As the flood waters rose, hundreds of prisoners in New Orleans were simply abandoned:

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no
food or water from the inmates’ last meal over the weekend of August
27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday,
August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and
sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an
unbearable stench. 

“They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish
Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where
he was sent after the evacuation.

 
As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners
became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to
force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area.
All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

“The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said
Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them
every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one
that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I’m scared. I feel like I’m about
to drown.’ He was crying.”

Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are asking for an accounting of more than five hundred people who were in the prison before the flood, but are not on the list of those evacuated.

Who were these prisoners?

Democracy Now! has some information:

Orleans
Parish Prison, for your listeners, is really not a prison. It’s a jail.
It’s a temporary detention facility. Other parts of the country you
refer to county jails. We call them parish prisons in Louisiana.
Orleans Parish Prison is, in fact, one of the country’s largest jails,
although New Orleans was far from one of the country’s largest cities
before the storm. At any given time, there would be 7,500 to 8,000
prisoners being held at Orleans Parish Prison.

Now, some of these prisoners were in fact serving misdemeanor
sentences, and others were picked up for parole violations, but the
vast, vast majority of the prisoners being held at Orleans Parish
Prison were pretrial detainees. They had only been charged. They had
not been tried and convicted.

As far as I can tell, the only mainstream news source that has picked up this story is the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which focuses more on the “struggle…to keep destructive and desperate inmates at bay” than on the humanitarian issues:

Deputies said they repeatedly calmed inmates by telling them that food, water and rescue were on the way, but the message began wearing thin. In the Community Correctional Center, two commanders and a deputy said, inmates breached several layers of security, smashing visitor center security windows and breaking through stairwell doors.

The worst damage was done by inmates who broke off metal shower rods and dayroom benches, then used them as battering rams, they said.

“They knocked out some cinder blocks and breached some visitation booths,” the deputy said. “It was like the movie ‘Attica.’ “

The deputies said that until the cavalry showed up on Day Three in the form of SWAT teams from the state Department of Corrections, they were forced to scare inmates back into cells by brandishing their pistols and occasionally firing off beanbags.

“There were some inmates who acted out, but I’d say 99 percent acted responsibly,” Short said.

Acting responsibly apparently means laying down and quietly dying, not trying to get the hell out of there, or help others survive.

The P-D also reports the official story: No inmates died. That may turn out to be true. I certainly hope so. But if 517 people are unaccounted for, as Human Rights Watches says, somebody needs to do some explaining.

In addition, way back on September 5, Newsday carried a human interest story on a corrections officer’s “harrowing escape” from the flood. The fate of the prisoners is not the main focus of the article, but it contains some interesting information nonetheless:

As Katrina raged Monday outside the prison on Perdido Street, water
began seeping into the building where Barnes worked. Toilets began to
back up. By Tuesday, the water inside was about 3 feet high and about
320 inmates had to be moved to the second floor, she said.

As water rose 5 feet high that evening, the situation became
desperate, she said. About 40 civilians, including family members of
prison workers, had also taken refuge at the jail. Word spread among
the inmates that the Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, where many
had family, was underwater. Unfed for days, the inmates began to riot
inside their cellblocks, Barnes said.

“We had no phone lines, no electricity,” she said. “There was raw
gas in the water … If it wasn’t for the deputies, a lot of people
would have died.”

She believes many drowned anyway, including inmates housed on the
first floor of the Templeman 3 building, where Barnes said that in the
chaos, some inmates may have remained locked inside.

“We evacuated everybody who was at the jail as far as we know once
we got there,” said Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana
Department of Corrections, which helped evacuate the prison. Laborde
said she could not confirm what may have happened before rescuers from
her agency arrived.

Too many contradictory stories here.

It’s been a week since Human Rights Watch issued the results of its investigation, and if reporters had been talking to people in New Orleans long before that they would have heard rumors worth following up. It’s really outrageous that no major paper has investigated this story.

UPDATE: I see (via Ben Greenberg, who has much more information on the story) that in fact the New York Times had an editorial on the subject today. Calling for an investigation is good. Sending some talented reporters out to investigate would be better.