Hurricane Katrina was a catalyst for change in New Orleans' public defender office
All Things Considered, By Ari Shapiro
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans 20 years ago this month, Meghan Garvey was fresh out of law school.
She was not even certified to work as a lawyer yet, but she wound up helping a team find thousands of incarcerated people who were lost in the prison system after the storm.
"There were people being moved around to different sorts of jails and prisons around the state. They kept moving people here and there," Garvey recalled recently. "It was really hard to figure out where people were, what they were in jail for, what was going on."
At the time, estimates show New Orleans housed 6,000 to 7,000 people in the local jail, more than any other city in the U.S., according to the Vera Institute of Justice. The city's incarceration rate was more than five times the national average per capita. Thousands of inmates were taken to dry land as the storm devastated the city, but their records didn't go with them. That meant that for months, the understaffed public defender office struggled to locate and represent its clients.
It was a moment that would define Garvey's career.
"I really do think that I became a public defender because of Katrina," she said.
The chaos exposed flaws in the city's criminal justice system that existed before the storm, but it also cleared the way for changes and some visionary people like Garvey took advantage of that opportunity.
To hear the full interview, visit NPR and All Things Considered.
