." 

Benny Flowers, a friend of Nick's from the same Central City neighborhood,
was on a work release program, and locked in a different building in the
sprawling OPP complex. In his building there were, by his count, about 30
incarcerated youth, some as young as 14 years old. "I don't know why they
left the children like that. Locked up, no food, no water. Why would you do
that? They couldn't swim; most of them were scared to get into the water.
We were on work release, so we didn't have much time left. We weren't
trying to escape, we weren't worried about ourselves, we were worried about
the children. The guards abandoned us, so we had to do it for ourselves. We
made sure everyone was secured and taken care of. The deputies didn't do
nothing. It was inmates taking care of inmates, old inmates taking care of
young inmates. We had to do it for ourselves." 

Benny Hitchens, another former inmate, was imprisoned for unpaid parking
tickets. "They put us in a gym, about 200 of us, and they gave us three
trash bags, two for defecation and one for urination. That was all we had
for 200 people for two days." 

State Department of Corrections officers eventually brought them, and
thousands of other inmates, to Hunts Prison, in rural Louisiana, where
evacuees were kept in a field, day and night, with no shelter and little or
no food and water. "They didn't do us no kind of justice," Flowers told me.
"We woke up early in the morning with the dew all over us, then in the
afternoon we were burning up in the summer sun. There were about 5,000 of
us in three yards." 

Nick was taken from Hunts prison to Oakdale prison. "At Oakdale they had us
on lockdown 23 hours, on Friday and Saturday it was 24 hours. We hadn't
even been convicted yet. Why did we have to be treated bad? Twenty-three
and one ain't nothing nice, especially when you ain't been convicted of a
crime yet. But here in New Orleans you're guilty 'til you're proven
innocent. Its just the opposite of how its supposed to be."