Broken Promises: Two Years After Katrina

In New Orleans, the American flag is a rag hanging limp in strips, like bandages, and the colors are bloody, muddy and bruised.

In New Orleans, the Constitution is a blistered scroll painted by convicts on an outside wall of a shut-down prison workshop. After "We the People," in fancy font, it blurs and peels away.

I'm here on a video project for the American Civil Liberties Union. I'm listening to people talk about justice during and after Hurricane Katrina.

One guy failed to pay his traffic fines. He wound up pepper-sprayed, Taser-zapped, beaten, kicked, stripped naked and thrown into solitary confinement.

The prison held him past his freedom date, then dumped him on the roadside in their trademark orange pants. With two months' beard, he thought he'd get shot, mistaken for a maniac on the loose.

A 6-foot-8-inch prison guard worked nights on the psych ward. For eight years, he walked cellblocks of caged men, locked up for life.

As tough as they come, right? Katrina made him cry and gives him nightmares still.

Guards left a boy in a man's prison during the storm. The boy's mother says he stood for three days in sewage water, chin-high, with family photos and letters tied in a T-shirt bundle on his head.

Think of the nights. Locked in a crowded cage, hungry, hot, thirsty, stinking water rising. Imagine the howling, the fear, the rage.

A young girl stares out the window every time it rains. She lives in a trailer set six inches in front of her gutted childhood home.

At 13, during Katrina, she was a runaway, abandoned in a prison for adults. It wasn't the guards, she says, who saved her, but the prisoners, coaxing her through neck-high muck to reach a boat. She's moving away soon and so delighted, she smiles for the first time.

An old lady pulls out photos of the barge that landed in her yard. She says she has lived here 85 years. Where will she go? Nowhere.

The teenager packs up. The old lady stays.

Just after Katrina, an army veteran is dragged from his home by the far-too-excited National Guard. At gunpoint, they get him handcuffed, face down on concrete, before they accuse him of looting his own home. He is locked up for almost seven months, then freed, as mysteriously as he was taken. Never actually charged.

How quickly our brute nature overstomps our civilized parchment veneer -- as fast as prison paint can blister in the Southern sun -- as swift as nature swallows up abandoned homes.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, you see ghost homes, naked porch pads crouched in a sea of reeds.

Sometimes you see filigree iron wrought into mangled angles, elaborate gates opening onto nothing but weeds as high as the water was.

People told us the government can fine you for not cutting the grass. And then take the lot if you don't pay the fines.

You think you'll hear nail guns and radio salsa, but nope. Only the buzz of summer bugs. Every now and then hot air hisses past the walls and half-walls, sowing the eager seeds of weeds.

An outskirts avenue is lined for miles with empty ship containers, doomed to one-way commerce. Dead cars, drowned by the thousands, sprawl, like some enormous brat threw them down.

We're lost, so we drive faster.

It's getting dark, and only hotter.

Weeds take the street edge back for the swamp.

The black silhouette of a wild boar trots fast across the roadway, into the green scum swamp. A wild boar pup trots just behind, keeping up.

Nature, tough old brute, takes this town in her teeth. Drags it down.

To watch more video interviews with Katrina survivors, and read the ACLU's new report on the hurricane's aftermath, go to www.aclu.org/brokenpromises.