Asylum Seekers Are Being “Disappeared” in Private Louisiana Jails

There isn’t much to see around the River Correctional Center, a small, privately run jail near the Mississippi River and the tiny town of Ferriday, Louisiana. Farmlands and fields stretch in either direction beyond the jail’s barbed wire fence. In the 19th century, enslaved people worked cotton and sugar cane fields here, enriching white plantation owners with their daily labors. The local economy is still extracting profit from maintaining the captivity of people of color today.

River Correctional Center is one of several local jails and state prisons in Louisiana, Mississippi and beyond that have lucrative contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to incarcerate hundreds of people detained in the federal immigration detention system, which has swelled

Notorious Louisiana Prison Accuses Inmate Of ‘Defiance’ For Speaking With Reporters

Officials at one of the United States’ most notorious prisons have reportedly punished an outspoken inmate for daring to correspond with reporters about conditions inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

William Kissinger was abruptly relocated from Angola to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center some 70 miles south in early February, after emailing with a reporter from the New Orleans Advocate for some weeks. Prison officials say he was moved as a disciplinary action because he was guilty of “defiance” and “general prohibited behavior,” the Advocate reports — two broad and vague rules of prisoner conduct that allow officials to punish inmates for anything they decide insults staff or impedes the prison’s function.

Louisiana Reporter Arrested for ‘Trespassing’ While Trying to Access Public Records

The mayor of White Castle, La., may have some explaining to do. Chris Nakamoto, the chief investigator of local news station WBRZ, was arrested Thursday when he attempted to legally access public files that detail Mayor Jermarr Williams’ pay—specifically, how much taxpayer money went to his travel expenses.

Earlier this week, WBRZ filed for access to the documents and obtained some of them, but Nakamoto later returned to City Hall to search for missing papers. It was then that he was arrested.

Louisiana Sheriff Accuses Ex-Gov. Jindal and the GOP of Impoverishing His State

Conservative Louisiana Sheriff Newell Normand last month publicly criticized “that idiot,” former Gov. Bobby Jindal, saying he had led his state off a fiscal cliff, and the law enforcement official went on to admonish his fellow Republicans for following obstructionist leaders and resisting tax increases aimed at covering budget problems the Republican governor left behind.

According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Louisiana faces a $943 million budget shortfall between now and the end of the fiscal year on June 30. “The state is also estimated to face a $2 billion shortfall in the 2016-17 budget year,” the paper states.

The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana

Over the course of 12 debates, the Republican presidential candidates were never asked to address the budget problems in Kansas. That may not sound like an odd omission but it is. To see why, let’s take a quick trip to a parallel political universe:

In Bizarro America, the tea party never happened. Instead, the Great Recession sparked a left-wing populist movement that swept democratic socialists into statehouses all across the country. In Vermont, these Denmark-worshippers took full control of state government and implemented their radical agenda. They raised income taxes to unprecedented heights, upped the minimum wage to $15 an hour, made all state universities tuition-free, and established a single-payer health-care system. As he signed the last of these programs into law, Governor Bernie Sanders declared that Vermont would serve as a blue-state model, one that the Democratic Party’s 2016 ticket could use to say,  “See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.”

Louisiana Has A Lot Of Problems. This Is How Bobby Jindal Made Them Worse.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has spent much of his final year in office outside of Louisiana, with frequent trips to Washington, D.C. and the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — trips funded by the disgruntled taxpayers of his state. On Wednesday, he confirms the ill-kept secret that he is joining the growing pack seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2016.

As Jindal makes headlines for his controversial remarks about Islam and racial inequality, his record running Louisiana has gotten less attention from voters around the country.

Louisiana Legislature Rejects ‘Religious Freedom’ Bill, Governor Imposes It By Executive Order

Louisiana’s “Marriage and Conscience Act” (HB 707), which was promoted using stories of anti-LGBT discrimination, died in committee Tuesday. Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who had prioritized the legislation’s passage in his State of the State address last month, responded by promising to issue an executive order accomplishing the same effect of the legislation.

“We will be issuing an Executive Order shortly that will accomplish the intent of HB 707 to prevent the state from discriminating against persons or entities with deeply held religious beliefs that marriage is between one man and one woman,” he explained. “This Executive Order will prohibit the state from denying or revoking a tax exemption, tax deduction, contract, cooperative agreement, loan, professional license, certification, accreditation, or employment on the basis the person acts in accordance with a religious belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

The Invisible Oil in Louisiana’s Senate Race

Dean Blanchard says three prayers at night: “An Our Father, a Hail Mary… and I pray that the idiot in North Korea can figure out how to blow up Washington, DC, so we can start over.”

The Louisiana shrimp processor sat looking over the marina at Grand Isle, a ramshackle resort destination south of New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico. Blanchard’s business was hit hard by the BP oil spill in 2010 and is still struggling. BP, he noted, is doing fine. Just two years after the spill, the company announced a record profit.

Louisiana About To Make It Illegal For Homeless People To Beg For Money

If you are poor, live in Louisiana, and have the audacity ask someone else for help, be prepared to spend up to six months in jail.

A new bill to outlaw panhandling is quickly moving its way through the Louisiana legislature.HB 1158 would criminalize solicitation, making it a misdemeanor punishable with a maximum fine of $200 and up to six months in jail. The bill is targeted not just at panhandlers, but hitchhikers and those engaged in prostitution as well.

Restoring Louisiana's Coast Will Require Restoring Its Democracy -- Governor Jindal Is Trying to Undermine Both

The Mississippi's River southernmost delta is home to a rich ecosystem, robust, culture and booming economy. Wetlands provide critical storm protection for the Louisiana's coast. A recent poll by America's Wetland Foundation found that 74 percent of Louisiana residents "consider saving the coast to be the most important issue [in the state] of our lifetime." For Delta citizens, flood protection is a matter of survival. Louisiana wetlands are disappearing at a rate of approximately 1 football field every hour and coastal communities are already washing into the Gulf of Mexico. To date, roughly 2,000 square miles of land have disappeared under water and the erosion is accelerating. The disappearing land once buffered communities including New Orleans from catastrophic storm surges.

A Massive Chemical Plant Is Poised to Wipe This Louisiana Town off the Map

In 1790, a freed slave named Jim Moss found a place to settle down on a bend in the Houston River in the bayous of southwest Louisiana. Although never formally incorporated, the village of Mossville became one of the first settlements of free blacks in the South, predating the formal establishment of Calcasieu Parish by 50 years. But over the last half century, Mossville was surrounded. More than a dozen industrial plants now encircle the community of 500 residents, making it quite possibly the most polluted corner of the most polluted region in one of the most polluted states in the country. Now, a proposal to build the largest chemical plant of its kind in the Western Hemisphere would all but wipe Mossville off the map.

BP, Chevron Accused Of Illegally Dumping Toxic Radioactive Drilling Waste Into Louisiana Water

The Louisiana parish of Plaquemines is taking on a group of oil and gas giants including BP and Chevron for allegedly dumping toxic waste — some of it radioactive — from their drilling operations into its coastal waters, according to a lawsuit removed to federal court on Thursday.

Plaquemines Parish is claiming the companies violated the Louisiana State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act of 1978 by discharging oil field waste directly into the water “without limitation.” Worse, the companies allegedly failed to clear, revegetate, detoxify or restore any of the areas they polluted, as required by state law. The oil and gas companies’ pollution, along with their alleged failure to adequately maintain their oilfields, has caused significant coastal erosion and contaminated groundwater, the lawsuit said.

Louisiana Police Sting Targets, Arrests Gay Men For Sex Using Unconstitutional Anti-Sodomy Law

Law enforcement in Baton Rouge have reportedly been using an invalid, unconstitutional law to target and arrest adult gay men, according to a new report.

The Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office sting was revealed on Saturday by the Baton Rouge Advocate, which investigated the arrests of at least a dozen Louisiana gay men since 2011 who agreed to consensual gay sex with undercover officers. In all of the cases, the men were arrested under the state's anti-sodomy law, which was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.

Massive Louisiana sinkhole caused by oil industry just keeps on growing

A sinkhole triggered in Louisiana by the fossil fuel industry grew to 12 acres over the weekend, and it appears that hundreds of displaced nearby residents will never be able to return to their homes.

The sinkhole has been growing since it appeared in August. It was caused by a salt mining operation that sucked brine out from beneath the Assumption Parish marsh and piped it to nearby petrochemical facilities. Houston-based Texas Brine had apparently excavated too close to the surface, and officials are worried that a similar fate could befall another Texas Brine salt mining site nearby.

Louisiana Judge Rules That Violent Felons Have Gun Rights Too

A New Orleans judge ruled last Thursday that a law forbidding felons from owning firearms infringes their rights to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the state's newly amended constitution.

Although Louisiana already had extremely permissive gun laws (and the second highest gun-murder rate in the country), last November voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative backed by the National Rifle Association that made gun ownership a fundamental right with the same levels of protection as the freedoms of religion and speech.

Louisiana Attorney General Says Angola 3 "Have Never Been Held in Solitary Confinement"

James "Buddy" Caldwell, attorney general of the state of Louisiana, has released a statement saying unequivocally that Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, the two still-imprisoned members of the Angola 3, "have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system."

In fact, Wallace, now 71, and Woodfox, 66, have been in solitary for nearly 41 years, quite possibly longer than any other human beings on the planet. They were placed in solitary following the 1972 killing of a young corrections officer at Angola, and except for a few brief periods, they have remained in isolation ever since.

Louisiana TV Station Fires Black Meteorologist for Responding to Viewer’s Barb About Her Hair

Rhonda Lee, an African-American TV meteorologist, was fired by Louisiana’s KTBS last month after responding to a viewer’s criticism of her short, natural hairstyle on Facebook. Lee had written: "I am the 'black lady' to which you are referring. I’m sorry you don’t like my ethnic hair. And no I don’t have cancer. ... I am very proud of my African-American ancestry which includes my hair ... I’m very proud of who I am and the standard of beauty I display. Women come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities, and levels of beauty. Showing little girls that being comfortable in the skin and HAIR God gave me is my contribution to society." Lee joins us to discuss her firing, and the remarkable show of support she’s received from around the nation after her story went viral.

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BP oil spill hastened loss of Louisiana marshes, study says

The 2010 BP oil spill accelerated the loss of Louisiana’s delicate marshlands, which were already rapidly disappearing before the largest oil spill in U.S. history, a new study reports.

As the oil washed into the marshlands, it coated and smothered thick grasses at their edge. When the grass died, deep roots that held the soil together also died, leaving the shore banks of the marshlands to crumble, said Brian Silliman, the University of Florida researcher who led the new study.

Louisiana Private Schools Teach Loch Ness Monster Is Real In Effort To Disprove Evolution Theory

Some students at private schools in Louisiana are being taught that Scotland's fabled Loch Ness monster is real, a claim that is then held as evidence disproving Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the Scotsman reports.

Thousands of students across the state are eligible to receive publicly funded vouchers to allow them to attend private Christian schools where textbooks published by Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) claim the monster was actually a dinosaur that existed at the same time as man, an assertion which conflicts with the theory of evolution.

Guest Workers Claim Abusive Conditions In Louisiana Seafood Facility

A group of Mexican guest workers at a seafood processing plant in Louisiana have walked off the job and sent a complaint to the U.S. Labor Department, accusing their employer of forcing them to work up to 24-hour shifts hand-picking crawfish and denying them overtime pay.

In their letter, the eight workers at CJ's Seafood in Breaux Bridge, La., said they came to the U.S. earlier this year to work in the H-2B program, a guest worker visa system that lets American employers hire foreign nationals when they can't find enough locals for the job. The guest workers claim they had to work double and triple shifts without overtime pay, while the doors to the facility were sometimes locked to prevent them from leaving.