The Wire

Following Hurricane Katrina, Australian Ashley MacDonald spoke of his terrifying ordeal when held in a maximum security prison in Louisiana. Recently an even more horrific story about the fate of prisoners during the Hurricane has surfaced. From a report produced by the US division of Human Rights Watch, it has emerged that hundreds of inmates who remained locked in their cells were abandoned by prison guards in the absence of any official evacuation plan. Corinne Carey a researcher at Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of prisoners who had been incarcerated in the Orleans Parish Prison compound. They claimed that from Monday the 29th of August, the day the Hurricane hit, there were no correctional officers in a building that held more than 600 people. Inmates were not finally evacuated until Thursday 1st of September. For over four days prisoners were stranded in rising flood waters without food or water. We asked Corinne Carey to describe the conditions experienced by the inmates left behind during Hurricane Katrina.