In a report soon to be released, the ACLU has found Orleans Parish Prison ‘Unsafe, Inhumane’
… the city’s jail is plagued by inadequate medical care, violence, overcrowding and squalid conditions … The ACLU report says 70 prisoners are sometimes held in a crowded cell and forced to share a single toilet. “Many new arrestees spend two days or more in such a cell, sleeping directly on a floor littered with trash, urine and feces,” it says.
If you know you’re headed for such conditions, would you contribute to the “uptick” in the New Orleans crime statistics? Oh wait, most criminals are arrested and then set free here, not actually sentenced.
Related: MSNBC- 7 Million Americans Behind Bars; Columbia Journalism Review – Prison Population Sets Record – Few Notice (emphasis mine)
While our nation’s huge prison population is nothing new — in a chewy recent piece, the Washington Post reported that the number of American prisoners is now “about eight times as many as in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world,” housed for a mere $60 billion or so per year …
In more upbeat news, New Orleans is not the only city without fluoride in its drinking water.
