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| Prisoners Evacuated After Hurricanes Allege Abuse |
| By NY Times |
| Published: 10/03/2005 |
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Lawyers for inmates in Louisiana say that prison officers have abused some of the nearly 8,000 prisoners who were 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 officers left prisoners locked in their cells while floodwaters rose to their necks, and that others engaged in regular beatings and other 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. State and local officials say flooding has destroyed much of the court system and legal records in New Orleans. 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 more than two dozen inmates have complained of beatings, racial slurs and sexual taunts. 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. 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. Lawyers said that interviews with the 450 prisoners in Jena produced complaints that officers had been 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 officers from Louisiana, as well as New York City corrections officers sent to the area after the hurricane, had participated in the abuse. Thomas Antenen, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Correction, said that 10 corrections officers from the city were working in Jena but that no officers had reported problems there. 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. Officers used racial slurs, forced prisoners to get up on tables and "hop like bunnies" and threatened to force them to perform sex acts on officers, the affidavits said. The lawyers said that prisoners showed bruises, cuts and chipped teeth that were consistent with their accounts of beatings. Prisoners confirmed that there had been a disturbance in the prison in early September. They said that the initial response had been heavy-handed, with officers forcing prisoners to lie naked, face down on the floor for five hours, and that brutal treatment continued for weeks. |
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