"They left us there to die." 600 Prisoners Abandoned in the New Orleans Flood

September 28, 2005

“Of all the nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst. Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling.”  This statement was made by a Human Rights Watch researcher who interviewed incarcerated people from the Templeman III jail, a 600 person jail that is part of the larger Orleans Parish Prison.

Incarcerated people from two other buildings in the prison, Templeman I & II, were evacuated from their flooded buildings on Tuesday, August 30. People in Templeman III were left locked in their cells without food and water from August 27, before the storm hit, until Thursday, September 1, after floodwaters reached at least chest-high. The last time prisoners in Templeman III remembered seeing a guard was August 29.

Prisoners on the upper levels could hear those people trapped in first floor cells screaming as the flood waters rose. They tried to alert the guards in the other buildings by putting signs in their windows and throwing burning blankets out of the windows. Signs that were still visible when the Human Rights Watch researchers arrived at the prison read “Help Us” and “One Man Down.” Some people jumped from the windows.

Guards said there was no evacuation plan for the prison. 517 people who were listed as incarcerated in the Orleans Parish Prison before the hurricane are unaccounted for. 130 of those people were incarcerated in Templeman III.

This news brief is based on a report from Human Rights Watch. You can read the full story here:
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/09/22/usdom11773.htm

There is also a radio program focusing on the New Orleans jail on "Democracy Now" that ran on September 27, 2005. It can be found in their archive at http://www.democracynow.org/shows

or you can read the transcript of that radio program at http://www.democracynow.org/2005/9/27/after_the_hurricane_where_have_all

If these links are broken, you may have to search their web site archives.