New Orleans Jail Escape emphasizes decades of problems

New Orleans (AP) – The party had its way to prison in the city that forgotten care.

More than a decade before the last New Orleans JailbreakThe stateless lockup of the city was viral in a number of videos in which inmates chugging Budweiser, snorting drugs, playing cash with handful and sperring balls from a pistol.

“You can get what you want here,” boasted an inmate without a manager in sight. “Medicines. Pills. Drugs. Heroin.”

The Pine rocket Promoted a comprehensive 2013 court order to reform one of the most violent prisons in the country – a dilapidated emblem of crime and corruption that have long been plagued by New Orleans in New Orleans.

A dozen years and tens of million dollars later, a large part of this revision remains an endeavor, although a federal judge and the US Ministry of Justice are supervised.

The city's corrections reached a new Nadir last week when a guard stepped down to food faulty cell doorremove a toilet And escape through a hole in the wall in which steel rods had been cut away. Nobody noticed that the men reduced a fence and sprinted over a motorway at 1 a.m. Hours passed before the public or even law enforcement was notified.

Five of the refugees remained on Friday on Friday as around 200 federal, state and local officials searched for them. Four people were arrested

The dysfunction comes back from the generations and continued after the opening of 2015 State of the art The Orleans Justice Center, which was invoiced as $ 150 million when it replaced its apparently packed predecessor. From the beginning there were major problems with the building, including a lack of supervision and adequate living space for mentally ill occupants.

“Now we have a prison with 900 cameras, but that's cold comfort when nobody watches it,” said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is the president of the metropolitan crime commission, a wax Defrise group based.

“The inmate-gone videos from years ago not even approach,” added Goyeneche. “If the sheriff or someone have thought about ending the prison's declaration of consent, this flight has ended a serious discussion about it.”

Prison monitor warned of Lax monitoring

The conditions for the disaster have been ripe for months. An independent prison monitor warned of “extremely inadequate” personnel levels and dangerous lax surveillance – both factors in a jailbreak that unveiled figurative and literal security holes. At the same time, the court files show that the number of “internal escape” within the prison has shot up in the past two years and underlines the inability of the prisons, which almost 1,400 in-occupants rule.

“Too often, the failure to follow the directive is blamed for the lack of employees or training,” the monitors wrote in a report. “Neither is an acceptable apology.”

Susan Hutson, Sheriff of the municipality of Orleans, initially distracted the fault for the jailbreak, which implied without evidence that he was politically motivated when she ran for re -election. A few days later she appeared in front of the city council and took over “full accountability” for the “failures”.

She informed the city council that she needed millions of dollars to remedy “outdated surveillance, aging infrastructure, blind spots in surveillance and critical lack of personnel”. The Council pushed back and said that the prison had received significant injections from taxpayers without sufficient control.

The most surprising was that Hutson warned that in the future she cannot guarantee that inmates would not guarantee.

“The prison is the same today as a week ago, as well as when we submitted our budget request from 2024 and as for years,” said Hutson in an explanation.

55 years ago, a judge said that the New Orleans prison was unconstitutional

Flight has drawn new attention to unfortunate prison conditions that have existed in New Orleans for decades, a neglect story that is also noticeable in a state that has long been connected to the over -ininicaration. The situation became so bad in 2016 that Hutson's predecessor Marlin Gusman, as part of an agreement, was released control over prison as part of the federal recipient.

“I think it got worse,” said Ricky Peterson, who remembered that inmates roamed “in their own free time” through the facility when he was imprisoned about a decade ago.

“In the course of time it went down and down,” added 48 -year -old Mario Westbrook, who was imprisoned at around the same time because of gun ownership and marijuana. “You shouldn't have to go through this type of conditions.”

In 1970 a federal judge declared the overcrowded community prison in Orleans as unconstitutional, and it was a cruel and unusual punishment and “shocking conscience from an elementary decency”. In a later lawsuit it was claimed that female inmates were tied up during birth. Murders and in the customer able to record the deaths, including a man's fatal blows by two MPs in 2004.

At that time, the sheriff accused the city of chronically undermining the prison, while the city officials were in the way of the Lockup, which was most affected by incompetent management.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 made an unspeakable chaos in prison when the occupants were stranded into chest floods and that Lockup had lost the strength.

A Report of the Ministry of Justice 2009 warned of “calculated abuse” by MPs who defeated the inmates so often, they developed a code to order an occupant to “tie up his shoes” if they wanted to swallow themselves.

The jailhouse videos

A big landmark took place in 2013 when a class action led to the declaration of consent, a detailed plan to overhaul prison guidelines, to reduce violence and to improve medical treatment of occupants.

This legal dispute discovered the viral jailhouse videos, which also contained a clip of an apparently escaped inmate in the famous Bourbon road for the city for what the Ministry of Justice called “evening of leisure”.

“The behavior in the video may have taken place a few years ago,” said the Ministry of Justice at that time, “but the guidelines, practices and culture that enabled outrageous behavior remain relevant.”

___

Mustian reported from New York.