Orleans Parish Prison Gone Wild! Video Shocks Court and Community

Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman has been under pressure in recent years to clean up the Orleans Parish Prison. He has agreed to a proposed federal consent decree, but he has maintained the problems lie with a lack of funds. Videos obtained from his safe after he was served with a grand jury subpoena show even basic security is lacking.

On the second day of the hearing for the consent decree, the video was shown in federal court. The courtroom went deathly quiet when the video showed a prisoner cooking crack cocaine. Moments later, a prisoner is shown using a piece of a cloth from a prison jumpsuit as a tourniquet before pulling out a syringe and slamming a needle in his vein to shoot up. Then someone yells, “This is Orleans Parish Prison gone wild!”

Shirtless prisoners are shown in an overcrowded cell. One lights up a joint. The video pans to a handful of pills: Percocet, Vicodin, and more. “We’re rolling like a dog in here,” someone says on the tape. “Medication, pills, drugs, heroin, crack.”

A few moments later, prisoner at a dice game are shown flashing wads of cash and taking turns shooting dice. “They want us to live like animals, we living like [expletive] animals,” someone shouts. Then, a prisoner with his head wrapped in a towel shows off a loaded handgun. After waving it around, he unloads the clip. “Click, click, click, click,” bullets fall to the filthy jail floor. “It is real,” an off-camera voice says. “Believe that.”

As the dice game continues, the prisoners pull Budweiser beers from a cooler. While they chug beer, they laugh about a 17-year-old drinking with them, calling him a “young alcoholic.”

The video, which was apparently created to expose jail conditions, rolls on to show prisoners rolling, smoking and snorting. A scene 12 minutes into the 14-minute video shows a prisoner cutting lines of heroin on a book. “That’s how we roll in OPP, baby,” someone shouts as the prisoner snorts the substance.

That video was one of the three recovered from Gusman’s safe and played in court. In another videotape, a young man is shown touring Bourbon Street, leering at woman, and bragging about how he just escaped from jail. He intimates the escape, video and return to jail were to document conditions.

“This tape was hidden away from the public in a safe in the sheriff’s office and only came to light when the city’s legal team fought to uncover it,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu. “How can we make our city safe when prisoners are coming and going from jail as they please, walking freely on the streets, and then returning to jail with heroin, cocaine, and loaded weapons?”

Gusman’s office released a statement that the videos came from the now-closed House of Detention that “is a city-owned building in a state of disrepair and abhorrent lack of proper security measures.” In court, Gusman’s testimony concerning the video was sketchy. He said he couldn’t remember many parts. He told reporters he saw the video on a “very small screen,” holding a finger and thumb a few inches apart. “It wasn’t much that I saw.”

The city disputes Gusman’s portrayal of his agency as strapped for cash and underserved by a lack of financing. Landrieu has said Gusman is mismanaging funds. The video pushed Landrieu to say, “We again request the Department of Justice join us in immediately putting a federal receiver in place to manage the jail. It is now clearer than ever that the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office is not keeping the prison secure and our city safe.”

Experts agreed. “It is a very unsafe facility for both staff and inmates,” testified prison expert Manuel Romero at the fairness hearing on the consent decree.

Gusman denied he does not have a grip on his jail. “Look, I’m not going to respond to paid experts that are getting paid to come up with a statement. I’m here, I’m elected, and I’m doing the job,” he said.

Sources: www.wltv.com, www.fox8live.com, www.nola.com

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