When Pearl Bland plead guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia in August 2005, she was to be released after undergoing a drug treatment program. However, because of an unpaid fine from an earlier offense, she was detained. Unfortunately for Bland, she and the other 8,500 prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans, Louisiana were just days away from experiencing Hurricane Katrina. While prisons along the Gulf Coast evacuated their inmates to safety, the sheriff of Orleans Parish Prison decided his prisoners could ride out the storm in New Orleans. As a result, Bland and her fellow inmates suffered through days of waiting in flooded or overcrowded cells without food or water before finally being shuttled to prisons throughout the state. With their arrest records destroyed by floodwater, many prisoners who had been arrested for petty crimes were held for months before seeing a judge. Bland wasn’t released until ten months later, which was a longer prison term than the sentence for her crime. This inhumane treatment could have been prevented had the prison officials followed their constitutional obligation to create and follow a comprehensive emergency plan.