It's been a long time
since I've updated this thing. Too long to recount everything that's happened since December 31st. To sum up, at the moment I'm both unreasonably busy and unreasonably happy (the latter being largely inexplicable, except perhaps for its relationship with the former).
This is a big improvement from the last couple of weeks, which were tough. Part of the reason I haven't posted anything on here is that I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what to say about New Orleans. I tend to avoid the television news, getting most of my information from print websites like cnn and the NY Times. As a result, I really wasn't prepared for what I saw down there. Until the last day in New Orleans, it was the little things that got to me - the fact that the streetlights still don't work downtown, that there are no open gas stations, that we had to drive half an hour to go to the grocery, that only 1/5 of the pre-hurricane population lives there now, that you can drive for miles at night and not pass a single other car on the road. Then there was the water line - in Lakeview, and in downtown, for blocks and blocks and blocks on what appear to be otherwise intact houses you can see a clear, solid line that marks how high the water rose - 7, 8, 9 feet high. It's incredibly eerie to drive by rows and rows of houses and see no signs of life, nothing but downed trees and that ever present line. Then you stop and look inside the houses and realize that while they look undamaged from the outside, inside there is absolutely nothing left.
These sorts of small things were my obsession all week long, even while we were in Alexandria, where my other obsession became the horror stories of the thousands of prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison who were left to die locked in their cells, without food, water, or electricity, with water up to their chests or higher, for days. After they were finally evacuated, the prisoners - most of whom were pre-trial (in prison because they couldn't make bail, or because Louisiana allows the state to lock you up for up to 60 days without charging you with anything) or convicted of misdemeanors were herded onto buses and sent all over the state, many to maximum-security, 23-hour-lockdown facilities, with no records of any kind - not even a list of who was sent where, where they were given no opportunity to contact their families or their lawyers; where 499 women, including a 15-year-old girl, were sent to Angola, the most notorious maximum security men's penitentiary in the country; where hundreds of prisoners were sent to a privately-run facility that had previously been shut down for prisoner mistreatment, and where they were subject to horrific abuses by unsupervised and bigoted guards for weeks; or where thousands were left for another two days to sleep in the grass on the grounds of a prison that couldn't fit them, given no blankets, no insect repellant to combat the hordes of mosquitos that attacked them, no sunscreen to protect them from the burns that caused their skin to completely peel off their faces, no toilet or shower facilities, and hardly any food or water. Everyone from murderers to shoplifters, to illegal immigrants awaiting deportation, to the kid in the drunk tank - everyone who happened to be at the county jail the night before the hurricane hit - was left for dead and then lost in the system.
As you can see, I'm still pretty obsessed :) Anyway, to make a long story short, a small band (and by small I mean 4) of private defense attorneys in Alexandria and Baton Rouge, who noticed the influx of prisoners to their own county prisons, began systematically interviewing and cataloging what ultimately turned out to be 8,300 prisoners evacuated from the New Orleans area after the storm, and trying to locate their families and attorneys. Most of them don't have attorneys, of course, because after the hurricane New Orleans laid of 30 of its 39 public defenders, and the private attorneys based in New Orleans are now based in Houston or Atlanta or elsewhere. So these guys started filing habeas motions, to get out of prison at least those whose prison terms had been completed, and to force the state to make charging decisions on the rest. The work is still ongoing - a few thousand have been released, many more are still in prison who shouldn't be. And they are gearing up for one hell of a civil rights lawsuit.
Anyway, so this was my focus all week long, these prisoners and their stories (even though we were only working with the data, we got so many stories - from Phyllis, from the video Human Rights Watch made, and from the notes and letters the prisoners added to their forms and interview sheets. Every single one was heartbreaking). Until the last day, Saturday, when I finally had a chance to visit the Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest hit neighborhood in New Orleans. By coincidence, we ended up driving from the least-damaged parts of the area right to "ground zero," so to speak, where the levee broke, and it was unbelievable. At first I took a lot of pictures - houses missing roofs and roofs missing houses, upside-down cars, boats everwhere. It looked awful. But it just kept getting worse. Suddenly whole houses had been knocked off their foundations and had gone floating down the street, in some places there was nothing left but the front steps and the mailbox. By the time we got to the levee break I actually stopped taking pictures. Of course by then there wasn't much to photograph - there's just nothing there. Earlier I had taken a lot of pictures of piles of rubble that used to be houses. But by the canal there isn't even hardly any rubble. Everything - everything - was flattened and swept away. Entire blocks have nothing in them larger than kindling. The barge that broke through the levee, causing one of the breaches, is still settled in the neigbhorhood, pinned between a couple of houses that, ironically, are probably still standing because they were protected from the rushing water by the barge itself. The situation was so unreal that the barge didn't seem all that out of place, plopped in the middle of this residential neighborhood, and that terrified me.
I am no good at posting pictures on here, but I do have them on snapfish if anyone wants to see them. I have about 30 of my own, and the friend I was with (made of considerably tougher stuff than me :) has about 115.
Anyway, so I got back from all this the day before classes started - my last first day of class of my whole life. About four days after I got back I had to turn around and go to DC for an interview of sorts, and while it was nice to catch up with the DC folks, by the time I got back (don't even ASK about the trip home) I was REALLY ready for another vacation. But after spending all weekend completing the draft (such as it is) of my thesis that was due on Tuesday, I felt much better. And the insane routine I've gotten into now, involving among other things a 9am Spanish for Lawyers class four mornings per week, has forced me to choose between feeling like I want to keel over and die all day every day and drastically increasing my caffeine intake - the latter of which (the obvious choice :) has had a dramatically positive effect on my mood :).
And so yes, things are good.
This is a big improvement from the last couple of weeks, which were tough. Part of the reason I haven't posted anything on here is that I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what to say about New Orleans. I tend to avoid the television news, getting most of my information from print websites like cnn and the NY Times. As a result, I really wasn't prepared for what I saw down there. Until the last day in New Orleans, it was the little things that got to me - the fact that the streetlights still don't work downtown, that there are no open gas stations, that we had to drive half an hour to go to the grocery, that only 1/5 of the pre-hurricane population lives there now, that you can drive for miles at night and not pass a single other car on the road. Then there was the water line - in Lakeview, and in downtown, for blocks and blocks and blocks on what appear to be otherwise intact houses you can see a clear, solid line that marks how high the water rose - 7, 8, 9 feet high. It's incredibly eerie to drive by rows and rows of houses and see no signs of life, nothing but downed trees and that ever present line. Then you stop and look inside the houses and realize that while they look undamaged from the outside, inside there is absolutely nothing left.
These sorts of small things were my obsession all week long, even while we were in Alexandria, where my other obsession became the horror stories of the thousands of prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison who were left to die locked in their cells, without food, water, or electricity, with water up to their chests or higher, for days. After they were finally evacuated, the prisoners - most of whom were pre-trial (in prison because they couldn't make bail, or because Louisiana allows the state to lock you up for up to 60 days without charging you with anything) or convicted of misdemeanors were herded onto buses and sent all over the state, many to maximum-security, 23-hour-lockdown facilities, with no records of any kind - not even a list of who was sent where, where they were given no opportunity to contact their families or their lawyers; where 499 women, including a 15-year-old girl, were sent to Angola, the most notorious maximum security men's penitentiary in the country; where hundreds of prisoners were sent to a privately-run facility that had previously been shut down for prisoner mistreatment, and where they were subject to horrific abuses by unsupervised and bigoted guards for weeks; or where thousands were left for another two days to sleep in the grass on the grounds of a prison that couldn't fit them, given no blankets, no insect repellant to combat the hordes of mosquitos that attacked them, no sunscreen to protect them from the burns that caused their skin to completely peel off their faces, no toilet or shower facilities, and hardly any food or water. Everyone from murderers to shoplifters, to illegal immigrants awaiting deportation, to the kid in the drunk tank - everyone who happened to be at the county jail the night before the hurricane hit - was left for dead and then lost in the system.
As you can see, I'm still pretty obsessed :) Anyway, to make a long story short, a small band (and by small I mean 4) of private defense attorneys in Alexandria and Baton Rouge, who noticed the influx of prisoners to their own county prisons, began systematically interviewing and cataloging what ultimately turned out to be 8,300 prisoners evacuated from the New Orleans area after the storm, and trying to locate their families and attorneys. Most of them don't have attorneys, of course, because after the hurricane New Orleans laid of 30 of its 39 public defenders, and the private attorneys based in New Orleans are now based in Houston or Atlanta or elsewhere. So these guys started filing habeas motions, to get out of prison at least those whose prison terms had been completed, and to force the state to make charging decisions on the rest. The work is still ongoing - a few thousand have been released, many more are still in prison who shouldn't be. And they are gearing up for one hell of a civil rights lawsuit.
Anyway, so this was my focus all week long, these prisoners and their stories (even though we were only working with the data, we got so many stories - from Phyllis, from the video Human Rights Watch made, and from the notes and letters the prisoners added to their forms and interview sheets. Every single one was heartbreaking). Until the last day, Saturday, when I finally had a chance to visit the Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest hit neighborhood in New Orleans. By coincidence, we ended up driving from the least-damaged parts of the area right to "ground zero," so to speak, where the levee broke, and it was unbelievable. At first I took a lot of pictures - houses missing roofs and roofs missing houses, upside-down cars, boats everwhere. It looked awful. But it just kept getting worse. Suddenly whole houses had been knocked off their foundations and had gone floating down the street, in some places there was nothing left but the front steps and the mailbox. By the time we got to the levee break I actually stopped taking pictures. Of course by then there wasn't much to photograph - there's just nothing there. Earlier I had taken a lot of pictures of piles of rubble that used to be houses. But by the canal there isn't even hardly any rubble. Everything - everything - was flattened and swept away. Entire blocks have nothing in them larger than kindling. The barge that broke through the levee, causing one of the breaches, is still settled in the neigbhorhood, pinned between a couple of houses that, ironically, are probably still standing because they were protected from the rushing water by the barge itself. The situation was so unreal that the barge didn't seem all that out of place, plopped in the middle of this residential neighborhood, and that terrified me.
I am no good at posting pictures on here, but I do have them on snapfish if anyone wants to see them. I have about 30 of my own, and the friend I was with (made of considerably tougher stuff than me :) has about 115.
Anyway, so I got back from all this the day before classes started - my last first day of class of my whole life. About four days after I got back I had to turn around and go to DC for an interview of sorts, and while it was nice to catch up with the DC folks, by the time I got back (don't even ASK about the trip home) I was REALLY ready for another vacation. But after spending all weekend completing the draft (such as it is) of my thesis that was due on Tuesday, I felt much better. And the insane routine I've gotten into now, involving among other things a 9am Spanish for Lawyers class four mornings per week, has forced me to choose between feeling like I want to keel over and die all day every day and drastically increasing my caffeine intake - the latter of which (the obvious choice :) has had a dramatically positive effect on my mood :).
And so yes, things are good.