JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Juana Summers in Washington.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: And I'm Ari Shapiro in New Orleans with a turnaround story about a broken system and the people who worked to fix it. This is actually a story I've been following for two decades. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans 20 years ago this month.
RONALD MARSHALL: On my birthday.
SHAPIRO: It was your birthday?
MARSHALL: August 29.
SHAPIRO: Ronald Marshall turned 31 that day. He marked his birthday in the Orleans Parish Prison. I recently met him outside the old building on a sweltering morning. Twenty years ago, he was brought here from a prison in upstate Louisiana for a court appointment. He was challenging his conviction and sentence of 50 years for armed robbery.
MARSHALL: I had no doubt in my mind, man, that I was coming home in 2005.
SHAPIRO: Ultimately, a judge vacated his sentence and he was released, but that didn't happen until 2021. These days, he works for a nonprofit that advocates for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Twenty years ago, his 31st birthday was the start of a nightmare. When Katrina hit, Ronald Marshall and thousands of other people had to survive in this lockup for days without any help.
MARSHALL: The air conditioning went off. Everything was off, completely shut down. Lights...
SHAPIRO: No air conditioning?
MARSHALL: No lights, no water. This is a centralized building, so once the heat and air go off, it gets extremely hot in there.
SHAPIRO: So you have no light. No food.
MARSHALL: No light. No food.
SHAPIRO: No air. No water.
MARSHALL: The water was off, too, because the water's electricity.
SHAPIRO: His cell didn't have a view of the street, so he didn't know how bad it was outside.
MARSHALL: The guys that was in the fourth floor right there, they can see over here. See that window right there?
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
MARSHALL: They can see the city. So they put signs in the windows to us, letting us know, hey, man, the city is underwater.
SHAPIRO: After close to a week, Marshall and the others were finally evacuated out the front door of the courthouse connected to the prison.
MARSHALL: The water was at the top of the steps.
SHAPIRO: The top of the steps?
MARSHALL: Yeah. When we come...
SHAPIRO: That is...
MARSHALL: Yeah, the water was at the top of the steps.
SHAPIRO: ...Like, twice as tall. That must be like 15, 20 feet tall.
MARSHALL: Twenty feet. Right.
SHAPIRO: Handcuffed and chained, they were loaded onto rescue boats and taken to a highway overpass.
MARSHALL: It was like a scene out of a sci-fi movie. It had bodies that was, like, floating in the water, and people was, like, tying them to the posts. 'Cause people had...
SHAPIRO: So they wouldn't float away?
MARSHALL: So they won't float away, man. It was horrible, man. At one point they had - you could see alligators in the water.
SHAPIRO: Eventually, he was taken to a prison in Florida. His lawyers and his family had no idea where he was.
MARSHALL: Four months passed before I heard from anybody in my family - anything, man.
SHAPIRO: Some of the other incarcerated people were driven to Alexandria, Louisiana, where Ross Foote was a retired judge.
ROSS FOOTE: I'm 200 miles north of New Orleans, so Katrina did not affect us. But we received a lot of the prisoners.
SHAPIRO: Even all these years later, he vividly recalls the crisis that landed in his town.
FOOTE: No paperwork, no status, no identification - we didn't know what they were charged with. We didn't know really who they were. We didn't know if they were pre-trial or serving time.
SHAPIRO: In a functioning criminal justice system, public defenders should have been representing most of these thousands of people. Legal defense is a constitutional right. But nothing about the New Orleans criminal justice system was working the way it was supposed to.
FOOTE: The entire court system, it collapsed. The files and all the evidence were under 4 feet of water.
SHAPIRO: When the floodwaters receded, the dysfunction remained. I went to New Orleans in the summer of 2006, a year after the storm.
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SHAPIRO: Here at the criminal court, things are not even close to normal. Plywood covers damaged parts of the building, and there's construction all over.
Sitting in his chambers back then, a judge named Calvin Johnson told me he had just gotten a phone call about 61 people who'd been sitting in jail for a year awaiting their day in court.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
CALVIN JOHNSON: I have tried, and we're still trying, to get to the point where I can say to people like you, there are none left. I can't say that today.
SHAPIRO: The immediate cause of the disaster was obvious - a swirling monster storm called Katrina. But there were deeper problems that made the situation much worse. Public defenders only worked part-time. They had to share computers and phone lines. The system was funded through traffic tickets. And lawyers didn't even meet their clients until their first court appearance, which could take place weeks or even months after someone was arrested.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
RON SULLIVAN: It was a structurally flawed criminal justice system pre-Katrina, and this storm exposed all of the flaws.
SHAPIRO: That's what Ron Sullivan told me back in 2006 when he was a Yale law professor. These days, he teaches at Harvard, which is where I recently called Professor Sullivan.
SULLIVAN: And I'm still Ron, even 20 years later...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) All right, Ron.
SULLIVAN: ...You know? (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: And I'm still Ari. And I'm just so happy to reconnect after all this time.
SULLIVAN: Likewise. Likewise. It was good...
SHAPIRO: After Katrina, the city of New Orleans appointed Sullivan to revamp the public defender system.
SULLIVAN: There were upwards of 8,000 people incarcerated with no records of why they were there. The speculation was - and it turned out to be true - that most of them were there for quality-of-life crimes - open containers of alcohol, loitering. You know, those sorts of things.
SHAPIRO: So there were two problems. No. 1, thousands of people lost in prisons and jails across the South, and No. 2, a dysfunctional criminal justice system that had been failing people for years before the storm made landfall. At times, New Orleans has locked people up at a higher rate than any other big city.
MARSHALL: It was the incarceration capital of the world.
SHAPIRO: Ronald Marshall felt the system's failings firsthand. And 20 years after he was evacuated from New Orleans Parish Prison, he still can't make sense of it.
MARSHALL: People in New Orleans, they struggle the best, right? They make struggling look sexy, man. They make it look real good, for real.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
MARSHALL: I'm still - to this day, haven't found the lesson in Hurricane Katrina. I mean, I've been through traumas all my life and I've found the lesson in those traumas. But I don't know what lesson Katrina taught us, or taught me. I still haven't figured that one out.
SHAPIRO: Did anyone ever apologize to you for what you went through?
MARSHALL: Oh, they don't do that here, man (laughter). This is New Orleans.
SHAPIRO: But something powerful also emerged from the wreckage of Katrina. The storm cleared the way for changes that the system had needed for decades, and some visionary people took advantage of that opportunity. Professor Ron Sullivan remembers when he first got to town, he was invited to a reception.
SULLIVAN: And one of the state Supreme Court judges came up to me and said in the most beautiful Cajun twang, Mr. Sullivan, we hear that you are trying to bring a Cadillac system down here to New Orleans. Well, let me just tell you, our old beat-up Buick is just fine. Just spruce it up a little bit and you'll do well down here.
SHAPIRO: And how did you think about that analogy?
SULLIVAN: (Laughter) It was was both offensive and incredibly comical at once. And little did they know that I was bringing a Rolls-Royce system, not just a Cadillac system.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
SULLIVAN: So I nodded and smiled, and just thought to myself, you have no idea of what's coming (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF DUKE ELLINGTON SONG, "CREOLE LOVE CALL")
SHAPIRO: Tomorrow, how New Orleans got that Rolls-Royce.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I didn't have any fancy tools, right? What I had was other people who saw things the way that I saw them and a lot of energy and a lot of motivation.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUKE ELLINGTON SONG, "CREOLE LOVE CALL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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