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  • Interview with Judge Calvin Johnson
  • Charles Henry Rowell

This interview was conducted in the judge's chambers in the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, on Tulane Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 30, 2007.

ROWELL: Your Honor, where you sit you can see a lot of what is happening within the city of New Orleans, and since Hurricane Katrina you have had an opportunity to see the impact of the hurricane and the flooding on the criminal justice system in this area. Will you speak briefly about what you have witnessed as some of the major effects of Katrina on the criminal justice system in New Orleans?

JOHNSON: We've always had a fractured criminal justice system in New Orleans, as there is a fractured criminal justice system in America. New Orleans traditionally has had difficulty operating a balanced criminal justice system, pre-Katrina. New Orleans had one of the largest prison populations of any urban area in the country; we operated one of the largest prisons in America, pre-Katrina: with a population of less than half a million, we had a 7,000-bed prison facility. That's the equivalent of the prison facility in Chicago; again, with a population of only half a million people. So we've had a very fractured system, and we've had a system that impacted adversely African Americans, the way it operated traditionally—the way it treated them in terms of proper and effective legal representation; the way it treated them in terms of being housed in jail as opposed to being out of jail, pending any kind of pleas; the way it treated them as regards programs or policies implemented to get them out of a life of crime, so to speak, and into a more positive place. All of those things existed before Katrina; Katrina blew the system away.

As a result of Katrina, the jail beds, for instance, we had at the time of Katrina 6,000 people in jail in New Orleans, those 6,000 had to be evacuated out of the city of New Orleans, but, as a result of evacuation, we lost, in essence, access to those individuals—not only access: we didn't even know where they were. And so what happened as a result of Katrina, just in terms of the jail population, so many of those individuals ended up lost in the system to the point where we were months and months and months still trying to locate people in terms of where they were in jails around the state of Louisiana. In some instances, jails outside of the state of Louisiana. To get those out of jail who weren't supposed to be in jail and to be sure those were kept in jail who should have been in jail. All of that came into play as a result of Katrina, just in terms of that issue, but then in terms of, again, starting up the justice system and then trying to operate the system in a fashion [End Page 521] at least on par with what happened before the storm but trying to operate a system as a result of the storm and trying to do better.

We have been working hard since the storm trying to do better: to put a better public system in place, put a better system in place that does not focus on incarceration prior to trial, but focuses on doing things that are keeping people out of jail and keeping people out of the jail system and out of the justice system. But all of this came both as a result of Katrina, that is, the latter part of it, but pre-Katrina, as a result of the vestiges of Jim Crow and segregation and all of those ills that affected African Americans historically in this country, especially in the South, New Orleans has suffered from all of those.

ROWELL: Have there been any differences in the numbers and kinds of crimes committed since Katrina?

JOHNSON: What we have seen since Katrina is just an incredible—when you look at the level of population and the amounts of violence—an incredible increase in...

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