Trying for Safe Streets: as New Orleans reemerges, one organization takes on the criminal justice system.(GULF COAST UPDATE)

ON MAY 9, 2006, Robert Goodman's brother Ronald was killed in an encounter with the New Orleans police.

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For Goodman, who was born and raised in the schools and prisons of Louisiana, the primary crisis of post-Katrina New Orleans is a discriminatory and corrupt criminal justice system. "Every time a Black child is born in Louisiana, there's already a bed waiting for him at Angola State Prison," he declared. Goodman is now fighting to change that system, as part of a grassroots organization called Safe Streets Strong Communities. Safe Streets is struggling not just to reform the entire system, from policing and public defense to prison, but also to reframe the debate around these issues.

In New Orleans, 95 percent of the detained youth in 1999 were Black. In 2004, Louisiana spent $96,713 to incarcerate each child in detention and $4,724 to educate a child in the public schools. "When I went to prison, I was illiterate," Goodman said. "I didn't even know anything about slavery, about our history."

New Orleans' public defense system is in such poor shape that Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter recently complained: "Indigent defense in New Orleans is unbelievable, unconstitutional, totally lacking the basic professional standards of legal representation, and a mockery of what a criminal justice system should be in a Western civilized nation."

Orleans Parish Prison, the city jail, was--before Hurricane Katrina--the eighth largest jail in the United States. Advocates complain that there is no forum for oversight over the jail or Marlin Gusman, the sheriff who runs it. "We've suffered under a policy where the city builds a huge jail that is then required to be filled with human beings, or else it's a waste of money," said civil rights attorney Mary Howell.

In the days after ...