The first photo showed a young African-American man carrying a case of soda and a bag through chest-deep water. This pair of photos then began circling the internet. A Yahoo viewer noticed a relationship between two photographs and posted them together on a separate page. First, immediately after Katrina hit New Orleans, Yahoo and other central websites began publishing dozens and then hundreds of pictures of people struggling in the devastated city. Two examples best illustrate how New Orleanians were criminalized in the media. Reality TV-shows such as “Cops” and “Law and Order,” and the violent film industry similarly inflate the prevalence of violent crime in the United States. In the entertainment industry, television characters on prime time are murdered approximately eleven times as often as real people in the United States (Becket and Sanson 2004). During the 1990’s, nationwide news coverage of homicide more than quadrupled while homicide rates declined by 33%. This illustrates a feature of the American media more generally. For the first days after the hurricane, news outlets focused on what we now know to be greatly exaggerated individual acts of crime and violence (Dwyer and Drew 2005). E11 “Thugs Rein of Terror,” 2 The New York Daily News, September 4, 2005, Pg. On the pages of national newspapers, headlines announced “The Looting Instinct,” 1 The Boston Globe, September 4, 2005, Pg. On television, commentators wondered why these people did not just leave when they were told. When authorities failed to provide these, New Orleanians were admonished for their positions to varying extents. In the days after the hurricane when the city began to flood, tens of thousands of mostly poor black New Orleanians found themselves without food, water, or shelter, and were forced to depend on local and federal authorities to provide their basic needs. It is important to explore however, the ways in which the specific social position of this population affected its treatment. In this respect, it is not surprising that New Orleans’ poorest citizens suffered the most in the aftermath of the hurricane. In this forum, Stephen Jackson argues that “the scale of a disaster’s impact has much less to do with, say, an earthquake’s Richter force or a hurricane’s category strength than with the political economy of the country or region that it strikes” (Jackson 2005). Instead, the distribution of damage exposes previously existing social fissures in any community. Social scientists have long claimed that “natural” disasters are not natural in their social consequences. In light of the citizens’ of New Orleans multiple needs, why was the jail the first institution to be “in business” after the city’s destruction? In addition, why was the mass media so attentive to the looting and violence in New Orleans during this first week? In order to answer these questions, we must situate them in the context of America’s criminalization of poverty. “We are in business,” said Louisiana Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder. State officials have set up a temporary booking and detention center in New Orleans to deal with those accused of killing, raping, looting and otherwise terrorizing the tens of thousands of people who were trapped in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and awaiting evacuation…It has capacity of 750 people, and is the start of rebuilding and relocating the criminal justice system of New Orleans, officials said. An article in the Times Picayune offered hope to its readers: The Superdome was “hell on earth” according to local officials, and 1700 hospital patients and personnel had been without power, food, water, or sanitation for five days. On Saturday, September 4, five days after Katrina came ashore, an estimated 25,000 people continued to wait to be rescued in New Orleans.
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