[News] The Forgotten Children of New Orleans

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/bervera09012006.html

September 1, 2006


Conditions Are Worse Now, Then Six Months Ago


The Forgotten Children of New Orleans

By XOCHITL BERVERA

Friends from around the country ask us: "How are 
things in New Orleans? Are things getting 
better?" I always have to pause, surprised that 
people haven't heard. I forget that the national 
media has abandoned us, that George Bush flew 
into town for five minutes to make promises of 
federal support which gave the rest of the 
country and the world permission to look away. I 
am stunned that people don't know how much worse 
it is in New Orleans today for our organization, 
for our members, for our community than it was even six months ago.

When people ask, I have to tell them: It's worse 
than you think. It's not what people want to 
hear, but it's the truth that isn't being 
reported in the mainstream media, so I have to 
keep telling them. And every time, I draw on a 
renewed commitment on the part of FFLIC and many 
others in New Orleans and around the country to 
hold onto faith and to the knowledge that the 
spiritual and material power of people who 
believe in and work for justice will one day 
prevail - and so we keep moving forward. Because 
it is always darkest before dawn and New Orleans, 
a year after Katrina, is due for the brightest of dawns.

How are things in New Orleans? For the young 
people and families who are FFLIC's heart and 
soul, things are not well. Besides the chaos of 
still-unrepaired infrastructure (traffic lights 
are still broken, garbage pick up remains 
illusive, levees are insufficiently repaired, and 
entire neighborhoods remain exactly as they did 
in October of last year) the clear plan of 
developers and the business community to deny the 
right of return to New Orleans' Black community 
is being implemented in the ugliest of ways. HUD 
recently unveiled its plan to demolish 5000 units 
of public housing. The Recovery School District 
will simply not open its schools that serve poor 
Black neighborhoods. Officials refuse to re-open 
Charity Hospital, the source of health care for 
New Orleans' poor and working class. All are part 
of a plan that has been in the works since the 
day after the storm. We are witnessing the 
normally gradual process of gentrification sped 
up to its logical conclusion, with developers 
interested in eliminating (and quickly!) all 
public infrastructure that supports the lives of 
poor and working class Black communities, and 
politicians eager to accommodate them. 
Politicians publicly make their commitment to 
welcome everyone back while quietly making the 
policy decisions that guarantee its impossibility.

And yet, people keep coming home! Black New 
Orleanians, whose land and city this is, are 
finding their way back every day despite all the 
predictions and efforts to the contrary. Our 
families and communities made it back to vote and 
made their numbers and power felt. Folks are back 
looking for jobs which don't exist and housing which is boarded up and vacant.

What does this mean? It means there are hundreds 
of children in the city with no public schools to 
attend in their neighborhood. It means there are 
thousands of people suffering with Post Traumatic 
Stress Disorder (only psychologists tell us there 
is no "Post" to our PTSD as the stress of daily 
life in New Orleans is newly traumatizing each 
day) with no mental health care. It means people 
still have no consistent place to live, no sense 
of protection from a future storm, no jobs to 
make a living, no health care to treat even basic 
medical needs. It means folks come back, are 
forced to leave again, come back and forth and back and forth ...

It means that the institutions that stabilize a 
community--like churches, schools, and 
grandmas--are absent, while instability and 
stress factors are through the roof.

It means that there has been a 25% jump in the 
mortality rate, including a threefold increase in 
the suicide rate. It means that Arsenio and 
Markee Hunter, Warren Simeon, Iraum Taylor and 
Reggie Dantzler,--all New Orleans youth and 
several of whom were friends and children of 
FFLIC's--were slaughtered on a street corners not 
5 blocks from our offices, gunned down with a 
submachine gun that somehow make it back into the 
city and onto the streets. It means we have lost 
Kerry Washington, a son and a father, who died 
mysteriously inside the overcrowded, overheated 
Orleans Parish Prison ñwhere he paid with his 
life for an old warrant of simple drug 
possession. It means Ronald Smith who was gunned 
down by police will never get to see how 
beautifully his brother testified at a city 
council hearing two months ago. It means our 
members and families live in fear of both the 
violence on the streets and the violence of the 
police who are supposed to protect them.

It means, in short, that the clash between the 
gentrifying forces and the Black community - who 
were not meant to survive, endure, and 
return--has turned deadly. Where the lack of 
schools, housing and healthcare fails to keep 
people away, those in power will turn to the police and prisons.

If there was ever any doubt that the criminal 
justice system would be used to keep Black New 
Orleanians from returning, the last few months 
have eliminated the last of it. With 300 National 
Guardsman called in to patrol (with M-16s which 
are "locked and loaded") the empty streets of the 
neighborhoods where the lack of infrastructure 
has slowed efforts to rebuild, the NOPD has been 
able to turn its attention to "protecting" the 
neighborhoods that have been rebuilt. By 
consistently profiling, harassing and arresting 
poor people of color, NOPD are now making over 
140 arrests per week. The vast majority of these 
arrests are for minor violations, including 
spitting on a sidewalk. The kinds of charges 
being put on people--resisting arrest, 
obstruction of justice, battery on a police 
officer - speak more to the tension between NOPD 
and community than to public safety.

The rise in NOPD arrests occurs at a moment when 
the Orleans Parish Prison is becoming made 
increasingly dangerous by its overcrowding and 
lack of adequate health care. Harsh criticism 
from national media and lawyers of Sheriff 
Gusman's operation of OPP has not stopped him 
from opening new "temporary" beds at breakneck 
speed and sending hundreds of prisoners up to the 
state penitentiary in Angola to try and keep up with the new arrests.

So how are things in New Orleans?

But, there is a beacon of light. Undeniably, 
organizing has taken root in the city. From 
neighborhood associations to workers rights, 
environmental justice, and public safety reform 
groups, people are beginning to come together and 
use their people power, their power to disrupt, 
to shame, to confront elected officials and 
demand that they do what they were elected to do: 
serve the people of this city.

An inspiring example of how organizing and reform 
work are together making a difference is in the 
juvenile justice system itself. Even as news 
coverage concentrates all the blame for crime on 
young Black men, and the demonized threat of 
these young Black men is used to justify 
everything from shutting down public housing to 
bringing in the National Guard, the juvenile 
justice system itself is continuing on the path 
of reform that had just begun when the storm hit.

The changes in New Orleans' juvenile justice 
system are real. During the six months before 
Katrina, there were over 4000 juvenile arrests in 
New Orleans. In these last six months, there have 
been 169. After the storm, Orleans Parish 
Juvenile Court Chief Judge David Bell took 
leadership in implementing many reforms that had 
previously been discussed, but never implemented. 
For starters, he brought in Attorney (and FFLIC 
friend) Ilona Picou to work as the court's 
recovery coordinator. Ilona, well versed in 
juvenile justice reform, coordinated 38 volunteer 
attorneys from outside Louisiana to winnow down 
the number of active cases from 26,500 to 2,500.

A new set of procedures on how to deal with kids 
has dropped the number of kids being arrested by 
police from over 100 a day to an average of 17 
per day. Police are no longer arresting kids for 
trespass, for example, for sitting on a 
basketball court after school. The Court has been 
able to use savings from such basic changes to 
upgrade its computer and phone systems. It has 
also purchased vehicles for use by families in 
need of supervision, drug court, weekend 
detention and alternatives to detention programs. 
Money that had been used to put kids in jail 
before the storm is now being used to bring 
support families need to keep their kids at home.

So, why is juvenile justice improving at the very 
same moment criminal justice for adults is 
spinning out of control, and despite the recent 
blame-the-victim policy responses of curfews and 
increased law enforcement? In part, it is because 
juvenile justice reform efforts--led by FFLIC and 
the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana--were 
already underway when Katrina hit. Before the 
storm, FFLIC, a voting member of the Children and 
Youth Planning Board was actively engaged in 
getting the many stakeholders to agree that 
detention reform in Orleans Parish was necessary. 
After touring the decrepit Youth Study Center and 
witnessing first hand the horrific conditions in 
which over 100 of our children were detained on 
any given day, FFLIC made a commitment to ensure 
that any reforms of the juvenile justice system 
would include the closure of that facility and 
the reduction of the number of children held at 
any given time. FFLIC worked hard with other 
stake holders, including the juvenile court 
judges, to recruit the Annie E. Casey Foundations 
Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) 
to come to Orleans to implement their proven 
program to reform local juvenile justice systems 
and help jurisdictions spend less on 
incarceration and more quality community based programs for kids and families.

So when the storm hit, the adult system and the 
juvenile system responded in precisely opposite 
ways. The juvenile system which had been forced 
to see children as the precious human being they 
are, and detention beds as the costly, 
ineffective burden they are, chose to speed up 
its reform process. The adult system which had 
made no such culture shift and no such commitment 
to change, has continued down its path of death and destruction.

What does this mean? To FFLIC, it is a reminder 
that our work has impact, value and indeed can 
make a very real difference in people's lives and 
in the systems which affect our lives. To all of 
us, it shows that issue based organizing has the 
potential to result in system shifts that can 
withstand a racist onslaught even of the 
magnitude we are witnessing in New Orleans today. 
It also tells us that FFLIC must not be content 
to just see the changes in the juvenile system, 
knowing more children each day are being bumped 
into the adult system and that no matter what the 
courts say, our 17 and 18 year old children are 
no less human, no less ours, no less worthy of 
our commitment to keep them safe from the harm of 
the streets, safe from the harm of law 
enforcement, safe from the harm of racism and 
displacement. As FFLIC looks forward, we must 
re-commit ourselves to organizing, to building 
our membership base and to our mission of 
improving the lives of Louisiana's youth, 
especially those at risk of getting involved in 
the juvenile justice system in the context of 
today's it's-worse-than-you-think New Orleans. If 
we and the many others in New Orleans who have 
begun, keep on organizing, we have hope that we 
may soon be able to answer the question 
differently, "So how are things in New Orleans?"

Xochitl Bervera is director of 
<http://www.fflic.org/>Families and Friends of 
Louisiana's Incarcerated Children.


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20060901/6f7d3bf7/attachment.htm>