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Justice

New Orleans Prison Inmate Alleges He Was Beaten In Retaliation For Revealing Abusive Conditions To The Press

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 6, 2012 at 5:40 pm

According to a recent lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Orleans Parish Prison is a hellhole. “Rapes, sexual assaults, and beatings are commonplace. Violence regularly occurs at the hands of sheriffs’ deputies, as well as other prisoners . . . . People living with serious mental illnesses languish without treatment, left vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.” Which is why former inmate Josh Hobson says he went to the press while he was incarcerated on a domestic violence charge that was eventually dropped. According to Hobson, prison guards soon found out he was speaking to reporters, and they retaliated with violence:

The guards took him off his bunk in the middle of the night, he said, dragging him outside and viciously beating him, pounding his kidneys so hard he urinated blood the next day.

“The night they smacked me around and dragged me out, all I could think of in my head was, ‘Great, I’m a f—ing dead man.’ They were already telling me they were going to kill me so I figured that’s it. This is a wrap. Lights out. When I got the knee to the head, I figured it was a done deal.” . . .

When the guards were beating him, Hobson said they warned him between punches, “This will teach you to talk to people.”

Neither Mr. Hobson’s allegations, nor those in the SPLC lawsuit have been proved in a court of law, but there is good reason to believe that allegations of widespread abusive conditions in the New Orleans prison are credible. The U.S. Marshall’s service recently removed all federal inmates from the prison, and the Department of Justice released a report in 2009 detailing unconstitutional conditions such as widespread violence and neglect of the mentally ill.

Special Topic

New Orleans Protesters Disrupt Foreclosure Auctions

By Zaid Jilani on Dec 9, 2011 at 3:30 pm

On Tuesday, demonstrators from Occupy New Orleans and Survivors Village — “a community group of former St. Bernard public housing residents and their allies” — disrupted a foreclosure auction taking place in New Orleans.

The demonstrators used a mic check to denounce the auction taking place, calling it immoral. “The sale of blighted property is the city’s attempt to remove poor homeowners who have already suffered tremendously from economic and natural disaster. Blight has become an excuse to gentrify,” they said. “Charging poor homeowners outrageous fees in order to steal their homes is an underhanded way to keep people displaced.” Watch the demonstrators disrupt the auction:

Bridging The Gulf explains what happened after the disruption began: “The sale was scheduled to begin at noon. At approximately 1:45 pm, after several potential buyers had already left, the police arrived and threatened the nonviolent protestors with arrest. Before declaring that the remainder of their protest would be silent, the protestors announced their intention to physically defend any properties sold: ‘We will be in court. We will be in the streets. We will be in the houses–defending them, boarding them up, and occupying them.’”

NEWS FLASH

Police Evict Occupy New Orleans | “Scores of police officers marched into an encampment of protesters and homeless people across from City Hall before dawn Tuesday, forcing the dozens of occupants out and removing tents in a peaceful eviction.” The eviction comes one day after protesters were reportedly seeking a restraining order to stop such a raid.

By Zaid Jilani on Dec 6, 2011 at 9:00 am

Alyssa

Treme, HBO, and Sexual Assault

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 17, 2011 at 12:14 pm

It’s taken me a while to catch up on this season of Treme, but I’m finally on track. I still think the show has weak spots. The overlap with actors from Treme and The Wire is significant enough to be distracting, as is the presence of Slightly Alternate Universe Tom Colicchio and Eric Ripert. The show’s recapitulation of political events feels a bit like a time capsule. And it’s a baggier show than I would always like, though I will watch musicians fiddle around forever, particularly when brass is involved.

But one thing that’s struck me as particularly strong this season is the way Treme is dealing with sexual assault and its aftermath. The scene where LaDonna gets assaulted in her bar isn’t as brutal as the scene where Dr. Melfi gets raped in The Sopranos, but her fear is raw and powerful, her pool cue whipping ineffectually through the dark air. Khandi Alexander is a remarkable actress, and it’s both horrifying and a wonderful piece of craft to watch her face as a doctor performs a vaginal exam in the hospital to check her for signs of sexual assault, to watch herself steel herself to take the pills that will guard her against sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, to watch her smile with a marked-up face, through missing teeth. Unlike Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where swift prosecution and conviction offer the promise of healing within the programming hour, there’s no police investigation going on, no warm and fuzzy sense that LaDonna’s going to be okay. LaDonna could close up the bar, move to Baton Rouge with her husband—it’s more complex than if she was simply too poor to move away—and the show has a respect for that complexity.

Similarly, the attack on Dr. Melfi is incredibly hard to watch (it’s in the episode “Employee of the Month,” if you want to check it out)—you’re really forced to sit through something horrible, rather than given the mercy of a shot that cuts away from the worst of it. But her pain and rage are powerful and sustained. I appreciate that The Sopranos respected that damage enough to let it linger, rather than curing her for the comfort of the audience. Most of the time, the premium cable networks get criticized for taking advantage of their ability to show explicit sex to titillate viewers. But that same license also means that HBO, Showtime, and the other pay cablers also get to show the starkness of sexual assault in a way that primetime television can’t.

Climate Progress

Neal Boortz: If New Orleans Is Rebuilt, The ‘Debris That Katrina Chased Out’ Will Return

By Brad Johnson on Aug 26, 2009 at 1:28 pm

Yesterday, hate-radio talk show host Neal Boortz mocked President Obama’s pledge to rebuild New Orleans, calling the victims of Hurricane Katrina human trash. This weekend, President Barack Obama told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he “remains focused on rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” and anything less “would be a betrayal of who we are as a country.” Boortz responded on Twitter by attacking the “debris that Katrina chased out“:

Obama wants to rebuild New Orleans? Build it and they will come. They? The debris that Katrina washed out.

Boortz, who regularly mocks Latinos, women and the poor — even calling Rep. Cynthia McKinney a “ghetto slut” — made an expansive case that the combined natural and human disaster of Hurricane Katrina actually helped the city of New Orleans on his June 24, 2009 radio show. Although Katrina’s devastation cost this nation $80 billion, killed thousands, and displaced a million people, Boortz believes “Katrina cleansed New Orleans“:

Katrina cleansed New Orleans. It just washed out a lot of debris, including human debris.

Boortz has also called the overwhelmingly black and poor victims of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans “human parasites” and “deadbeats,” even suggesting that a victim of Hurricane Katrina consider prostitution instead of “sucking off taxpayers.”

Boortz is nationally syndicated from Atlanta’s WSB, part of the Cox Enterprises empire, whose billionaire heiress Anne Cox Chambers is the richest person in Georgia and a million-dollar tax evader.

Update

Referring to research done for a Wonk Room exclusive, top hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel of MIT explains that the “levees would have held” if not for global warming:

Probably if Hurricane Katrina had happened in 1980, the levees would have held. Global warming didn’t cause Katrina, but it did cause Katrina to be more intense than it otherwise would have been.

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