Serving Life

by Lisa R. Cohen

Two weeks ago I traveled to Louisiana's maximum security Angola State Penitentiary. It was almost exactly two years since I'd begun Serving Life, the documentary that aired last Thursday night on OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Back in July of 2009, months before OWN decided to fund the film, before Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker came on board as Executive Producer, I first went to Angola to check out their inmate hospice program.

There I met the inmate volunteers who staffed the program and I was skeptical - it seemed too good to be true. Murderers - serving life sentences - were caring for their dying fellow inmates. Washing their bed-sore covered bodies, changing their diapers, holding their hands while they took their last breath. It was the other side of death, not the one at the end of a sudden muzzle flash, but the slow and wrenching kind, leaving plenty of time for hard reflection.

It's a volunteer position; the inmates have regular jobs that come first. So there's a lot of burnout, and the hospice coordinator planned to pick a new class of volunteers from among the ranks of the prison's 5,100 inmates. I asked if we could follow along, from the application interviews through the selection through the training, and their first patients. This way, we could watch for ourselves to decide whether it was a con job. The prison said yes.

Two years passed, during which time I was there, off and on, and then on and on, with a skeleton crew of producers and camera men (and one amazing and nimble woman) who flew in from New York. One cameramen was local - an inmate named Sean Vaughn, whose innate talents blossomed over the course of production. He himself is serving life.

They say time passes slowly in prison, but it did pass. We met the incoming class of volunteers on a freezing January day, the record-breaking, coldest day in years. They seemed to be wearing every piece of clothing they owned, and with good reason.

We watched them train in June, and their T-shirts gave us continuity problems. So did the sweat that beaded up on their faces as they concentrated on practicing feeding, bathing and changing the sick, elder inmates in the hospital wards before graduating to actual hospice patients.

Angola is, well, let's just say unique, as prisons go. It's 26 miles of acreage, a huge former plantation bounded on three sides by the Mississippi. Most of the wardens, guards and other staff actually live inside the prison, in a town with its own post office, swimming pool, baseball diamond and 9 hole golf course (called Prison View).

At Angola, they decorate big time for holidays. Life size Uncle Sam cut outs and fireworks (yes, fireworks) on the Fourth of July, turkeys with crepe paper tails at Thanksgiving, and Christmas lights strung from the guard shacks. You can't fail to notice the seasons passing by. We were there for all of the major holidays, except Easter. I imagine there were brightly colored eggs, and the staff's children probably had a hunt.

Our team lived at the prison as well, in a series of small guest houses built to accommodate the endless stream of visitors who pass through Angola. The one we spent weeks in overlooked a small lake, and alligators occasionally skirted the dock, making us more nervous than any of the "trusty" inmates who wandered freely, carrying out their farm duties - raising cattle, fishing the lake.

And we filmed. Hundreds of hours at the hospital, in the inmate dormitories late at night, the cafeterias during meals, the churches and the workshops, the college classrooms and the inmate basketball court. But mostly, we filmed in the hospice, tracking the new volunteers' progress.

There was the ambivalent "Boston" who juggled doubts about his work with anxiety over his nine-year old son's impending visit, a son he'd never met. The convicted murderer Justin, who was serving life for being at the scene even though he hadn't pulled the trigger. The "three-strikes-you're-out" lifer Ratliff, who also helped care for his older brother at the hospital, a Crohns patient. And Shaheed, who very late in the game disclosed the tragedy in his life that had helped him change his way of thinking. They all proved my skepticism wrong.

Two years passed, including 4 plus months of filming, half a dozen deaths, 4 months of edit, and more late nights than I thought there were in a lifetime. The film was finished, and we wanted the inmates to see it. It felt very important. I flew down for the first time in many months and on a very hot July day, hundreds of inmates streamed into the prison's main chapel, along with Warden Burl Cain and many of his assistant wardens, several guards, and other staff.

I was nervous. More so than I'd be the next week in Los Angeles, at a private invitation-only screening filled with, among others, the new Co-presidents of OWN, Forest Whitaker and other media muckety mucks. There I'd have to get up and join Forest in a Q&A afterwards.

But this was harder. We'd followed these men around, shoving a camera in their faces for months, as they cringed, cried and peeled back their layers - something tough guys in prison never do. Then we'd thrown out 99.9% of it, shaped the remaining .1% into a dish of our own making, and now it was going to be projected up on the giant white wall at the back of the sanctuary. Not to mention broadcast nationally the following week.

Luckily I sat in the front row where I couldn't see anyone's face. It was very quiet, but I was thrilled when the audience laughed in all the places I'd hoped they would. It's hard to believe, but we'd worked very hard to include the humor - which there is in every part of life, especially the toughest parts. The AP reporter who covered the screening wrote afterwards that the room was also filled with quiet sobbing - I was too far away to hear for myself.

But afterwards the Warden spoke briefly. "It's incredible," he said, visibly moved and teary himself. "Many of you have a chance to change your lives, and this says you can do it... And

you're worthy of this film. You're worthy of what the public is going to think about you.... My encouragement to you is, you have a legacy. And you can't betray it. You can't betray this hospice program. So you just got to live it... We can't be counterfeit, and if we do, then we desecrate what you just saw. And we can't do that. So it draws out the best in all of us."

A lot of very positive reviews followed, including the Washington Post, New Orleans Times Picayune, and others. But the Warden's comments - those were the most rewarding I've gotten so far.

Serving Life encores this Wednesday night, Aug 3, at 9pm and then again at midnight. See the trailer here, and find out where it's showing in your zip code.

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Defining Features

by Lisa R. Cohen

For the last two years, I’ve been in and out of prison. I’m out now, and have something to show for it – a documentary film I directed and produced called “Serving Life” that will premiere on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) on July 28. I’ll be writing about it in my next few blogs. It’s been two years in the making, and I’m mighty proud of our small production team’s heroic efforts. You can watch the promo for it here.

The film, executive produced and narrated by Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, led us to the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola, aka “the Alcatraz of the South.”

I happen to have been to Angola many times in the past, and I know the place better than many. The 26 mile property, contained on three sides by the Mississippi River (except when it floods the levies there as it did last month) is an unearthly world unto itself, a throwback to a long ago time when Angola actually was a plantation, worked by forced emigrés from the African nation it was named for.

My first visit to the maximum security prison was over 15 years ago, and when I arrived this time around, on a sweltering July day, for a week of preliminary shooting, some things had changed. Since the ‘90s, under the current Warden, Angola has had so many outside visitors, they’ve built guest cottages on the premises. So this time we literally moved into the prison. Every morning we’d leave our cozy four bedroom cabin, overlooking a lake filled with with cedar stumps and sinister looking alligators, and head to the prison hospital.

There, tucked away in a corner of a chronic care ward, a group of inmates staffed the prison hospice. Day after day, these volunteers walked the chain length enclosed path from their dorms to the hospital, to wipe a dying man’s fevered brow, change his diaper, and, finally, to hold his hand while he takes his last breath. It’s a burn-out job. In fact it’s not a job at all, it’s all-volunteer. At Angola inmates work every day; the volunteers come to hospice before and afterwards. So it’s no surprise there’s a constant need for fresh recruits.

Our mission was to follow a new crop of inmate volunteers–watch them get picked, get trained, and then find out whether they were up to the task. If a hardened criminal can be taught to perform the ultimate act of compassion, what excuse do the rest of us have?

By last summer we were in full production. That meant weeks on end watching as these men tested themselves. What they learned about themselves, we did too, and the results were both chilling and life-affirming.

The first day at the hospital, I met probably a few dozen inmates. They all looked exactly the same to me, even though at Angola they dress in street clothes, a kind of informal uniform of jeans and colorful t-shirts that advertise the various prison clubs they belong to. But their faces all blurred together, impersonal, hard-lived, and I could only identify them by their charges–murderers mostly, armed robbers, a heroin-lifer, and multiple drug offenders.

As the days passed, though, personalities emerged, and pretty soon these men defined themselves–by their past criminal acts, their current struggle to redefine themselves, and their hopes for the future. (And they all maintain hope, even the ones who are destined to die at Angola, perhaps in a hospice bed.)

I met their children, their sisters, their brothers (some serving time in another part of the prison). I watched them recoil with disgust as they started training, but then come to embrace the most grueling parts of the work. I watched them make each other laugh– and me too–because that’s what you do in real life even in the darkest times.

I spent this week filming on the start of another venture, just the first days of a long, long haul. On Monday I sat in a room in Nashville and listened as a group of women bared their painful pasts. On Monday they all looked the same to me, just like Robert and "Animal" and Stephen did two years ago.

But by yesterday, as I said goodbye and headed for the airport, I’d begun to know their stories of courage and survival. These women were taking shape to me, and their message was that much more powerful. It made me realize, once again, that this is why I do it. And that getting the chance to pass on those stories can make us all a little more human.

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A Credible Motive

by Lisa R. Cohen

I missed my slot on this blog in the last cycle because I was away in the slammer. Don't get me wrong -- I was comfortably ensconced in a two bedroom guest cottage with wood burning fireplace and fully stocked frig.

But the cottage was high atop a hill inside Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, aka "the Alcatraz of the South." A former plantation worked by slaves imported from the country it's named for, Angola holds some 5,000 maximum security inmates and spans 22 miles - "bigger than all of Manhattan," as the warden likes to say.

There were four of us packed into the two bedrooms, and the southern heating system couldn't compete with record freezing temperatures, but still, the housing was certainly bigger than the cells some Angola inmates inhabit, and much more private than the sweeping double-bunked dorms most of them sleep in at night. I am always cognizant and grateful when I go there that I can drive out whenever I want.

After our first night, I arrived at the Treatment Center, home to the hospice patients whose lives and deaths I'm here to chronicle. I was sad to see the Christmas lights that had twinkled around the guard shack when I visited in December were being packed up. The candy cane and Santa Claus-patterned gift wrap that had papered the infirmary office doors was gone, as the New Year ushered in a return to institutional white.

I was there with a film production crew to watch as the prison hospice staff selected a new crop of inmate volunteers. Executive Producer Molly Fowler (who took the photos of our trip); DP Tom Mason; Producer Jeca Taudte, and I were following the inmates for our new documentary-in-progress, ONE LAST SHOT: A Story of Redemption, see more info and trailer here.

One at a time, the applicants sat in the infirmary chapel, facing a security warden, the hospice co-ordinator, two mental health specialists and a classifications officer. One of the men considered each question intently as he sweated so profusely, it beaded up and rolled down his face. One was bowed over with the weight of decades spent at Angola. Several were still young, but they knew they were going to grow old and die there. Many are murderers.

"Why do you want to be a hospice volunteer?" asked Stacye, the hospice co-ordinator with a healthy bullshit detector. "I want to help in time of suffering," said one, in biblical tones. He'd watched his mother die of cancer, he informed the room. He probably had, and he seemed very sincere. Later Stacye told us she'd believe it when she saw it. "You have to prove it to me," she said, in tones that brooked no nonsense.

"I'd like to think someone will be here for me one day, when I need looking after," said another, enlightened self-interest at its most pointed. "I want to learn about life," said a third, a little cryptically, or profoundly, depending on the interpretation. He almost sounded like he was looking for an adventure - which didn't bode well for his chances.

I find all these answers somewhat unsatisfying. Mainly this is because I haven't yet heard one that works for me. "Why the hell would anyone want to volunteer to work in hospice?" is the more apt question I find myself thinking. I just can't fathom it.

Taking a dying stranger into your heart, watching him shrivel and weaken as he strikes out against death -- futilely -- and often against you, holds little appeal. Feeding him, bathing him, holding his hand as he slips away; who would step forward to embrace such a task? And yet scores of these inmates do.

Are they looking for special privileges? A sympathetic ear from the mostly female nursing staff? Some face-time on our air? Or, like Stacye says, will they show better than tell their genuine intent?

We arrived on a Sunday night. Executions in Louisiana have been all but put on hold, as post-conviction appeals wend their way endlessly through the courts. But that Thursday an execution was scheduled, the first in eight years. Gerald Bordelon (seen at right), convicted of raping and murdering his 12-year-old stepdaughter, was to be put to death at sundown that day. He had waived all his appeals; there was no paper trail to slow him down.

So on Monday, before the hospice job interviews, we watched from inside the execution chamber as the prison "strap-down" team held its final rehearsal for the big show. They practiced over and over cinching the buckles for each arm and leg, monitoring the heart rate, taping the IV line securely. Someone positioned a plastic trash can under the end of the drip, to keep the floor free of the saline which dribbled harmlessly out of the plastic tubing instead of feeding into the arm of the assistant warden standing in for Bordelon.

By Wednesday afternoon, the hospice folks had finished making their candidate picks -- eight new recruits made the cut. Wednesday night, my small production crew and I went back to the execution chamber building to talk to Bordelon. He was awaiting his death the next day in a cell just 62 steps away from the lethal injection table.

"What will God think about all this?" I asked him, as I faced him through the horizontal meal slot in the barred door. Our hospice film is about men who seek redemption, and we'd wondered if that's why Bordelon had chosen to waive his chance to hang on to life at least a little longer, possibly for decades.

"I'm not doing it so God will grant me forgiveness," he replied, "or for redemption, but if He's the God I believe in, maybe He will." Bordelon said he wanted to do it sooner rather than later to atone for what he'd done, to bring -- if possible -- some peace to his ex-wife and her family. Like the prison volunteer candidate, he seemed sincere, too.

There were more practical reasons, of course. The appeals process extends your life, but it doesn't extend the square footage of your floor plan, and an 8x6 cell is a rough place to spend years waiting. And Bordelon had been clear about one other thing. If he ever got out, he'd said, he would probably do it again. Better not to take any chances.

The next day it all went off without a hitch, and Gerald Bordelon showed rather than told his good intentions. And in the days that followed we went on with the rest of our shoot, interviewing our new hospice volunteers. Not all of the eight will make it through the next step -- a three-week training course, one week of class and then two tougher weeks on the job before graduating.

The inmates who've been doing this work for years will be putting the new guys through their paces and looking over their shoulders every step of the way. My film crew and I will be looking over theirs, to see who's "gaming" as the old hands call it, and who's got the real, credible motives.

All photos of One Last Shot production by Molly Fowler.

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ONE LAST SHOT

by Lisa R. Cohen

So here’s the new project I’m immersing myself in – a different side of Crime, Ink. But first, some history.

In 1996 I was producing for ABC News PrimeTime Live. I traveled to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, site of the film Dead Man Walking and one of the most notoriously brutal prisons in American history.

Correspondent Cynthia McFadden and I were profiling Susan Sarandon, the actress who played Sister Helen Prejean in the movie, but the piece had spun away from us and we found ourselves in the death chamber at Angola, interviewing Sister Helen herself. She understood the value of a good visual.

From there, it was just a short hop – ok, a very long one - to a one-hour PrimeTime Live special on the death penalty called “Judgment at Midnight.” Cynthia and I and a very talented production team installed cameras on Death Row, including two fixed cameras clamped to a condemned man’s cell bars round the clock.

We followed him for days, finally to the door of the death chamber, where we watched him walk in. Along the way, we also interviewed his family, the family of his victims, the lawyers for both sides, the guards, and his fellow death row inmates. And we spent a lot of time with Warden Burl Cain, who gave the orders for his death, a very media savvy man who told us, “If you’re going to be for the death penalty, you ought to see the way it all happens… see it from my shoes.”

It was a profound and humbling experience. Now, thirteen years later, I’m back at Angola for a look at another kind of death penalty. This time our story takes place inside the infirmary, following the lives – and deaths – of hospice patients who’ve been given months to live because of diseases like liver failure, cancer, or heart disease. Old men’s diseases inside walls where 9 out of every ten inmates is serving life, until they die, inside these walls.

But the story is less about the terminal patients than it is about the hospice staff, the men who care for the patients until they die, then care for their successors until they die, and on and on. The staff is made up of fellow inmates, also serving life sentences. Most are killers who will now see death in a different way, up close, lingering, with plenty of time to know and develop ties to the dying. For many it is the first time they’re developing these kinds of ties to anyone, as they help feed, bathe, carry or wheel their patients around. As the end approaches, they’ll change their patients’ diapers, sit with them round the clock in a vigil, pray with them, and finally, help to bury them.

In our proposed documentary, we’ll ask questions about what that work does to someone who cared so little about life before this. We’ll ponder redemption. I’d like to think I’m going into this with an open mind. But I wonder what the preconceptions of my readers here are.

Here is the link to the five-minutes-and-change trailer that came of our trip there last month. We’ll use it to raise funds and interest, to get our project made. The documentary is tentatively titled ONE LAST SHOT. Your comments are welcome. And if anyone has a better title to suggest, we're open to ideas.

Watch here:

Or go to:
http://www.lisarcohen.com/OneLastShotFinalWeb.mov

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It's Official: Gustav Looters GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL (Not to Angola Prison)

by Vanessa Leggett

Most of us know better than to believe everything we see on TV. But when an official makes an emergency announcement during a press conference televised worldwide, we pay attention, as we should. And we tend to accept such statements as fact.

As Hurricane Gustav churned toward the Gulf Coast over the weekend, I caught a press conference on CNN.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin had important announcements to make. This was the third time in as many years that Mayor Nagin found himself addressing a panicked public trying to recover from or prepare for cataclysmic hurricanes: first Katrina (looter pictured above), then Rita, and now Gustav. “This is the Storm of the Century,” the mayor proclaimed on Saturday.

"The Storm of the Century"

Big storms call for big words. And Mayor Nagin was full of them. A mandatory evacuation had been ordered in anticipation of a Category 4 hurricane. The mayor had a warning for anyone who did not follow orders to evacuate: Watch out for flying mobile homes. Trailers would become “projectiles,” he said, and would “start to fly around the city.”

He also had a warning for crooks planning to take advantage of the city-wide evacuation. "Anybody who is caught looting in New Orleans will be brought directly to Angola,” he said, repeating himself: "Directly to Angola."

This statement hit me harder than the one about trailers hurtling through the city, which Nagin said to expect as "a matter of fact," though it sounded more like the movie Twister than reality. I remembered the devastation Katrina brought, however, so I was prepared to believe in flying trailers.

I was not ready to accept that the Constitution would be thrown to the wind as well—that police would pluck looters from the streets of New Orleans and haul the accused to Louisiana's Death Row. If cows could fly in Twister, BS could fly in a press conference. Nothing unrealistic about that. In fact, City Hall seemed as fitting a venue as any. But the mayor's message was broadcast worldwide.

“You will not have a temporary stay in the city," Mayor Nagin continued. "You’ll go directly to the Big House, in general population. You will go directly to Angola Prison. And God bless you when you go there."

Given New Orleans’ experience during the storms of 2005, cautioning would-be looters was called for—especially after Hurricane Katrina, when pilfering was so widespread that even uniformed members of law enforcement were filmed helping themselves to goods from a Wal-Mart.

I remember how stunned I had been to see police captured on tape, stealing in the storm-torn town they were sworn to protect. But I found Nagin's message even more shocking. Here was the Mayor of New Orleans making an official announcement, threatening thieves picking over others' belongings with a direct ticket to "general population" in the nation's largest maximum-security prison, the "Alcatraz of the South." It was unbelievable.

Maybe my personal background is what kept me from buying the threat. I'd taught corrections at a university and later did time in a maximum-security federal facility. You could say I know a thing or two about the prison system. My knowledge of how things are run on both sides of the bars did not square with Nagin's threat.
C.J. 101: Arrestees are detained in jails, not prisons. Penitentiaries house those who have been convicted of a crime, felons who have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment.

The Mayor Has No Clothes

Traditionally, the responsibility of bringing such errors to public attention falls on the media. (Though it doesn’t always happen that way and results can be disastrous. Just ask former ambassador Joe Wilson.) Of course, the mainstream media might not be motivated to correct this type of inaccuracy, since it seemed to me at least that Nagin was using a scare tactic to force law and order. I'm guessing journalists with more practiced noses than mine at "smell test" reporting shared my initial reservation in bringing the error to the public's attention: Why let the thugs think otherwise? And there was a less honorable reason the press did not point a finger at Nagin to say there was not a thread of truth to the mayor's statement: some reporters never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

But after watching credible journalists like Wolf Blitzer perpetuate Nagin’s claim that looters would be sent directly to Angola, I started to wonder . . . Could it be true? Yet another report made me reconsider my initial impression. A New Orleans-based broadcast journalist interviewed by CNN echoed the cable network's reports that looters would be sent directly to the Big House. "They’re serious," he said, seeming, well, serious.

When in Louisiana . . .

OK. If a local reporter was backing up Nagin's claim, maybe these Louisianans were serious after all. The law in Louisiana is different from any other state in the country—and I’m not referring to the way it’s enforced, or that it’s sometimes not enforced. Louisiana operates under the Napoleonic Code.

I decided to check the statute, which I was not surprised to see had been revised since the storms of 2005:

"Whoever commits the crime of looting during the existence of a state of emergency . . . shall be imprisoned at hard labor for not less than three years nor more than fifteen years without benefit of probation, parole, or suspension of sentence."

The punishment seemed a bit harsh. For a property crime that could be as small as stealing a loaf of bread to keep from starving, sending someone to prison for a minimum 1,095 days approached the fiction of Les Misėrables. In New Orleans a few years ago, those who rode out Katrina truly were without survival essentials. In the looting footage cited above, the reporter at Wal-Mart asked one man if he was stealing from the store.

"We have no means of washed clothes or food, sure," he said, continuing shopping.

If Nagin's straight-to-prison threat became reality, what would happen to a victim who was without food, or a merchant to sell it to him? And what if an evacuating homeowner returned to pick up something left behind? What if, for example, a New Orleans P.D. officer didn't believe he really lived there? Should an innocent man go straight to prison? Would a teenager having fun in all the chaos by stealing a plastic pink flamingo from a neighbor's yard find himself in general pop at Angola?

Where in all this mess is a little thing called due process? As the Louisiana looting statute stands, at least three years prison would be mandatory for anyone found guilty of looting during an emergency. In addition to imprisonment, a fine would be subject to a judge's discretion. How could a monetary punishment be left up to a judge in a courtroom, but a man's life and liberty rest solely in the hands of an officer on the street?

As preposterous as the whole thing seemed to me, one phrase in the statute gave me pause. Looters would be “imprisoned at hard labor.” Angola, a.k.a. "The Farm," is perhaps the country’s most recognized hard labor prison. The acronym for Louisiana State Penitentiary stands for something else to the prison population, which knows L.S.P. as the “Last Slave Plantation.”

I did a quick fact tally. During a state of emergency, the law mandates "hard labor" as punishment for all looters. And Angola Prison is the state symbol for chain-gang labor. Maybe the mayor wasn’t off his rocker. Two years ago, Katrina looters had been dealt double-digit prison sentences for stealing booze from a store, to "send a message."

Louisiana does do things differently. And exigencies can similarly affect how laws are applied in any state. The Constitution makes due process exceptions during times of war or in cases arising out of "public danger." Insurance policies contain clauses addressing force majeure, or “acts of God,” which can change the rules.

More than a century ago, The New York Times ran a story days after the Great Storm of 1900, a Category 4 hurricane, which claimed more than 6,000 lives in another Gulf Coast community: Galveston, Texas. In the aftermath of that disaster, an insurance company spokesman was quoted as saying "The letter of the law will not be adhered to."

In 2005, one New Orleans cop looting the Wal-Mart had the same spirit. In that footage, a reporter asked an officer what was going on in the closed superstore. "Doing my job," the cop said, walking away from a basket of stolen goods. "Looking for looters."

Lessons from History

According to storm lore, on September 9, 1900, the day after the Great Storm made landfall on Galveston Island, literally thousands of corpses began rapidly decomposing in the Gulf Coast's relentless heat and humidity. On the small island, the stench of human remains and livestock carcases littering the landscape was unbearable. Survivors quickly decided to dump bodies at sea. Looters complicated efforts to ID the dead. Police caught one man whose pockets were stuffed with a couple of dozen gold rings, the owners’ fingers still attached. Ears and other body parts were severed for jewelry. More than thirty looters were dealt with Texas-style: the majority were shot to death, some on the spot.

Contra-flow of Information

Like Texas, Louisiana is a renegade state, but I still doubted Mayor Nagin's sincerity. I had to do a little independent investigation. I checked for official press releases restating the mayor's Angola warning, but found nothing.

Visiting the Louisiana State Penitentiary Web site, I did discover a public notice concerning the state prison system's "Preparation for Tropical Storm Gustav." The press release simply notified the public that visitation would be suspended. The L.S.P. posted the bulletin to inform and "assure the public that the prison is secure and public safety will be maintained through this emergency crisis." Nothing about Angola.

I e-mailed a request for more specific information regarding Mayor Nagin's comments. Here was the official response:

Post-evacuation and post-storm arrestees will be housed at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, not Louisiana State Penitentiary. . . .We are in the process of establishing court functions at EHCC for later in the week. More than likely, a judge will be appointed to hear cases from all parishes making arrests, instead of having a judge from each parish coming in and handling only that parish. We're still working out the details on that, but we did have some court hearings at EHCC after Hurricane Katrina so this is not unchartered territory.

Pam Laborde, the Communications Director for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, ended the statement with the typical courtesy: "Please let me know if you have any further questions."

I did. Perhaps I asked too many. Though she'd just confirmed, in so many words, that the mayor's claim had no clothes, I knew I had to press, specifically about Angola. And while Ms. Laborde's responses were helpful . . . it wasn't until I bore down on Angola, that I received the information I needed:

"Angola has nothing to do with this story," she wrote, "other than the fact that the mayor apparently gave incorrect information as to where arrestees would be taken."

The Mayor is Full of Hot Air ("Apparently")

I do understand that leaders have to make choices for the greater good of those they serve. And this would not be the first time or the last that a man in charge delivered deliberate misinformation for what he believed was in the better interest of his community.

Maybe Nagin's prevarication served its purpose. The mayor gave his "Mother of All Storms" warning Saturday night as mass evacuations were under way. As of Sunday morning, the New Orleans Police Department reported no arrests for looting. Then again, those reports came during the calm before the storm.

But should it ever be acceptable for an elected official to deliberately mislead his constituency? Does talk of projectile mobile homes and prison without due process (if spoken to secure the public's personal safety and property) rise to the level of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater? I'm not sure.

But I have a problem with even the appearance that a person's Fifth Amendment rights can be gutted, even if the threat is ultimately empty. If that's what Mayor Nagin did, he abused the First Amendment.

On the other hand, I would support a citizen's right to push the free speech envelope. I appreciated this comment to an online news story restating the mayor's whopper. This reader had an even stronger notion of how looters could be deterred:

"Unless they drop [the property] immediately, shoot them. Tag them with signs saying, this was a looter."

Lesser of Two Disasters

Perhaps Nagin's greater good was served. But what will the repercussions be, considering his message was broadcast around the world? Might other countries wonder: Is that how America now deals with petty thieves? Hard-core prison without benefit of trial or so much as a hearing before a magistrate?

Early this morning, as the world waited for Gustav to make landfall, I was thankful to see CNN storm trooper Anderson Cooper wisely revising history. He seemed to fumble for words that wouldn’t take the wind out of the mayor’s threat, but would make the report closer to the truth.

“You will be taken directly to a local jail,” he said.

Anderson’s trademark squint seemed especially blinky. Perhaps it was the wind whipping his face. More likely, I think, is that Anderson realized what he’d just said on live television:

Looters will be confined in a jail within the city that Gustav is barreling toward, the "ghost town" that everyone else has evacuated.

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