Part II: New Orleans works to get juvenile justice system moving again after Katrina.

Byline: Richard A. Webster

Editor's note: The final installment in a two-part series on how the city and state processed hundreds of juveniles incarcerated in the New Orleans area during Hurricane Katrina. This week focuses on how the devastated Orleans Parish Juvenile Court tried to ensure juvenile inmates weren't trapped in legal limbo post-Katrina.Word began to spread in late September that more than 6,000 adult inmates evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison after Hurricane Katrina were languishing in a devastated justice system.Thousands sat in jails scattered across the state having never been formally charged with a crime. They had no legal representation, no scheduled court date and no idea when they would be released. Judges, lawyers and activists throughout the United States condemned the situation as a disaster. Before it was all over, some people arrested for minor traffic violations had spent more than three months in maximum-security facilities, including Angola State Penitentiary.Derwyn Bunton, associate director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a New Orleans nonprofit dedicated to reforming the juvenile justice system, said his immediate concern wasn't for the adult inmates. It was for the more than 100 juvenile inmates in OPP at the time Katrina made landfall.While state-run juvenile prisons in New Orleans evacuated inmates to Baton Rouge before the hurricane, city-operated juvenile detention centers moved juveniles to Orleans Parish Prison. They were not evacuated until after the city flooded."Word was coming out from various sources that the adults were going nowhere and sitting all over the place for things like contempt, traffic tickets and all this other nonsense," Bunton said. "We said it wasn't going to go down like that so we all jumped in quickly to make sure our kids didn't sit there like the adults did."One week after the storm, Chief Judge David Bell moved the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court to Baton Rouge and began holding as many juvenile hearings as possible. By the end of October, every eligible juvenile inmate had been released, placed on probation or sentenced, according to Juvenile Court."We couldn't allow children to sit in a bad situation that was deteriorating by the day," Bell said. "That was the difference. We were going to be active and make it happen as opposed to allowing FEMA or the city or federal government or money to dictate to us how it was going to happen. We had kids that had not been found guilty sitting in adult facilities and that was unacceptable."

Preventing chaosIn the days before and after Katrina, more than 240 juveniles held in parishes affected by the storm were transferred to Jetson Correctional Center for Youth in Baton Rouge. Most had never been charged with a crime or tried before a judge.But with 80 percent of the city under water, the New Orleans judicial system was shut down, throwing the juveniles in legal limbo.Bell moved quickly to secure the use of affiliate courts in Baton Rouge and recruited public defenders and assistant district attorneys to conduct trials. The Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana began tracking juvenile case files and families.The Orleans Parish Juvenile Court in Baton Rouge held its first post-storm hearing Sept. 21 and by the next day 58 pre-trial juveniles had been released into the ...