Resilience and Reform: Hurricane Katrina's Impact on Public Defense in New Orleans

In 2006, Ari Shapiro reported on how Hurricane Katrina made an already broken public defender system in New Orleans worse. The court system collapsed in the aftermath of the storm.

Katrina caused horrific destruction in New Orleans. It threw incarcerated people into a sort of purgatory - some were lost in prisons for more than a year.

But the storm also cleared the way for changes that the city's public defender system had needed for decades.

Two decades later, Shapiro returns to New Orleans and finds a system vastly improved.

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