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Locked Up to Die in Templeman III
Since hurricane Katrina hit we've all heard many stories of poor planning, and poor-to-horrible choices made by people who were in various positions of responsibility in terms of helping to reduce the human cost of the storm. But among those stories, yesterday was the first I'd heard of the Orleans Parish jail where guards and officials just left the prisoners locked up to die when the floodwaters started rising. L. pointed me to yesterday's Democracy Now which has many of the details about the facility known as Templeman III.
Thumbnail sketch: The storm started and no one did anything about evacuating the jail; instead, many area jails transferred prisoners there so the place was totally overcrowded w/people just wandering in common areas, etc. Water started rising, the guards abandoned the jail. Eventually some of the prisoners who were sort of “free” in the common areas helped others break out of lower cells so they wouldn't drown. And when prisoners eventually got out of the jail, the guards were waiting outside to transport them to an overpass where they were made to sit, some for three days or more. They were not allowed to move and had to relieve themselves where they sat. They were also not given food or water. When they were eventually bused out, they were scattered all over the place to approximately 39 facilities. This has made tracking them down and helping them get out of jail a nightmare. Many of them were moved to a prison football field somewhere where death-row prisoners were mingling freely w/misdemeanor defendants who hadn't even had a trial yet and had just been picked up for reading taro cards w/out a permit. Guards would come to the football field once a day and throw peanut butter sandwiches over the fence.
Currently over 500 prisoners from Templeman III are still unaccounted for, though it seems unlikely that that many died. Thank goodness for criminal defense attorneys Phyllis Mann, Ben Cohen, and Marcia Widder, who have been investigating all of this and have filed writs of habeas to get as many of these people released as possible.
Imagine: You're picked up for something ridiculous like reading taro cards, you face a max of 1-3 days in jail maybe—if you're even convicted—and you end up being in jail for weeks and going through all of the above horror. Many of these people were just being held pending trial!
How the heck could this happen? What were those guards thinking when they just left the jail w/thousands of prisoners locked inside as the water began to rise?
Women, Listen to Your Mothers
We saw the White Stripes last night at the Merriweather Post Pavilion. Cool venue, great show. Look, that's them in the pic at the right. Really. Ok, no need to enlarge that photo; you'll just have to trust me that we were there. Hey, and check it out, you can be there, too! NPR recorded the show and it's now available for your listening pleasure! Or if you subscribe to NPR's All Songs Considered podcast, I believe today's download will be this show.
As you can tell from the recording, for two little people, Jack and Meg sure can make a lot of great noise! Before the show L wondered whether the Jack and Meg ('cause, you know, I'm on a first name basis w/both of them, now that I've seen them play live) were going to play everything themselves. I figured they'd be using taped loops or whatever to augment their own instruments; I was wrong. It was just the two of them the whole time, and that was awesome!
They also did a great job of adding variety to the set—keeping the big hits recognizable, yet jamming them out to keep reminding you that this is live. (I hate it when bands just play their songs exactly as they were recorded; that always gives me the feeling I might as well just be listening to the CD at home.) The two of them are also relentless—they just kept playing and playing and playing at this frenetic pace (they played almost all the songs much faster than the recorded versions) w/out pause for water or even catching their breath. Pretty impressive, really.
Watching these two perform, I was thinking that maybe one of the reasons they're so popular (besides creating catchy rockin' tunes, of course) is that they sort of seem like humble, normal people. I don't know why this is; maybe it's just that they don't both look like supermodels or something, or maybe it's because I know Jack used to be a manual laborer (a furniture upholster) before he became a rock star. They're just cool people who like to rock out. At least that's the vibe they seem to project.
Anywho, good show. Worth a listen if you're even a sort of fan.
Althouse Express!
Congratulations to Professor Althouse for being quoted on page 37 of Tuesday's Express newspaper. The paper is available here in PDF format (caution: huge file!), but the relevant portion is reproduced at right (click to enlarge). The paper quoted Althouse's comments on the risk that the flood of money into the hurricane-ravaged areas of the gulf coast will lead to a different form of looting as unscrupulous individuals and corporations vie to get their hands on those recovery dollars.
Somehow Althouse seems to have become something like an A-list blogger—she's on lots of radar screens. Is this because she's a law prof and therefore has some kind of automatic credibility? Is it because she claims to be a middle-roader politically? Or is it simply the fact that she posts so frequently and on such a wide range of topics? The world will probably never know.
Oh, for those not familiar, the Express is a tabloid daily that's printed by the Washington Post and available for free throughout the city (but predominantly around metro stations so people can read it on their commute).
Posted 10:02 AM | TrackBack | meta-blogging
