Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO – After Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans and the floodwaters began to rise, the Orleans Parish jail, housing more than 6,000 prisoners, became a scene of chaos and fear where guards abandoned their posts and inmates frantically attempted to escape.

“The water was coming in,” Orleans Parish sheriff’s deputy Darlene Poole recalled Thursday. “We were trying to keep the inmates under control. They were panicking. We didn’t have food. There was no water; no toilets.

“And then the power went out.”

In the wake of the storm, the jail was evacuated and now inmates are scattered across Louisiana in dozens of prisons and parish jails. Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union contend lawyers have been denied personal access to the inmates and have asked a federal judge to order prison officials to provide access.

Further, the ACLU is alleging that the treatment of prisoners violated court orders previously entered in the lawsuit.

On Thursday, ACLU attorneys filed written accounts prepared by 45 inmates who alleged they were beaten, shot at and abandoned by guards. The inmates’ identities were not revealed to protect them from recriminations.

ACLU attorney Eric Balaban, who has worked on a long-running lawsuit challenging prison conditions in Louisiana, said the accounts were “remarkably similar.”

The accounts are also similar to comments made by Poole, 45, who evacuated and now is living in Elgin, Ill. In an interview, she said that the situation was so dire in her unit that guards – some of whom had brought their families there in the belief the jail would be a safe place to weather the storm – locked themselves in the cafeteria.

“We could hear (the inmates) yelling, saying “They left us here to die,”‘ she said. “It was a bad place to be … They were terrified. They saw the water was rising.”

Poole said officials report that no inmates died in the wake of the storm. “I find that hard to believe,” she said. “One inmate told me he saw another inmate floating.”

One inmate, who was housed in the same unit where Poole was assigned, told the ACLU that he remained locked in his cell as the water rose to his waist while other prisoners escaped. He said he was not provided with food between Aug. 27 and Sept. 1.

Poole said she began her shift on Saturday, Aug. 27. “Saturday was calm. It was Sunday when everything started getting bad,” she said. “We ran out of food. Then, when the power went out, generators started, but then the generators busted.”

“We tried to get inmates out of their cells,” she said. “They were trying to get crowbars to open the cells. … They were like caged animals.”

She recalled, “I remember an inmate who was left down there and I asked a ranking officer about him. He said he would be OK. What I remember is him knocking on the window, asking “What are you going to do about me?”‘

In the prisoner accounts filed by the ACLU, inmates said some deputies used stun guns and shot bean bags and pepper spray, keeping prisoners in their cells.

Poole confirmed inmates used broom handles to break glass windows to get out. She said about 100 prisoners had been locked into a gymnasium area.

“They were just locked in there with no supervision,” she said. Jail officers “thought there was no way they could get out. But they climbed through the bathroom air-conditioning ducts and got out to the roof.”

One inmate said that she drank water from her toilet; another said she drank water from a trashcan. Some inmates reported seeing other inmates who had passed out from lack of water and food. An inmate reported that guards refused to intervene when several prisoners began beating another inmate in a fight for food.

Another inmate said he was released from his cell and moved to a cell on a higher floor after the water rose to his chest. After two days with no guards in sight, he said, “We made a (hole) in the wall so we can get some help from outside, but no one came.”

Ultimately, the inmate said he swam out and was rescued by deputies. But several inmates reported that guards fired guns at prisoners who were escaping.

When the jail was finally evacuated, inmates were taken to a highway overpass in New Orleans where they remained for at least two days before being bused to other prisons and jails.

Poole said she and other guards, as well as the prisoners, had no food and water at the overpass. “We had no medical people, we had no food and we had no water,” she said.

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