Hurricane Katrina helped change New Orleans' public defender system

Consider This from NPR

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🗓️ 6 August 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

In 2006, Ari Shapiro reported on how Hurricane Katrina made an already broken public defender system in New Orleans worse. The court system collapsed in the aftermath of the storm.

Katrina caused horrific destruction in New Orleans. It threw incarcerated people into a sort of purgatory - some were lost in prisons for more than a year.

But the storm also cleared the way for changes that the city's public defender system had needed for decades.

Two decades later, Shapiro returns to New Orleans and finds a system vastly improved.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a turnaround story about a broken system in New Orleans and the people who worked to fix it.
0:06.8	When Ronald Marshall turned 31, he was behind bars at the Orleans Parish prison.
0:12.1	It's a day he'll always remember because it's when Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
0:17.4	Oh, my birthday.
0:18.8	It was your birthday.
0:19.7	August 29.
0:20.9	20 years ago this month,
0:22.8	Marshall and the others in the jail were plunged into darkness.
0:26.0	The agonitioned went off.
0:27.0	Everything was all, completely shut down.
0:28.6	No air conditioning.
0:29.7	No lights, no water.
0:30.8	This is a centralized building.
0:33.5	So once the heat and air go up, it gets extremely hot there.
0:36.2	So you have no light, no food, no air, no water.
0:41.3	The water was off too because the water is electricity.
0:43.3	He'd been brought to New Orleans from upstate Louisiana for a court appointment.
0:48.3	He was challenging his conviction and sentence of 50 years for armed robbery.
0:52.3	Ultimately, a judge vacated his sentence, and he was
0:55.8	released, but that didn't happen until 2021. These days, he works for a nonprofit that advocates for
1:02.6	incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. 20 years ago, in the Orleans Parish prison,
1:08.7	nearly a week went by in the dark and heat before help came.
	...

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