A military parade in North Korea. Photo by babeltravel via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

A lot has happened in the past seven days across the Korean peninsula. First, North and South Korea started shooting each other after the NPRK told the South to stop broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda. Then, 50 North Korean submarines disappeared, reportedly away to war, and then turned up in their bases some hours later. While all these mini-skirmishes were taking place, diplomacy was quietly sewing up wounds. Finally, after days of talks, came the peace agreement and the photographs.

One moment the East was on the cusp of war, the next things were better than ever. It was a political event in microcosm, not so much a Cold War but a firecracker dispute that seemed to end as quickly as it began.

On the ground of both countries, everything seemed curiously normal. "During the crisis the BBC spent an hour broadcasting phone interviews with a cross-section of residents of Seoul," Adam Cathcart, lecturer at Leeds University and expert on North Korea, told me, "[and] they all agreed that there was more tension coming out of the international media than from South Korean society." And in the North, "There was a holiday on August 25 and people were out dancing in the streets, as if nothing had happened."

"At first [the South] said there was no evidence of North Korean involvement and that injuries sustained had been minor," added James Hoare, Britain's first diplomat to Pyongyang. "Then the story changed. The first statement might have been aimed at preventing the incident escalating into something bigger or it may just have been a premature assessment."

So what on earth was all that actually about?

The dispute began back on August 4, when a reportedly North Korean landmine badly wounded two South Korean soldiers conducting a routine border patrol through the DMZ. The DPRK, of course, denied any culpability, and utilized the classic "pics or it didn't happen" argument for their defense: "If South Korea wants to keep insisting this was our army's act, then show a video to prove it. If you don't have it, don't ever say 'North Korean provocation' again out of your mouth," North Korea's state KCNA news agency quoted the country's National Defence Commission as saying.

In response, South Korea began broadcasting propaganda against the regime for the first time in eleven years, which turned out to be the opposite of ideal for Pyongyang due to the impending presence of two major national holidays—the National Independence Day on September 9, followed by the Party Foundation Day just over a month later.

In a nation founded quite literally on the power of charisma, during the run up to two of the hottest propaganda events of the calendar year, South Korea's actions were anathema to the regime. And, of course, South Korea knew this. It's not a one-way fight, and never has been. "Strife and low-level violence along the border, it should be stressed, predates the creation of the Demilitarized Zone in 1953," Cathcart said. "For two years prior to the Korean War, the two Koreas were really going at it pretty heavily along multiple stretches of the border. Both sides tested the other, and South Korean President Syngman Rhee stated multiple times his desire to push all the way up to the Yalu River (Korea's border with China) and wipe out the North altogether."

There are even reports that South Korea were the first to militarize this week, which suggests they moved their machinery before 70 percent of North Korea's subs went walkabout. This would explain why the North reacted swiftly with anger—entering the state into "war footing," the deployment of submarines, the general moaning. North Korea takes propaganda very fucking seriously, it takes actual militarization by a richer, more powerful foe even more fucking seriously.

WATCH: The VICE Guide to North Korea:

Pyongyang's power structure is founded like a really tightly written TV show. Everything coheres and pulls in the same direction: toward the smiling face of Kim Jung-un, what Cathcart calls a "unity of expression. "Blast the wrong thing, like South Koreans did, at precisely the wrong time, and they'll most certainly threaten to blow your sweet Hi-Fi system up.

When the event is viewed in micro, then, the swift and quiet resolution of all this seems both intriguing and a bit odd. Everything was ramping up. Subs were disappearing, gunfire was traded over the DMZ. But the explanation, according to Cathcart, lies not to the south, but to the north, across the Yalu River and into China. Beijing, it turns out, is currently preparing for its own massive propaganda event, which the two Korean nations were about to overshadow and potentially ruin.

The celebration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II is scheduled for September 3 in Tiananman Square, an event that the president of South Korea is very much expected to turn up to and admire as 12,000 Chinese soldiers march in celebration of Xi Jinping's own vice-like grip on power. "Beijing was very obviously displeased with Pyongyang," Cathcart said. "The prospect of having [their] propaganda event of the year (the "Anti-Fascist Global War Victory Day" parade [coming up on September 3]) ruined by Kim Jong-un probably caused serious heartburn among the Chinese Communist Party leadership."

So, China spent the weekend quietly collecting troops on the Chinese-Korean border, as if preparing to unleash the mother of all bottom spankings.

It all made for a fascinating mix of political intrigue, military displays, and total confusion. "Never underestimate China's ability to be insulted by what it perceives as North Korean ingratitude and intransigence in the face of China's expanding regional agenda and ambitions," said Cathcart.

More on VICE: Why I Had to Watch the Videos of the Virginia Shootings

It's often easy when thinking about North Korea to imagine it as a cartoon nation, with no real motivation other than to entertain us with its barbarism. The thing is, North Korea is poor. And hungry. Really fucking hungry. It suffers regular famine—one in the 90s lasted for four years. By last count, at least 20 million people out of a population of 24 million are malnourished. These are the same people who make up their army, the same army that lost 3.5 million members during the famine in the 90s, made up of troops who are reportedly underfed and far shorter than their Southern counterparts. In both 2004 and 2010, North Korea has successfully received food and economic aid after periods of aggressive foreign policy.

By entering their nation onto the cusp of war mere days before two vital regime events, Pyongyang could explain to the population the reason for the current food shortages and lack of economic fortitude. Their upcoming calendar events are hugely important to the regime's charismatic control over the nation; a time to remind, according to Cathcart, "groups like the Democratic Women's League or the Kim Il-sung Socialist Youth League, that they live under the dark cloud of war that can only be kept away by their supposedly brilliant leadership."

"One could argue that both [the North and South] have gained," added Hoare. "The incident did not escalate, the North offered a token gesture over the landmine without quite admitting that it was their responsibility. But the loudspeakers have stopped and there may be further talks. It is not the way I would do business, but they have been doing it for 60 years."

But both nations also must answer to higher powers—like China, who sometimes simply cannot afford to waste time on elongated disputes and lose face.

While it may seem the DPRK dropped draws and got a thorough bottom spanking, they have managed to secure the potential for future peace talks (where more aid from the South is almost certainly top of the agenda), as well as an immediate short term break in US-Korea military exercises in the region. This will undoubtedly be used by Pyongyang as a show of might to its people. The glorious leadership has kept them safe, once again. Oh, and here's some food they just found.

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Collage kindly donated to the cause by Joel Golby

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I am what is commonly known as a commuter. I willfully, some might say foolishly, choose to live more than a fair distance from VICE's London office. A single journey, door to door, can take anywhere between 90 minutes and three and a half hours, and is usually somewhere between these extremes. Thankfully, there's this thing called the internet—you're looking at it—which means that I don't always have to travel to get a day's work done. I can, instead, do it from the comfort of my home office, a.k.a. a cushion on my lap in the lounge.

When I do travel, though, I am never without my compact 4GB iPod, a substitute for my crippled 160GB Classic model that decided to no longer produce sound through its headphone socket on the day Apple confirmed the unit's discontinuation. There aren't all that many albums you can fit on such a small-capacity device—right now, there are 35 on there, most of which are evergreen collections that no amount of repeat playing can dull the luster of. So I hear a lot of the same songs, over and over. Which got me thinking: What would video games based on my favorite albums be like?

Gaming inspiration can come from several sources, but a lot of big-budget interactive entertainment bases its foundational elements—action, narrative, character development, period setting and the supporting technology—on the world of film. Gears of War: Starship Troopers, sort of. Uncharted: Indiana Jones, definitely; likewise, Tomb Raider. Mass Effect: Star Wars with more snark. I'm sure you can draw your own parallels. They're not always explicit, but connections between movies and games can be seen across the latter industry's spectrum. What is The Last of Us but a zombie twist on the cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road?

Music though, and novels for that matter, before they're sliced, diced, and compacted into cinematic form, is an area of inspiration that rarely makes itself obvious in the gaming world. Google for "video games inspired by albums" and you get results linking to articles listing records, and musicians, who've been stirred enough by particular games to create art of their own in their shadows, but not vice versa.

Watch VICE's new film, 'Gone: How Mental Illness Derailed the Career of a Promising Young Skateboarder'

There are games available that simply couldn't exist without music—the plastic peripherals everywhere, tap-along-at-home histrionics of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series; Tetsuya Mizuguchi's beats-driven rail shooter Rez and its spiritual sequel Child of Eden; and rhythm action titles that split the difference between these two takes, like the PS2 cult classic Gitaroo Man, upcoming "rhythm violence" racer Thumper and Harmonix's recently rebooted Amplitude.

But that's not what I'm thinking. I'm after games that don't fit the music genre, but are inspired by music, by recordings, and the artists that create them. You know what I'm on about, right? I need you to be, because here are some ideas, based on six albums stored within my faithful 4GB buddy.

...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – 'Source Tags & Codes' (2002)

What is it: The third album from the Texan rock crew once known for their wild live performances marks the fascinating mid-point between that fiery early rep and their later descent into proggy indulgence. Pitchfork gave it a 10/10 score. Reasonable.

Watch a video: "Another Morning Stoner"

What it could be as a game: I envision an incredibly surreal point-and-click affair, like something LucasArts in its prime would have produced had its core creatives spent a team-building week away swilling spiked punch from the sick bowls of long-dead French poets. I can see it now, garish and grotesque and impossibly compelling, like a Hohokum-bright nightmare where the cursor's turning from an eye to a hand to a foot and through the three again, over and over. Hell, I can taste it. It's vandalizing the tongue like heather honey stirred into neat but premium vodka, and then left in the equatorial sun for an afternoon or two. I don't know what any of it really means, but I suspect that's the point. Create your own adventure, then, ideally while intoxicated.

Björk – 'Vespertine' (2001)

What is it: The Icelandic maverick's fifth solo album, a document of a relationship forming and all the rushes of nervousness, passion, and promise that time sends into a dizzying spin of emotions. "It's about the universe inside every person," is how the artist herself has described the LP, which sometimes quite explicitly addresses her blossoming romance with American artist Matthew Barney. It's timelessly beautiful too, or at least I think so, a marriage of understated electronic elements and delicate organic instrumentation like harp and celeste. My wife walked into our wedding ceremony to "Frosti," you know.

Watch a video: "Pagan Poetry" (which is not entirely safe for work)

What it could be as a game: An erotic puzzler using all of those pearls from her necklace(s) in a terrifically confusing take on Bejeweled. Probably. That, or the quietest rhythm action game ever realized, where you must coast the contours of a human body, tapping the A button in time with the accompanying notes of a music box, hypnotic and swallowing.

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Death Grips – 'The Money Store' (2012)

What is it: The debut studio album proper from the world's most riveting rap-collapsing-into-the-apocalypse crew, straight out of Sacramento with a branding iron shaped like a middle finger and a whole lot of axes to grind. Goddamn I love this record. I play it when I'm walking around central London and it makes me feel as if I could smash right down to Crossrail's deepest points using just my fists. I couldn't. I'd merely bleed all over the pavement outside River Island. Nobody would pity me, but Death Grips would still be playing so fuck their sympathies, I don't need them. I do need a plaster, or else I'll make a right mess over these three-for-two socks.

Watch a video: "Hustle Bones"

What it could be as a game: SimCity on permanent disaster challenge mode as reimagined by Jake and Dinos Chapman. With a shit on it.

Kanye West – 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' (2010)

What is it: The best rap album released this side of the millennium bug that never was. A stressed and shocked, confident and intelligent, invigorating and infuriating collection of introverted insights and blinding braggadocio. Never yet bettered. Probably never will be. The ultimate making of its headlining artist, and the most potent distillation of his many and varied talents.

Watch a video: "All of the Lights"

What it could be as a game: This is the album that first had my mind wandering to what a game based on a record, just one record, just this record, could really be like. Given Kanye's propensity for the grandiose, it'd have to be something open world and endless, with "missions" based on the themes writhing within each track but no real need to complete them. Aesthetically I'm picturing something that combines the realism of Watch Dogs' Chicago—the city Yeezy was raised in—with the gothic horror of Bloodborne, perhaps with a real world/parallel dimension division as seen in Too Many Other Games and Movies to Mention. I see tendrils. I see grills. It'd be utterly fascinating, and most likely completely awful. You wouldn't play as Kanye, either—but everyone you met in the game would have his face. Standard.

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Thundercat – 'Apocalypse' (2013)

What is it: What I was shaking my posterior to in public—on buses, trains, gas stations, and parks—while you sheep were lapping up that dross that Daft Punk put out the other year. Disco, funk, electronica, soul, jazz: Thundercat, a.k.a. frequent Flying Lotus collaborator Stephen Bruner, blends disparate sounds on his second solo album in such a way that you're sure the results will be a meaningless mess—but it's actually a high-gloss mix of slickly sublime interstellar sonics, persistently flirtatious but way too fucking high to go all the way, so it just collapses into giggles and tears. I'm not sure what that means, to be honest. But I know this record is awesome.

Watch a video: "Oh Sheit, It's X!" (audio only)

What it could be as a game: Something from the Saints Row series with all the shitty bits sandblasted off and replaced with class-A hyperactivity and howl-worthy humor that keeps you grinning like a Smylex stiff from beginning to end—at which point you bawl like a baby over the end credits before voiding your bowls and trade the game in at CeX immediately. It's okay, they're used to the stink.

Deftones – 'White Pony' (2000)

What is it: The Californian act's third album, awarded a 1/5 score in Select magazine on release, which may (or may not) have been the reason said publication closed shortly afterwards. A bold departure from the rap-rock dynamics that its makers had sailed through the nu-metal years with, White Pony smashed Decepticon vocals into tidal waves of distorted guitars and relentless percussion born of both skins and samples. IDK, it might be my favorite album ever (if you asked me right now, at least). Maybe. The version with "Mini Maggit" on it doesn't count and if that's the one you have, you're doing this all wrong.

Watch a video: "Change (In the House of Flies)"

What it could be as a game: What you know, shifted, mutated, into something entirely creepier than you ever thought it could be. Take Mario, his Goombas, and black out the light, the color, the cheer. Bowser is Chino and he's not falling for that old bridge-over-the-lava trick. You're already in the lava. You're under it. Everything's doomed before it's begun. The princess was never in any castle—she's been in the ground for weeks. Robots have taken over the sky. Mario's a blubbing ball of fat rolls and failed quests, lost in the shadows of a kingdom where the only mushrooms are clouds on the horizon, a physical foretelling of the end of days. Fucked it, but hell: Doesn't it sound incredible?

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It's easy to say fuck the police. But we know we need them. We need the police to protect us, although quite often it seems like we need to be protected from the police. But when people agitate for more effective policing they are not suggesting the institution be eliminated, but demanding that police do their jobs better. But while it's important to be critical of the police, especially in the midst of a national policing crisis, we cannot escape or even comprehend our policing crisis without knowing what the police are thinking.

More from VICE on America's policing crisis:
A Decade After Hurricane Katrina, Police Brutality Is Still a Problem in New Orleans
Police Have Killed at Least 1,083 Americans Since Michael Brown's Death
Why It's Almost Impossible to Reform America's Police
How Cops Became Soldiers: An Interview with Police Militarization Expert Radley Balko

Earlier this year I met a black police officer who currently serves on the force of a major American police department. Each time we spoke I was impressed at how willing he is to be critical of his fellow officers, and how blunt he was in assessing the state of policing in the United States today.

Most police officers are not allowed to give interviews, which is perhaps understandable, but also a shame, because it denies people the opportunity to add their perspective. My cop friend, who I'll call Marc, agreed to let me publish one of our conversations, as long as he could remain anonymous. Below is our interview, lightly edited for clarity.

Toure: Why do you think so many shocking policing incidents have happened over the last year?
Marc: Some of it has to do with the petulance of police. What I mean by the petulance, and I've argued with some co-workers about this, we have to be held to a higher standard. We took an oath. The community didn't take an oath to protect the community—we would like them to, we would like them to be part of the solution. But they made no promises and took no oath. We did. We volunteered for this job and we are held to a higher standard.

In a lot of the situations I'm referring to, we're not talking about how police deal with criminals. We're talking about unarmed people who may have committed some basic violation, or done nothing wrong, and then things go way off the rails.
That's entitlement. Remember on South Park when Cartman started talking about, 'Respect my authori-tah?' And then he starts beating people? It's an entitlement thing. You have to get back to the basic question of why do people want to do this job? And if you're not from the inner-city but you wanna police the inner-city, I kinda have to question, why do you wanna do that? Not saying that that's not honorable, but what are your motives behind that?

And I think it's an entitlement thing. It's like, 'I'm wearing this badge and you need to respect me.' So I pull you over and I expect your respect, but you've been harassed by police and disrespected and you have somewhere you want to go, so you give me a little bit of attitude. But instead of being an adult and controlling the situation and de-escalating it, now I escalate the situation and say shut your mouth. You say 'Hold on sir, I'm a grown man. I won't shut my mouth.' Now we're going back and forth and no one's de-escalating the situation, it goes from zero to 100. And I think the police's job is always to de-escalate the situation.

Like Sandra Bland, that situation irritates me because it was a simple ticket that shouldn't even require anything. OK, she doesn't like the police. People have a right to not like you. Get over it. It's a God-given right for people to not like you. But, you can't be disorderly to the police, so people need to understand the disorderly conduct thing.

But I also think cops have to understand not to take it too personal. I'm in a confrontational job and 99 percent of the time when I deal with someone it's gonna be in a confrontational environment. Therefore it's my responsibility to de-escalate the situation at all times.

But what we hear from the police is a fear of being overpowered or having their authority lost to a particular young, unarmed black man. You hear that narrative over and over.
It would be nice if everybody who is in law enforcement were skilled marital artists and skilled fighters. But unfortunately in a job that's hard to get people to apply for anyway, there are people who are walking around this nation with a gun and a badge who have never been in a real fight. Never. Never been punched in the face before. So [they] don't have confidence in that skill. So when a person balls his fist up or comes after you, the first thing you think is, 'I know I can't fight. And I have a gun on me.' And there's a fear that you'll be overpowered and killed with my own weapon. A lot of cops have died this way.

They show you these videos in the academy. "How we die." It's not just fear of the black man, it's fear of people within itself. But then we have the perception from the media that the black man is the animal. He's stronger, bigger, faster, more aggressive. So the white person who never grew up around blacks, all he has is this perception that these individuals have this superhuman strength. And it's like, before the fight even begins I already think I'm gonna lose. And the reality is if you can beat me up and overpower me then you have the ability to take the gun off my hip and kill me with my own weapon. That's a strong possibility. And if I'm afraid for my life that's all I need to use deadly force.

We hear cops saying over and over in these incidents, 'He went for my gun, I feared for my life.' It seems like there's this playbook coming down from someone telling them, 'If something happens say this, it'll get you out of jail.' Is there some reason why we keep hearing the same story over and over?
One of the main things they focus on in the academy is liability. You have to know the liability of the law. You're carrying a tool that can end somebody's life so you have to know when you can use it and when you can't. It's taught in the academy you can only use your weapon when you fear for your life or your safety, or the safety of others. It's beat down that this is when you can use it. So officers across the nation will always say 'Well, I was in fear for my life.' You can't say anything else because there's no other reason to shoot somebody.

When you look at all these incidents which one makes you the sickest?
The Cincinnati one.

Sam Dubose.
You can't put yourself in harm's way in order to use deadly force. Yes, we don't wanna chase people and yes, if somebody runs from me it sucks to chase them, but you can't just be bustin' off at cars because they drive away. Especially if it's not for something major. It's not like this person was a rapist or a killer. We're talking about a traffic stop. So that one was sickening. And South Carolina was sickening.

Walter Scott. 

That was sickening. The guy's running away. That's called a chase. It's time to run. Catch up to the person, tackle 'em, and then take 'em into custody. It sucks. God knows I don't wanna run all the time but unfortunately that comes with the territory.

Do You Trust the Police? The People Speak:

So this narrative of black lives being taken by cops, and then making national news so each incident becomes a big story on its own—has that had an impact on cops on the ground and how they do their job?
I think so. I truly honestly believe and think so. And I don't think it's just the movement, I think it's a combination of stuff. They don't feel like they're gonna be backed by the mayors. I think one of the things we all want in our jobs is job security and the hope that we have bosses who support us. We all want supervisors to support us. And the community doesn't support you, they never really have. If a cop dies there's no national outcry, the community doesn't really care. The mayor doesn't support you because the mayor is a politician. The mayor, the county councilmen, they want votes. They want to win. So everybody has this fear they'll set you up just to make national news and say 'See we're doing something.'

It's almost like instead of saying 'Lets get the facts,' it's, 'Nah, lets make 'em [cops] guilty and we'll figure it out later. To quiet the storm because we don't want these Black Lives Matter people protesting in our backyard so we'll hang the officer out to dry. Well who wants to be in a job where you're hung out to dry?

Are you saying cops are going out on stops and feeling extra stress and tension and anxiety and thus officers are not de-escalating incidents, and they feel an anxiety because they don't feel supported and they're growing more aggressive toward citizens? Is that what you're seeing?
Yes. I think cops are stressed out. It's a stressful job anyway. And then it's stress that your command will set you up just to appease the citizens. And the community now is more emboldened. More people are walking up to your face and sayin 'f you' and putting cameras in your face and almost becoming more disorderly. That's happening now more than ever. You still have to be in authority cuz you don't ever wanna lose authority. But you're like why am I dealing with this?

Do you think policing biases officers against black people? That they're so constantly interacting with or hearing about black men doing the wrong thing that they start to become biased against black men and expect that from them and any time they're pulling over a black man they're behaving more aggressively toward them.
Ninety percent of my job is confrontational. No one really wants to see me when I'm there. Therefore I'm not gonna [encounter] the best type of person. And over time seeing criminals, murderers, drug dealers, criminals, you begin to develop this baseline norm. This is why I don't hang with a lot of cops. Because cops who hang out with cops then dwell in their own thoughts and perceptions of what reality is when that's not reality. So what we end up becoming is an occupying force, no different than what our military does. Not to mention that a lot of law enforcement are prior military. I was in the military, too.

So they've now brought whatever aggressiveness and occupying force [mentality] into the department and deal with it the same way almost. I think all the community wants is accountability. I think police fail to realize that. And then the police say you're not accountable to yourself so I'm not listening to anything you say because your points aren't valid.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

Photo of Jamycheal Mitchell via Facebook

Jamycheal Mitchell was arrested on April 22 for stealing a Zebra Cake, a bottle of Mountain Dew, and a Snickers bar from a 7-Eleven. For that crime the authorities in Portsmouth, Virginia, held him in a cell without bail for about four months. Last Wednesday, the 24-year-old died behind bars—but it was only today that the Guardian's Jon Swaine broke the news of his death and the long detention that preceded it. (Local media had noted the death of an inmate in a short item.)

Nicknamed "Weezy," Mitchell was reportedly bipolar, unable to hold down work, and living with his mother at the time of his arrest. "He just chain-smoked and made people laugh," Mitchell's aunt Roxanne Adams told the Guardian. "He never did anything serious, never harmed anybody."

Related: Dead or in Jail: The Burden of Being a Black Man in America

Mitchell, who grew up as an altar boy in Louisiana, according to an obituary, had a habit of stealing inexpensive items as a teenager. He had been arrested twice before, in 2010 and 2012, for petty larceny; the latter incident led to a monthlong stay in a state hospital. When he stole from the 7-Eleven, the items he took were worth about $5—for that, he was taken to Portsmouth City Jail for about three weeks, and then transferred to a regional facility.

A judge said he was not competent to stand trial, but the hospital he was supposed to be sent to had no open beds. So he remained in jail, where, his family told the Guardian, he eventually started refusing meals and medications, then died. "Officials from the court, the police department and the jail could not explain why Mitchell was not given the opportunity to be released on bail," Swain reported.

According to data just released by the Department of Justice, the number of people who have died behind bars has increased the three years in a row, from 2010 to 2013. Suicide has been the leading cause of death since 2000, the report notes. It does not break down data by race.

The deaths of people of color behind bars has been in the news this summer, however, amid greater public scrutiny of violence against black Americans by police officers. The most high-profile death was that of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old who was visiting Texas for a job interview and got pulled over for not using a blinker, thrown in jail, and was later found hanging there. That incident, which was ruled a suicide, sparked a social media campaign of people asking #WhatHappenedToSandraBland, because it seemed so farfetched that a woman who was just about to start a new career would kill herself over a traffic stop, no matter how unfair or unnecessarily violent it might have been.

Mitchell's case also has some parallels to that of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old who was arrested in New York on suspicion of stealing a backpack and held for three years in terrible conditions without being given a trial. Although he didn't die at Rikers, he tragically committed suicide in June.

On the same day Mitchell was arrested, police in Portsmouth shot an unarmed 18-year-old black man named William Chapman outside of a Walmart because he was suspected of shoplifting. A state prosecutor is pursuing an indictment before a grand jury in that case.

Yesterday, Mitchell's older sister Jasmine posted a tribute on Facebook. "I guess God needed you more than we did," she wrote. "But now we know you're in a place where there is no more struggles and no more pain." She's also set up a GoFundMe page to help raise money for a funeral.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Last month, we consulted an expert to find out whether or not a Donald Trump presidency would be as entertaining as it sounds (Answer: Maybe). This week, we tried that same exercise, exploring a different hypothetical: What would happen if Bernie Sanders, a curmudgeonly Independent Senator from Vermont, actually became the leader of the free world?

So imagine: It's Inauguration Day, 2017. Sanders is putting his 75-year-old hand on the on the Bible—for the first time, it's just the Old Testament. His grey flyaways are flying away in the wind off the National Mall. Everyone around him is smiling, but Bernie is the face of grouchy stoicism. He's about to become the first avowedly socialist president in United States history and he has work to do.

Who knows how this happened? Maybe someone finally found something in Hillary Clinton's emails that not only sank her campaign but also pushed the entire American electorate dramatically leftward on the political continuum. Maybe Rush Limbaugh reveals he's a robot created by Bill and Hillary to manufacture a vast conservative conspiracy, and Republican voters realize their entire political existence has been a lie.

Whatever. It doesn't matter. The important thing is that Bernie's finger is about to be on the proverbial red button. Billionaires are quaking in their boots; college students are taking celebratory bong rips; and the White House social office is contemplating a coup d'etat. Now, what happens next?

To find out, we called up the political science department of Middlebury College, a private liberal arts school in Sanders' home state of Vermont. Department Chair Bert Johnson, and professor Matthew Dickinson, who writes the blog Presidential Power, have been following Sanders' career as closely as anyone, and they were kind enough to bring us up to speed.

Like stuff about presidents? Here's a video of us interviewing one:

VICE: You've been watching Bernie Sanders as a politician for longer than most of us. What can you tell us about him?
Dickinson:The closest I've come to him is the annual [Memorial Day] parade [in Vergennes, Vermont] where he walked five feet in front of me and had this grimace on his face that said I'd rather be anywhere but in this parade.

Johnson:The first thing I would say is with a lot of candidates, you would have to speculate fairly widely about what would happen if they became president. But with Bernie, I think, you have to speculate a little less, because he's been remarkably consistent over his career about what he's in [politics] for. You look back to his 1990 campaign for Congress and he was saying almost exactly the same things that he is now.

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Early on in a new administration, presidents tend to talk about bipartisanship. Would Sanders do that?
Johnson: I think, in terms of whether he would talk about bipartisanship, I'm sure he would say, 'Let's hope to get some bipartisan agreements on stripping the privileges of the billionaires,' but I don't know that that bipartisanship would be forthcoming.

Dickinson: If Bernie Sanders wins, it will hugely be shocking, in the sense that he is not a mainstream candidate. Basically he's going to say, 'Listen. The message here is it's a new message—that things have really got to change, whether it's on campaign finance or income taxes. The people have said, you know, the status quo never works' So I suspect there will be a little more edge. He'll have the olive branch, which is, 'We've got to work together,' but it's going to be tinged with a, 'Hey! Don't tell me that the same old political status quo is going to remain. The people clearly said we want to change that, and you better recognize that.'

Foreign policy hasn't been Bernie's strongest area. How would that shake out in a Sanders administration?
Dickinson: I don't think he's very comfortable in foreign policy and he'd be willing to—at least particularly in the beginning—rely on the advice from sort of Establishment military advisors and diplomats. On foreign policy, I think Sanders is going to be more malleable; he's going to be more willing to defer to the experts. Now if he has some basic principles that will guide him, I think he's going to be more collaborative, more internationalist, less interventionist, than, certainly, George W. Bush, and perhaps Obama—less willing to engage militarily.

Johnson: It's not [my area], but I think what we think about him on foreign policy is much less radical than on domestic policy. I think he's much more mainstream even then somebody like Rand Paul who is very non-interventionist.

So military intervention wouldn't be off the table?
Dickinson:Yeah, certainly in response to an attack on US borders. Otherwise, I suspect it's less likely to be on the table unless it's as part of a multi-nation coalition—some international, NATO or the UN, something like that. I don't think he's going to be doing any unilateral actions. Now, he may continue—this is what I mean by stick to the status quo—he may continue the drone policy, although under perhaps more stringent safeguards to make sure civilians aren't collateral damage. He may encourage or continue with some covert operations. You know, there would be some continuity there.

Would he have a big signature deal, like Obamacare?
Johnson: There seems to be, on the Democratic side, an understanding that dealing with student debt problems is important. So I imagine that's probably one of the first things he might do. Something might make its way through Congress. I think it would look very different after it came out of the House [of Representatives], but it could be a political winner because there's a lot of students in debt.

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Sanders has been adamantly opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but what do think he would do if he's elected president, given that the Trade Promotion Authority bill would still give him enormous power?
Dickinson: Rarely does a president who campaigns on a particular stance, and then is given power to do something against that stance, say 'Oh! Take that power away from me! I don't want that!'

People give him a lot less credit for being pragmatic than he deserves.

Could he use it to alter trade deals and introduce more protectionist policies?
Dickinson: I think it's very difficult—even if legally he had the power to sort of rework this pact—to just come in and say, 'Hey, I'm going to rewrite the whole darned thing. And maybe, by rewriting it, I'm going to blow it up.' You know, it's very difficult to do that because you've inherited a web of expectations, some legal, some not—it has ramifications that go beyond the immediate policy, in fact. But I would be less than comfortable telling you for a fact I know what he's going to do one way or the other without sort of looking more closely at what the pact entails.

If he didn't do something to scale back free trade, that seems like it would really let down his base. Could compromise hurt his career, and his administration?
Johnson: I don't think Bernie would compromise on those principles. He might compromise on finding, you know, a bill that only got you halfway, but he would sign that bill, and at the same time say, 'The ultimate goal remains the same as always.'

So say Sanders is president, is it safe to say that Democrats also took over control of Congress in that general election?
Johnson: Not as much as [it would have been] 20 or 30 years ago. [Congress] might have [a few more Democrats]—you might expect that there would have been a Democratic Party wave of some kind to get him into office. But coattails are a fleeting phenomenon these days. The House of Representatives, for example, is structured in a certain way that it's difficult to imagine it going [to the Democrats] anytime soon.

Now on I-D: Lily Rose Depp Gets Behind Bernie Sanders

During Bernie's administration, would he be able to make a dent in income inequality?
Johnson: Most major proposals in a presidency are accomplished within the first two years, so, like Obamacare or something like that. So he would have to act quickly and decisively. And it might be a situation where he would issue a proposal that got vastly narrowed. So something that maybe hiked corporate taxes a little bit in exchange for a reduction of the payroll tax, or something like that. So I think he could make a dent, [but] I don't think he would make much more than a dent.

Sanders is known for not being very friendly. Could that make his job hard?
Dickinson: This guy knows how to glad-hand. He knows how to get things done. Obviously his Senate record is not sterling in terms of lasting accomplishments, but we shouldn't dismiss the fact that Bernie likes to present himself as the man of the people. He's also an experienced politician.

Johnson: People give him a lot less credit for being pragmatic than he deserves, both when he was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, and then also in Congress, but especially in the Senate. He has proven, at least on a few issues, that he's willing and able to work with people on the opposite side of the aisle on things like in the Senate, for example: veterans' affairs.

You know his career pretty well. Is he hiding anything from us?
Dickinson: The thing about Bernie that his stood him so well with local voters is his authenticity. He is who he presents—there's not a lot of guile there.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

As you can see, the Dow Jones Industrial Average went very, very down this week, then very, very up. Image via Google

On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 588 points—the worst drop it had experienced since 2011—and then fell 205 more points on Tuesday. Just when the world seemed doomed and nothing would ever be OK again, the Dow bounced back, climbing 619 points on Wednesday. Yesterday, it continued to trend upwards, increasing by 369 more points. Today, everything's more or less evened out, and with the Dow hovering slightly above 16,600, we're only slightly higher than when we started at around 16,460 on Monday.

All of this stuff is easy to report—anybody would have figured out all the crap in the above paragraph just by googling the word "Dow" and clicking around. But what does this week's stock market loop-the-loop actually mean for us, the humans of America?

As I often do in times of crisis, I turned to my dad for clarity about all of this stuff. In addition to being the guy who taught me how to drive and the human that my mom saddled with the responsibility of enforcing my draconian 11 PM curfew in high school, my dad is also a certified financial planner with over 20 years of experience. He runs a successful practice in the small North Carolina town he and my mom raised me in, maintains a YouTube channel offering practical financial advice, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and (along with me) co-wrote a primer on the financial multiverse for our Wall Street Issue.

In a nutshell, my dad's advice is this: whatever you do, don't freak out.

VICE: Hi, Dad! Can you explain the roller coaster of a week the stock market had?
My Dad: On Friday of last week, the US domestic stock markets took a big dive, largely because there was concern that China's growth is slowing. Not only is their growth slowing, but their stock market has been takin' it on the chin. It gained incredible amounts last year, something like 30, 35 percent. That's crazy for a stock market to gain that much. China had been encouraging that growth by encouraging people to borrow money and put it in the stock market. Their economic growth has been flying high for several years as a result. China isn't the largest economy in the world, but it's close. Their stock market going down is a big deal. So that spooked investors.

Really, investors were looking for an excuse to slow down this crazy market growth we've got here. We've been in a bull market since 2009, and investors were looking for an excuse to freak out. This was a great excuse! Things like this tend to become an emotional spiral, so on Monday the market plunged even more—a lot more. On Tuesday, as a lot of us anticipated, it took off on the upside to begin with, but it didn't hold for the rest of the day and lost a couple hundred points.

But on Wednesday and Thursday, it took off and started rising. What you're seeing is volatility. When markets are doing well and going up, it'll gain or lose 20 or 30 points a day. When people start freaking out, then the market starts going down, and when it goes down, it goes down fast. When we overdo it on the down side, then people's greed kicks in and they start buying stocks because they're cheap, and prices go back up quickly.

How big a deal was this week in terms of history?
The Dow lost 600 points on Monday. That was the eighth largest drop in history. From a points standpoint, that was really big. But you can't look at it like that, because it was starting from this really high level. It's around 16,000 right now. 600 points is nothing. If the DOW loses 600 points when it's sitting at 4,000, then that's something different.

What does "the Dow" actually mean?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average consists of 30 stocks of 30 different companies. They add those companies' stocks all up together, and they get a number that they use to quantify how high they are on average. It's just an artificial quantification. But it doesn't really mean a lot to be honest with you. The Dow and any indexes like it are basically artificial constructs.

When the Dow started in the early 20th century, it was just some number, like 15 or something—it was the value of a specific 30 stocks. As the Dow has grown and certain stocks have entered it and others have left it, that number has taken on a life of its own. The actual number doesn't really have any significance other than to show how much the Dow has grown since it started.

Is it wise to treat the Dow as shorthand for how the economy is performing?
No, but even people who understand the stock market sometimes do that. The economy and the stock market are two different things. The Dow isn't even a really good measure of the stock market. There are only 30 stocks, and they're all really big. The Dow Jones company selects the stocks that go in there very carefully because they want good, solid, strong companies. A better measure of the stock market would be the S&P 500, which has 500 stocks in it. Or the Russell 5,000. Gosh, what was your question?

Is the Dow a good shorthand for the economy?
No. The economy is a different deal. The economy is Gross Domestic Product—the GDP. It's the financial output of a country. The stock market is often considered a predictor of the economy, but it's not always a really good predictor of the economy. They call it a "leading indicator." In other words, if the stock market goes up, then people start thinking the economy will do well. But the problem is the stock market, by its very nature, wants to go up. People make money when the stock market goes up. You can make money when the stock market goes down, but it's a lot more complicated and a lot more difficult.

The vast majority of the money that's invested in stocks has a real vested interest in the market gaining. Investors—particularly traders—by nature, are greedy. That's not a negative thing to say, it's just the way it is. They want it to go up. That's why we overdo bull markets. If they really reflected the economy, when the economy would slow down the stock market would slow down. When the economy picked back up, the stock market would pick back up. But that's not how it works. The other thing is that stocks are like a school of fish. You'd think that each individual company would go up based on its own merits. There's a certain amount of that, but people who influence stock prices adhere to a herd mentality. It's a crazy thing.

On Motherboard: AirBnB Hires Ex Clinton Aide to Make Nice with Policymakers

When the stock market has a crazy week, should people freak out?
No. People should never freak out over the stock market. First of all, people need to remember that it's just money. Money only has importance insofar as it supports the major priorities in your life. If money becomes the major priority itself, you've got a real problem. The stock market going up isn't going to fix that. You can't freak out. Good decisions are never made in the heat of the moment. When the market goes down, one way to look at it is that stocks are on sale.

When you say, "Good decisions are never made in the heat of the moment," are you giving me financial advice as a money professional, or life advice as my dad?
It's me giving you advice in all areas of life.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

College is traditionally the place where young minds are molded, but before the molding takes place, Jesus, those young minds can be in rough shape. Like many half-domesticated animals, 18-year-olds tend to be skittish, guided by momentary impulses, and utterly unable to plan more than half an hour ahead—despite this, we toss them in dorms where they're expected to interact with the opposite sex and a variety of drugs. "Have fun, honey! Give me a call if you need help remembering how to do your laundry!" their parents call out before returning to their now blissfully teen-free homes.

Related: Some Duke Freshmen Are Refusing to Read a Comic Book Because It's Too Sexy

Needless to say, when sent to classes where they are confronted with a bunch of big books and ideas they are often disoriented. "Disoriented" as in sometimes stoned, sometimes unprepared, sometimes plain dumb, and sometimes literally unsure where they're supposed to be. When you're experiencing this disorientation yourself as an undergrad you assume that it's going on mostly in your head, unseen by the grown-ups in charge of grading and governing you.

But no, the professors who teach you—or at least attempt to teach you—notice all of your harmless and not-so-harmless foibles, and they are laughing at you more or less all the time. Here are some of their stories, which they have shared anonymously:

–"I had a student choose to write a research paper on the topic of ethics. It became clear right away that the student had plagiarized his work, with a Google search revealing that it was taken from the 'Ethics' entry of the Catholic Encyclopedia. I don't think he appreciated the irony."

"I had a student bring her baby to class. A few minutes in, the baby got fidgety, so the student put the baby on the floor."

–"When I walked into class once, a student was standing in the middle of the room with a yo-yo, intensely yo-yoing. He was obviously high, and he needed a lot of convincing that he had to put the yo-yo away. After class I told him that his habits were his business but that the yo-yo shouldn't come to class again. It didn't. He turned out to be a good student."

Watch our documentary about racism in sororities and fraternities:

–"I had a student in a BFA program once turn in a report on an artist from whom she drew 'artistic influence,' and I knew in less than two sentences that shit was entirely plagiarized. The language in it was preposterously flowery and sounded suspiciously like a terribly shitty artist statement written by the actual artist (who, for the record, was awful and did mostly plant-inspired wallpaper patterns).

I googled one sentence from her paper in quotation marks and it pulled up the artist's own bio on her website. The student had even forgotten to change every first-person statement by the artist to third-person for her paper.

Naturally, I called her out on it and she was scared shitless. I then lied and told her I'd sent the plagiarized paper to her department chair and was waiting on his decision about whether to contact her parents and whether to expel her, and let that hang over her head for the rest of the semester. She generally quit fucking off after that. LOL."

–"My favorite malapropism of all time, from an essay on whether prostitution should be legal: 'caramelized prostitution.'"

–"I had a student bring her baby to class. A few minutes in, the baby got fidgety, so the student put the baby on the floor to crawl around under all the other students' desks. It was hard for everyone to concentrate, but one student managed to fall asleep in class anyway. Then the sleeping student's cell phone rang, which startled the crawling baby, and, in a daze, the student answered it right there in class: 'Hello?' That's when I dismissed everyone early."

–"During a class in which we read a lot of nonfiction, we read an essay by the economist Robert Reich. This was circa 2010, just before the Occupy Wall Street movement kicked off, and before student debt hit $1 trillion. I mentioned something about a law regarding student loans that George W. Bush had signed, and made an offhand crack about Bush. Most of the students laughed, but a few days later, my superior called me into her office to have a little chat. I told her what I'd said, she agreed with me, and of course said I had every right to my own opinions. However, she told me to be more careful about what opinions I expressed in class. (This was in Tennessee, after all.) I never knew which student it was, but by the end of the week, a student had dropped the course."

–"One summer I taught a Tuesday/Thursday English course, and had a student who missed about ten classes. She showed up one day, out of the blue, wanting to know if she could make up the essays she missed. I informed her that she would be failing due to her excessive absences, and she threw a tantrum, complete with tears and wailing. She immediately went to the dean and wanted to file a complaint, stating that she had been there, I just hadn't noticed her. It was a class of 20; it wasn't hard to notice her non-presence. I was forced to let her back into class, and she attended every single one after that, piping up with comments throughout discussions to make sure I knew she was present. She even signed up to take a fiction class with me the next term."

The new people-scanning advertising eye at Birmingham New Street Station, presumably after having picked up a strong whiff of someone who really likes exotic birds (Photo courtesy of Concept Signs and Dynamic Digital Displays Europe)

As if it weren't already obvious that we're all living in a wacky parallel universe, a twisted parody of the real world—possibly created by a blind god or a power-crazed mad scientist—the city of Birmingham has decided to build for itself the Eye of Mordor, to be installed above the revamped New Street Station.

Not just one eye, but three. These are enormous advertising panels in the shape of vast and inhuman eyes, each made up of hundreds of tiny television screens, that will simultaneously watch everyone who passes before them, lights flashing across their eternally unblinking surfaces.

What makes these screens unique—they're the first of their kind in the country—is that they look back at you. Hidden facial-recognition cameras will scan the area in front of the station, and deliver advertising messages tailored to the demographic profile of the crowds.

So, presumably, if a trainload of incoming college freshmen pulls into the station, the giant eyes will condescend to them about drink offers and the silent menace that is chlamydia. A group of sad and sweaty business drones will prompt messages about erectile dysfunction pills, hair loss treatments, cars that look like they're worth more than they really are, luxury dog food, and all the rest of the dull flotsam of meaningless adulthood. And if some kindly old ladies should totter through, clanking against their walker frames, the vast eye above them will taste their frailty in the air, narrow its gaze in their direction, and start furiously flashing large-print advertisements for life insurance, bath lifts, Dignitas.

Occasionally you get moments like these—think of TfL's "secure beneath the watchful eyes" campaign—when the mask of reality slips a little, and the world reveals itself as something so stupid it can only be satirical. Not even a good satire, but something clunky, derivative, and heavy-handed, built by an idiot. We're living in the scribblings of a slightly dim teenager. The real world is out there, impossibly distant. Somewhere beyond the walls of space and time there's a person who looks just like you, but unlike you they're happy, fulfilled in life, safe in the knowledge that they can leave Birmingham whenever they want and without being stared at by a giant mechanical eye bolted to the wall of a John Lewis.

WATCH: Our new documentary 'Searching for Spitman':

For the moment this is an indignity to be suffered only by the unfortunate citizens of Birmingham, but it can't be long before the giant eyes are everywhere. What all this amounts to is the internetification of what's still sometimes called the "real word," the reconfiguration of everything that was once solid as a giant pop-up ad. Targeted ads like these are what keep the internet going: all the eminently clickworthy content farms you're wasting your life on can only afford to pay their writers such exorbitant salaries because they're reading you, just as you read them. Every exciting new web project, however high-minded, is built on the rubble and crap of the online experience. Weird tips, discovered by perkily anonymous moms, that doctors hate; newly discovered Amazonian berries that can turn you from a revolting lardy sphere into something minimally fuckable; CGI tits begging you to download some stupid app about dragons.

Google, which alternately pretends to be a clear-eyed collaborative project seeking to compile all the world's knowledge and a sinister legion of doom building robot cars and frantically searching for the secret of eternal life, is actually probably the most boring company in the world. It made its vast fortune by collecting billions of scraps of meaningless data about its users, and then selling them on to companies selling plastic shoes or pet accessories.

The new rulers of the world don't want our blood, our toil, or even our money. They just want our attention. And the internet isn't enough; there's always the chance, however small, that you might turn off your computer and go outside. So now they've followed you, and erected a monstrous million-dollar eye of evil above the center of the city, in the desperate hope that it might get you to buy a sandwich.

There's something inherently queasy about eyes, the quivering jelly blobs that look back at you: the scene in Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou where an eyeball is cut by a razor is still sickening, and the great literary pornographer Georges Bataille had great fun putting eyes in various unwholesome places. For the moment, the giant eyes in Birmingham only see you as a vague cloud of demographic data—but it's only a matter of time before they can see everything you've spilled into the vast confessional booth of the internet, all the bodily insecurities you've whispered into the search bar, all the lonely fears you've inexpertly masked in Tinder messages that nobody replied to, so that it can stare, like Sauron, right into your soul. There's already technology that allows audio messages to be delivered to specific people, and screens that display different images from different angles. Within a few years, each of us will be trapped in our own personal hell, taunted by our own past deeds, forever.

Of course, a few clever types are likely to point out that Birmingham's big new eye bears a striking similarity to the world of George Orwell's 1984. In fact, the comparison is fairly stupid: compared to the luridly sadistic shitscape that will shortly rise up amid us, Orwell's Airstrip One is a paradise. The telescreens in 1984 make sure nobody is doing anything forbidden: you're forbidden from free thought, non-procreative sex, or friendship, and so all you have to do to defy the rulers is to think, talk, or fuck. Now, power is so total that it doesn't even have to forbid anything. That way, there's no escape. If you have a sexual fetish frowned on by polite society, the giant eye can recommend you a few accessories. If you want to be a revolutionary communist, no problem; it has some books to sell you. And if you want to read an article about how awful all of this is, and share it with all of your friends, then that's fine too.

Follow Sam on Twitter.

Photo of St. Paul's School via Wikipedia

The teenage girl who charged Owen Labrie with raping her when she was 15 as part of a game of sexual conquest at New Hampshire's St. Paul preparatory school says she is leaving the courthouse today with "her head held high," according to Laura Dunn, a spokesperson for the victim and her family.

After less than eight hours of deliberation, the jury of nine men and three women found Labrie, now 19, guilty of three misdemeanor statutory rape counts, a misdemeanor of endangering a child, and a felony charge of using a computer to "seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, a child."

In finding him not guilty of the three counts of felony sex assault, the jury ruled that the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the sex between the two teens wasn't consensual.

Labrie sat slouched in his chair as the verdict was read, stoically looking forward. His mother, a schoolteacher in Vermont, leaned over in her seat with her hands in her face and sobbed. The victim and her family sat with their arms wrapped around each other on the same bench a couple yards away.

Later, outside the courtroom, the victim, along with about a dozen family members embraced and left the courthouse.

On VICE News: Global Outrage Follows Sentencing of Two Indian Women to Punishment by Gang Rape

During the trial the courtroom heard details of the "Senior Salute"—a tradition at the elite prep school where graduating seniors reach out to younger students with invitations to hook up. These encounters were reportedly scored and tallied on a school wall. It was in this context that Labrie emailed the girl and convinced her to meet in an isolated room in an attic.

This felony charge Labrie was found guilty of can carry three to seven years in prison, while the misdemeanor statutory rape charges carry up to a year each. The New Hampshire Department of Correction is currently undertaking a pre-sentencing investigation.

But prosecutor Catherine J. Ruffle says the felony means Labrie will spend the rest of his life registered as a tier II sex offender. He can register for that status to be lifted after 15 years. He is currently out on $15,000 bail, and had to surrender his passport and submit to a curfew.

Watch: Ghost Rapes of Bolivia

The defense argued that Labrie never penetrated the girl, and the sperm found on her underwear likely came from precum expelled while they were dry-humping.

The girl's story was complicated by seemingly friendly and flirtatious messages she sent to Labrie before and after the incident. She said she willingly went to meet Labrie, but wasn't comfortable going past first base. When Labrie pressured her to go further, the prosecution claimed that the girl said "no" three times before freezing in terror. Ultimately, the jury ruled that her testimony was not sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she did not consent.

Through Dunn, the girl said the convictions today were a "step in the right direction, even if it's not complete justice."

"We hope this will send a message to future victims, that they will have the strength to come forward," said Ruffle.

Former federal judge Nancy Gertner isn't sure this is a clear victory for the prosecution, as the jury acquitted Labrie of the felony sexual assault charges. "The danger in this kind of verdict is if people will take it as an indication that this kind of behavior is OK rather than it doesn't meet the proof of a reasonable doubt," she told VICE.

But the fact that this case was brought to court at all shows an evolution in how prosecutors see rape cases, added Gertner, who is now a professor at Harvard Law School. The victim took a few days to report the incident, and there is evidence that she called him an "angel," even after they had sex.

"Ten years ago the ambiguity and evidence would have led a prosecutor to not have declined to prosecute at all," she said of the victim's seemingly mixed messages.

"Now we know better," said Gertner, adding that the victim's reactions aren't unusual reactions for someone who has been assaulted.

Though there is still an "awkwardness" in date rape cases where the verdict often rests on the jury's preconceived notions of what counts as rape and what counts as consent, said Gertner.

"The jury imposes their own social values on this and that's going to go on forever."

The victim's family says while the verdict is not a complete victory, they are pleased with the outcome.

"This conviction allows him to take ownership for his actions and the harm he has caused," said the victims' parents in a statement, adding that there is "no joy in this outcome. Our daughter can never get back what she has lost."

The victim's family was also highly critical of St. Paul's School, which the family says "fostered a toxic culture." Labrie's peers "laughed and they joked with Owen Labrie about slaying our daughter," they said.

Defense attorney J.W. Carney says his client Labrie is "devastated," and was critical of the Senior Salute as well.

"It damaged both Owen and [the girl]," said Carney in his closing statement.

In a statement released by St. Paul President James Waterbury and Michael G. Hirschfeld, the school's rector, they say the school has since the charges were first brought against Labrie they have begun addition and education and prevention programing on "harassment, bullying, gender-based violence, and substance abuse."

All photos by the author

More on New Orleans post-Katrina:
-The Lower Ninth Ward, Ten Years After Katrina
-Living With My Post-Katrina Survivor's Guilt
-William Widmer Captures Life in Post-Katrina New Orleans with 'My Mississippi'

If you were a teenager in New Orleans East in 2006 or '07, there wasn't much to do. That part of the city had been a white flight destination in the 60s, the home of a black middle class by the late 70s, and since then had slowly been falling into disrepair thanks to the oil bust in the 80s and rising rates of poverty and crime.

Katrina decimated the East along with most of the rest of the city. With the mall closed, the one movie theater closed, and the Six Flags amusement park closed, kids had little to do. To fight boredom, they took up skateboarding, a relatively novel hobby for black teens in New Orleans. It was something fresh, something new and intriguing.

C. J., 21, at Parisite Skatepark. 2015

Since schools had not yet reopened and family members were preoccupied with the brutal rebuilding process, the teenagers took to the internet, learning tricks from YouTube videos. They bought $20 boards at Walmart, and finding a place to skate was easy: Everywhere there were empty skateable concrete and asphalt parking lots attached to blighted strip malls, and cops weren't too concerned with chasing them down.

Nearly ten years later, a full-fledged community of black skateboarders is now thriving in the Crescent City.

"We're like a brotherhood. We help each other," said Chuck, 20, a member of the local skate crew CREAM. "Skateboarding is like a family."

Diamond, 14, has been skateboarding for four years. Her older cousin's boyfriend, Vernon, started teaching her simple tricks when she was ten. "I've made all my friends through skateboarding," she told me. "If we weren't doing this we'd be getting into trouble. That's all we used to do before we started skating, was get into trouble."

I've spent the past three years speaking with the young members of the skating community with a camera in one hand and my skateboard in the other. Many of them, like Diamond, talked about the way skating gave them an alternative to the culture of violence that sucks too many young people in.

The following is members of the New Orleans skateboard community describing in their own words what skateboarding has meant to them in the years following Katrina.

Brad, 20, doing an ollie in New Orleans East. 2015

Fredrick, 22:

My probation officer told me I should start skating. He told me it was popular with the kids and I should try it. All my homies in the hood were getting into it too. At first I thought it was pussy, you know, like some white shit. But I tried it out and I liked it. All the people in my family were like, "What the fuck? You doing that shit now?" They are hood though, you know—they never seen black kids skating. I come to the park [Parisite] everyday, getting my skills, hanging with other skaters. It's a big part of my life, I'm here at the park everyday. I go to school at Delgado [Community College] and I skate. I'm just really trying to hold myself up and do something with myself.

Fredrick, 22, at Parisite Skatepark. 2015

Anthony, 16:

I was living in Gonzalez, [Louisiana], after the hurricane. Then we moved back. I was walking home from school and they were building a skate park. I was one of the only black skaters out there. I used to go the skate park everyday. They have some black kids out there now—they just started—I was just out there last weekend. I skate with [my cousin] Lance, and sometimes Adam from [the skateboard company] Preservation, but mostly I'm by myself. When I don't skate it's boring, so I just skate everyday. If I wasn't skating, I'd just be sitting inside, playing video games or something.

My family is supportive. They buy me boards and stuff. I show younger kids stuff. At first I had a Walmart board, then Adam from Preservation came down there. I had to do a trick, and he gave me a Preservation board, and it was better than the Walmart board, and I was like I need a new board. I'm into this pro Ishod [Wair]. He's black, he's one of the best, he's got sway. And Lance, he's my role model too.

I think [the city] puts us out because they don't want us to hurt ourselves. But I don't know why they don't build a park. I know they could afford one. We skate at the library a lot. We come on Fridays and Sundays a lot. They have a church around the corner from [Lance's] house and that's it. Just two spots. When my mama and my brother go to work, they drop me off at Parisite, then I walk to Grandma's.

"There was one lady security guard—I asked her if I could land my trick before she kicked us out. She said yeah, she said she wanted to see us be something." –Lance, 16

Anthony, 16, doing a backside disaster at Parisite Skatepark. 2015

C. J., 21:

I use to sling weed—I ain't gonna lie. I used to sell a lot of weed, but I ain't in the streets anymore. I skateboard, I got a job at Morning Call [restaurant] cooking beignets at night making $10 an hour. I'm happy. I skate everyday. I can't hang out with my old crew anymore—I don't want to be on the streets. So I make friends skating, new friends, and I don't do dumb shit anymore.

Brad, 20:

After Hurricane Katrina passed, I started getting into skateboarding. I wanted to make it like a real sport. Skateboarding has gotten bigger and bigger now, but as I was coming up it wasn't as common for a black person to be skating. It was more for a white person, for white people. Coming up skating, people always used to say, "Oh, skateboarding is for white people." "Oh, you wanna be a white boy," they'd say to me. I was 11 when I started, I got my board straight outta Walmart. Skated on it for a couple weeks then it broke. Bought another board at Walmart, then me and my cousins broke it. I bought my first real board at a skate shop in Baton Rouge. It had black wheels, it taught me how to ollie.

When I moved to New Orleans after the storm [from Baton Rouge], I didn't think they had a skate scene here, especially a black scene. But I found this guy named Imani, and we started skating around the East, making our own spots. It was 2010, and you had to really look for black kids. They weren't skating downtown yet—they would just go down for Go Skate Day. They were skating around the East, but you really had to look for them, the East is so big. In 2011, a lot of the skaters started to leave the East and head downtown, showing other black kids that you could skate and get good at it. Kids in the East had nothing to do. They were trying to stay out of trouble so they picked up a skateboard and started skating.

"All the people in my family were like, 'What the fuck? You doing that shit now?'" –Fredrick, 22

Lance, 16:

I went to Jacksonville, Florida, for Katrina. I was six. We came back about a year later. I started skating when I was 12. I was in the East—I've been there my whole life. My older cousin started skating—he was just skating by himself out here in the East. We shared a board until I started learning my own tricks. I was on YouTube, learning tricks. My cousin doesn't skate anymore, so I was just skating by myself out here. I started going downtown, to Humidity [skate shop] and I started hooking up with beaucoup people downtown.

We skated every day. I skated at Poydras, One Shell, the Convention Center, and Armstrong Park. The park is the only place you can really skate without getting kicked out. At One Shell you have at least ten minutes [to skate] before [security comes] out. They knobbed [metal deterrents on benches] Poydras, so you really can't skate that anymore. There was one lady security guard—I asked her if I could land my trick before I she kicked us out. She said yeah, she said she wanted to see us be something. They had a skate park, [Lil] Wayne's, but it's not open anymore. We got through the window a couple times to skate after it closed down. I like to skate street, mostly rails and stairs. You ain't gotta worry about nothing. We look at the world differently. A normal person would just be like, "Oh, those are stairs." We see if we can skate it. You get momentum from people. Say he jumped down this, it's gonna make me want to do it. Makes us both better.

Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans East, former site of proposed suburban subdivision, in 2014

Trey, 18:

I've been chilling, slowing it down, trying to get it together. I'm about to graduate. I'm looking for a job, my pocket's been hurting. I didn't quit [skating]—I just paused it. People think I quit because I got too good at it, and there wasn't anything left for me to skate, but I'm not that good. I'm never satisfied, though—I always push myself to go further. I was in Germany—my dad's in the military—so we were traveling a lot. My brother was skating then. He exposed me to it. There was a skate park down the street there, so that's when it all started. I don't remember the year, but I came back in sixth grade, six years ago, I guess, in 2009. We moved to Gentilly [a neighborhood of New Orleans]. I started going downtown a lot. There were a lot of skaters down there. Humidity [skateboard shop] was out there, the skate scene was really poppin' off out there, down on Canal Street.

That's how I really, really got into it. [When I was moving around in the military,] the skate scene was always mostly white. It was kinda surprising to see black kids skating here—I didn't expect the skate scene to be that big out here. I was skating with friends. It was more of a social thing, really. That was what my life was about, really. I didn't take it seriously, it was more about having fun, meeting friends, skatin'. Skating from spot to spot, that was what my life was all about really. I come to Parisite a lot, I skate the street area here. [Because of Parisite], a lot more people are starting to come. It's starting to get a lot more exposure. It's public—you don't have to pay. That's huge. I was kinda hanging with the wrong crowd, but skating took me away from that.

Watch 'Gone: How Mental Illness Derailed the Career of a Promising Young Skateboarder':

One of my homies, named Keelan, had been skating for a while [downtown]. We were skating in a basketball court in the Iberville, we started skating right there. Then we started skating on Canal [Street] in front of Sports Plus and all that. I learned tricks by watching videos, and I stole this book from Kipp [, a charter school]. It was about skateboarding. It taught you how to do simple tricks like ollies and kickflips, so I just put it in my backpack. I looked at it when I got home and started learning from there. By me moving around, I had friends with access to internet, so I started watching YouTube a lot.

After the Iberville I went to the 12th Ward off Louisiana [Avenue]. I got people skating up there. There wasn't anyone skating—maybe three people up there. There was this kid P. J., and a couple other kids. We would skate uptown in front of Walgreens and Walter L. Cohen. It's non-stop action for me. I hang out with a bunch of different people. I tried to get away from my neighborhood uptown in Calliope. It's a bunch of stuff that happens now and then, all types of shit. Shooting, fights, a lot of danger—I stay away from it. Skating helps me stay away from it a lot. It makes me explore most of the city. It helps me get around a bunch.

"I was in that era where I was called white boy, I was called fag, I was called a bunch of other demeaning things because I skateboarded." –Patrick 'Melon'

Julian, 17, doing a manual in New Orleans East. 2015

Patrick "Melon," 24:

I started skateboarding when I was 16. I started skateboarding pretty much because I wasn't good at any other sports. I was in that era where I was called white boy, I was called fag, I was called a bunch of other demeaning things because I skateboarded. I'm not great at it [skateboarding], but it's something I can do. I can ride down the street on a skateboard and it's one of the most alleviating feelings I can have.

The [black] kids who started skating here are inner-city kids. They are used to that whole thug mentality, like skateboarding wasn't cool even a couple years ago. Skateboarding is a beautiful thing—anybody who wants to be involved in skateboarding is more than welcome in it. But I don't like the people that profit off of it, for the cool factor. Like how you'll see skateboarders in music videos or people talking about skateboarding in their songs. The main fact of it is, they could be out here doing all these violent things, shooting people, doing dumb things, but they're out here skateboarding. This here puts a cap on [violence] to an extent—it doesn't happen as much as it should. When you're bored, you're going to be irritable. But when you have an outlet like skateboarding, it's an easier way to make sure people don't get killed, don't get shot, don't get beat up.

Jamize, doing a frontside 180 at Parisite Skatepark. 2015

Skateboarding through the French quarter, that's it. It's probably the most fun you can have in New Orleans. There aren't a lot of clear-cut skate spots in New Orleans—you have to be creative about where you skate. Though now that it's boomed the security has gotten stricter in a lot of areas. At this point we have to figure out where we're going to skate, because where we have been skating we're gonna get kicked out in two minutes. New Orleans has potholes and big cracks in the street everywhere. You have to find a place that's skateable.

Chuck, 20:

I started skating in 2008. I started skating with my neighbors, just pushing around. This one kid Nathan on the block started pushing around with us, doing tricks. He made me jealous. I wanted to get good, so it was on. I'd seen a commercial on TV. There was a skater in the commercial. I asked my parents for a board and they got me my first board, you know, at Walmart. The usual, everyone got their boards there. [It was called] a Little Mongoose, two in a pack—I loved it.

As I grew up, I started exploring the city more and meet people. By seeing other kids [skating], I kept skating and kept getting better. There are some posers—they started skating because of Lil' Wayne or some shit—I be hating on them. They're not real. We formed our team, the CREAM team. It started out small, just four people, we got about ten now. We're the best little street team downtown. We're like a brotherhood—he help each other. Skateboarding is like a family.

The city doesn't reward us for what we do. Sometimes it's bad because we skate on [private] property, but we aren't going to sue anybody. Skateboarding keeps me out of trouble, because young black kids these days, and white kids too, you know, they get into robbery and burglary and weapons. Me and my team, we never got into any of that. We don't look down that way. Kids here reflect off of what other people do.

Chuck, 20, at Parisite Skatepark. 2013

Aubrey Edwards is a photographer living in New Orleans. Her website is here.

All photos courtesy of the author

My childhood best friend, Olivia, called me last week to tell me her big birthday news: At 26, she's been diagnosed with breast cancer so severe she needed an immediate double mastectomy. "You felt the lump and just knew?" I asked, waiting for gut-wrenching details about the breast self-examination gone wrong.

"No lump," she replied.

In America, young women are taught to always watch out for the lumps in our self-exams, because lumps equal breast cancer. But that's not always the case—asymptomatic breast cancer is rare, especially in young women, but up to five percent of breast cancer patients have inflammatory breast cancer, which does not present in lumps.

Olivia not only found herself facing breast cancer without classic symptoms,she also had one of the most aggressive cancers her doctors had ever seen. Olivia has been a 49ers cheerleader, a finalist on So You Think You Can Dance, and a dancer for pop stars like Madonna; she's never smoked cigarettes or done drugs, and she has no history of breast cancer in her family. Without lumps to signal their arrival, how could she know about the tumors spreading in her breasts?

Things like this don't happen to healthy, young girls like us, we kept thinking, Especially without the tell-tale lump.

For Olivia, the hint came in the form of blood inside her bra. "Nipple discharge is rare, and sometimes the nipple becomes inverted, or loses symmetry as a symptom of breast cancer," Dr. Melissa Accordino, her oncologist at Columbia University Hospital, told me. "Younger women might have breast pain, but really it's any sort of sudden changes to the breast that can indicate symptoms of a larger problem."

Weeks of headaches and hot flashes coupled with the bloody nipple were enough to get Olivia to call her doctor, but the doctor wasn't initially concerned, because there was no lump. "My family doctor's exact words were, 'I'm sure its nothing to be worried about, you're a healthy girl, there' s no family history, and there's no lump. But just to be safe let's do a mammogram,'" Olivia told me.

They had to redo the mammogram three times; the breast tissue of a young woman is dense, making it difficult to get a clear image. The radiologist was first to detect nine centimetersof cancerous calcium deposits in Olivia's left breast.

"It looked like a firework in my left breast. It was so spread out..." Olivia told me, trailing off as she remembered the gravity of the moment. The biopsy officially confirmed her diagnosis a few days later. When Olivia, shell-shocked and in denial, rejected the initial news from her doctor, she got a second and third opinion—all the doctors she spoke with agreed an emergency mastectomy was critical given how quickly the cancer was spreading.

A few nights before surgery, Olivia and I sipped white wine on my couch and had a good cry about how insanely unfair a double helping of breast cancer AND a double mastectomy was for any woman, let alone for a 26-year-old blonde bombshell with big dreams. Things like this don't happen to healthy, young girls like us, we kept thinking, Especially without the tell-tale lump.

Olivia during her days as a professional cheerleader

Earlier this month, Olivia went in for a six-hour double mastectomy. She was one of the youngest women in the US to have this surgery under these conditions.

The surgery went smoothly, but it took longer than expected to cut out the breast cancer that permeated 87 percent of her breast tissue. With most mastectomies, reconstruction can be done at the same time. But because so much of Olivia's tissue was covered, there was no muscle left. So they inserted expanders into her chest that will gradually stretch the skin over three months while she receives regular injections of saline, then they'll put implants in to complete the reconstructive surgery.

The day of Olivia's mastectomy, I rushed to Columbia Hospital to see her after work and slept on the hospital floor beside her, nursing her throughout the night. Olivia had two massive drains for the blood coming out either side of her body, and dressings across her chest.

Doctors told Olivia that had she not gone to the hospital after discovering her bloody nipple, she wouldn't have made it much longer.

Thanks to improvements in technology and surgical procedure, a double mastectomy no longer has to mean permanent cosmetic consequences, and plastic surgeons worked to make sure Olivia's chest would look just as it had before the cancer.

But what can young women do to detect undetectable breast cancers? "Regular mammograms are recommended by 40 to 50 years old," said Accordino. "Before then, there's nothing but regular self breast exams and clinical breast exams. Evidence is not so great for self-exams, but we still recommend it every month just to know your body."

While she has a long road to recovery, Olivia is grateful the cancer was discovered when it was. "I was fortunate enough to have blood coming out of my nipple," she said. Olivia was extremely lucky: due to the placement of the cancer underneath her nipple, the symptoms appeared in a visual way that was hard to ignore. In some cases, it's simply persistent breast pain and tenderness that alert women to the problem.

Women can now undergo what's called a BRCA test to see if they have one of two genes that make them predisposed to breast and ovarian cancer. This test was recently popularized by Angelina Jolie, who took it and, when she confirmed she carried one of these genes, decided to controversially go through a voluntary double mastectomy even though she didn't have cancer. Accordino cautioned against these tests "unless [women] have significant risk factors, like family histories of ovarian cancer or breast cancer." But beyond the BRCA test, how can a young healthy young woman protect herself?

Across the board, the overarching advice given by patients and doctors alike is to listen to your body. Doctors told Olivia that had she not gone to the hospital after discovering her bloody nipple, she wouldn't have made it much longer. "My surgeon told me, flat out, if this would have gone for another year, I'd be dead. But because we caught it early, I'll be fine. And the crazy part is I was so religious about my self breast exams every month," Olivia recalled.

Olivia's fight isn't over yet. Last weekend, a post-surgery biopsy showed that the cancer is still there. She'll be on cancer treatment for the next ten years, and may also need an aggressive round of chemotherapy and egg-freezing treatment before she makes a full recovery. But Olivia is above all grateful that she listened to the small signs her body was giving her. "I've been guilty of thinking 'I'm young and strong and invincible,' but I knew something was wrong," she told me. "Fortunately I listened to my body, or else I wouldn't have been around to celebrate my 27th birthday. I'd rather be called crazy for going to the doctor too many times than be dead a year later because I thought I was making a big deal out of nothing."

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Illustrations by Alex Gamsu Jenkins

On Saturday, August 27, 2005, two days before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast, Dan Bright was locked inside Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) on what he calls "bull-crap charges." He had been exonerated just a few months earlier, when it was determined that he had been falsely imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. But Bright says that on Saturday, while helping board up his mother's house, he was arrested for trespassing and wound up in central lockup on misdemeanor charges.

Sunday was deceptively peaceful, as Katrina whirled closer and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the first-ever mandatory evacuation of the city. Governor Kathleen Blanco added that the storm was "very serious," and "we need to get as many people out as possible." In spite of this, Sheriff Marlin Gusman announced, "The prisoners will stay where they belong." He had generators, he said, and a loyal staff, so the city's inmates would hang tight.

The grouping of buildings that comprise Orleans Parish Prison render it something of a crown jewel in what some call the world's incarceration capital—Louisiana—and at the time of Katrina, one of America's biggest jails. Because OPP earns roughly $25 a day per prisoner from the state, city cops don't do a whole lot of catch-and-release. In August 2005, the majority of OPP's roughly 6,800 prisoners hadn't been convicted of a serious crime. They were people who couldn't pay traffic tickets, drunk tourists who'd pissed on Bourbon Street, kids caught smoking pot. The robust jail and regressive criminal justice policies made for a perfect storm for what was to come.

Katrina soon made extra clear the many drawbacks of over-enthusiastically caging so many people at once. "It took us six hours to evacuate about 300 prisoners from St. Bernard out to OPP the night before Katrina hit," recalls one guard who worked in the jail at the time of the hurricane and asked to remain anonymous since he is still employed by the city's corrections system. "All of our inmates were put in one big gymnasium at OPP—we'd thought we'd have cells, or structure. We [guards] were stationed on the outside of the gymnasium, unarmed, cause no one can bring weapons into OPP."

When Katrina hit on Monday, August 29, OPP's generators failed. All the lights went out, and the under-ventilated jail became stifling. "When the storm hit, it sounded like the building was gonna come down," the guard recalls.

On VICE News: Indian Workers Awarded $14M In Post-Hurricane Katrina Trafficking Case

"My attorneys and the bail bondsmen were all leaving the city. Then the electricity went off and the water started rising," says Bright, who was being kept inside OPP's Templeton building. With no power, the electric cell doors remained stubbornly shut as the facility filled with water.

"The prisoners thought we were all planning to leave them to die locked in there, and I can't say I blamed them for thinking that."

Bright and his cellmate, a diabetic man, kicked at their own door for two or three hours. "It's on a hinge that slides back and forth," Bright recalls. "You can knock it off its hinge and then slide out the bottom of the cell. And we're doing all this in the dark—all you see is the water." Lucky for Bright, he'd been lodged him on the second floor. Below him the terrified prisoners began to riot in the sewage-tainted floodwaters.

"Our gym was on the ground floor, and the inmates were getting agitated," the guard tells VICE. "Food and all services had been discontinued. There was no AC, no ventilation."

Downstairs, the water rose from the prisoners' ankles, to knees, to waists. Though they experienced the hurricane in separate OPP buildings, both Dan Bright and the guard say that by Monday night, most OPP officials had fled the scene to save themselves. "The prisoners thought we were all planning to leave them to die locked in there," said the guard, "and I can't say I blamed them for thinking that."

Around that time, Sherriff Gusman realized his mistake in failing to release the prisoners and began to send rescue teams back into the jail. By Tuesday morning, the toxic water was chest-level or higher.

"At some point it got high enough they got angry and started banging on the doors... breaking down the first set of security doors to get out," the guard remembers. "We real fast went out and locked the second set of security doors and stood outside of them with no weapons. All we had were our voices, tellin 'em, 'Don't come out!' I started seeing chips of concrete breaking out of the wall in the overhangs—turns out the inmates inside were using a bed to beat a hole though the cinderblock wall."

Bright and his cellmate pounded their way out, then struggled to save a few others. But their effort ultimately amounted to nothing. "The deputies had left the building, but they were outside with boats. They hadn't been comin' in because there was no power, it was dark...they was afraid to come in," Bright claims. "But when you got out they were grabbing you and putting you on these boats."

There are few documented reports of the conditions Bright and the guard described. But a damning 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, titled Abandoned & Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviewed more than 1,000 people who were at OPP during those days and attest to horrifying circumstances. Raphael Schwartz, a 26-year-old Missouri man arrested for public intoxication on August 27, said he was held in a cell with no ventilation and nothing to eat or drink for four days. Renard Reed, a guard at OPP's psychiatric ward, reported being locked into the ward to prevent his desertion, and then being ordered to the roof with a shotgun and told to shoot anyone trying to leave the flooded buildings. Reed remained stranded at the prison long after the prisoners were evacuated. Ashley George, a 13-year-old girl housed in OPP's Youth Center, said she was moved to an adult male holding area where she spent days in water up to her neck.

In response, Gusman said that, "None of it was true... Don't rely on crackheads, cowards and criminals to say what the story is." He would also later claim that no one died escaping OPP.

There are no official reports on inmate deaths during Katrina, but Bright says the Sheriff is a bonafide liar. "I'm lookin at the dead bodies! I seen a guy catch a heart attack and drown," he says. Likewise, the guard describes Gusman's claim as "bullshit."

"There were definitely deaths at that prison," he says. "I don't know how they covered that up. I didn't believe in conspiracy theories before, but now I do." The Orleans Parish Sheriff's office did not return requests for comment on this story.

One of very few high-ground options—the elevated, hell-hot Broad Street overpass—is where the guard says boats dropped about 3,500 inmates, to be watched over by 200 to 300 police officers, beginning on Wednesday August 31. (Other inmates were sent elsewhere.)

"They had dogs and everything to keep us sitting on the hard concrete on the bridge for four days. Ninety-five degrees with no water," Bright says. Bright says his cellmate, who helped kick open the door, suffered a diabetic stroke on the hot asphalt. A report from Human Rights Watch, which interviewed over 1,000 inmates evacuated from OPP, suggests Bright's experience was not unique, citing

"After four days, they figured out how to get a bus to the prisoners. They had to climb down a scaffolding onto a bus to Hunt Correctional Facility," recalls the guard, who remained trapped up on the interstate for a couple more days before being rescued and reunited with his family.

On Saturday, September 4, Dan Bright was brought to Elayn Hunt Correction Facility in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, where the horror continued. "After the bridge, they brought us out in the middle of this football field for another five days and five nights. [Guards] were throwing sandwiches over the gates, and if you didn't get one, you just didn't," Bright remembers. He also claims that the guards, believing he was still locked up for murder charges, kept him in solitary confinement 24-hours-a-day and fed through a hatch in his isolated cell. "And when I kept trying to tell these idiots [guards] I'm not on death row anymore, they'd grab me and throw me against the wall."

In a very lucky break, one of the attorneys who'd helped exonerate Bright happened to move to Alexandria to start her own firm. "She came to Hunt jail for humanitarian reasons, to see if anyone was being mistreated, and she recognized my name on the list," Bright says. "Once she saw my name she pulled me out. I told her what was going on."

Bright became one of the lucky ones to even meet a judge. "Once they bring me to court I get escorted with four patrol cars, heavily-armed with shotguns, machine guns, handguns, they all lined up around the court," Bright claims. "I'd never heard of this in New Orleans; you can't bring a gun into New Orleans courtrooms, but...they figured I'm on death row."

Eventually, Bright says, jail officials admitted, "There might be a mixup in my paperwork."

After Hurricane Katrina, all-girl biker group Caramel Curves was forced to disband. Now they're back.

Bright says after suffering such an emotionally trying experience, "you start to ask yourself, Why not suppress that? If I continued to dwell on it I would go crazy."

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In 2012, with the US Department of Justice listed as a co-plaintiff, Southern Poverty Law Center lawyer Katie Schwartzmann sued OPP on behalf of thousands of the prisoners. The suit was meant to address the total lack of an evacuation plan, but also sought "to fix ongoing unconstitutional conditions at the jail, particularly safety and security issues, especially for men, women, and kids with special mental health needs," according to Schwartzmann, who has continued her work on the issue as co-director of the New Orleans branch of Chicago's Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center. She won her case, and the resulting 46-page federal consent decree against OPP, enacted in June 2013, requires changes to almost every aspect of the facility: increased staffing and training, better mental health facilities, improved food and sanitation, revision of prisoner grievance process, and much more.

Two Ohio tourists, arrested in New Orleans on public drunkenness charges two days before Katrina and jailed for more than a month, were awarded $650,000 for false imprisonment and Chief Deputy William Hunter's "deliberate indifference" to the men's constitutional rights to call an attorney or relative. But besides that, Schwartzmann admits there has been precious little justice for the individual prisoners who survived Gusman's lethal mistakes. "I am unaware of any successful cases," she says, "I do think cases were filed by prisoners representing themselves, and that there was at least one suit by an attorney, but I am unaware of any that were successful."

Nor has the consent decree been a cure-all. "It's been slower going that we'd hoped, there's still a long ways to go," admits Schwartzmann, who says OPP has "taken some steps forward."

The guard we spoke to agrees OPP is changing for the better. "I think the officers left have more respect, and a better report with the inmates and the facility [since Katrina]. The deputies and officers are more conscious now, which I don't think has to do with Katrina so much as technology, and being watched—bad apples make front-page news now. Plus, new employees go through psych evaluation. It's a more strenuous hiring process and if you manage to make it through that, if you're not in it to help people and you just like the authority, you're gonna get weeded out."

"I think everybody learned lessons in Katrina and I believe if there were another storm, decisions would be made differently and plans would be executed differently." - Katie Schwartzmann

Still, you'd have a hard time convincing Dan Bright, who is currently staying in the Lower 9th Ward while a writer is working on a book about his tumultuous life. He revisited New Orleans's jail about a year ago on further misdemeanor charges, and did not agree that OPP is changing for the better.

"They tore that Templeton building down and [in the meantime] they put a lot tents. I went back in for misdemeanor charges and I was in our tent city. Guys living in tents."

Although the tent city makes the place look like a refugee camp, construction on a new $145 million, 1,438-bed consolidated OPP building is finally set to wrap up this fall. The Times-Picayune reported last year that Gusman did purchase four new backup generators for the prison, and in June he promised The Advocate that he would be ready for another Katrina. His office would now theoretically evacuate all of OPP by bus 60 hours prior to the landfall of any hurricane category 2 or greater. In the case of a category 1 hurricane or a tropical storm, Gusman said the jail staff would likely relocate inmates out of its most vulnerable areas, including the remaining tents.

In conjunction with other parish prisons, he said, the Orleans Sheriff's Office would bus inmates to three or more separate state Department of Corrections facilities north of Interstate 10. Inmates would now enjoy a mobile, solar-powered booking facility that would help track them with bar-coded armbands.

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"I think everybody learned lessons in Katrina and I believe if there were another storm, decisions would be made differently and plans would be executed differently," says Schwartzmann. "One thing to remember is how big OPP was at the time of Katrina. This incarceration binge we're on [is tough to sustain]. The bigger the prison system, the harder it is to run."

Schwartzmann explains that when she filed the class action suit in 2012, there were 3,300 prisoners in the jail. Now, "that number has dropped because the city has been working to reduce its incarceration numbers. It has adopted policies such as citations for marijuana offenses, refusal to hold prisoners on out of parish warrants, and implementation of the Pretrial Services Program. Policy changes have driven down our incarceration numbers. And now we're down to 1,800 people in that jail, and hopefully they'll all be in one facility soon."

Bright now tours the world, telling his frustrating life story. While Mayor Mitch Landrieu uses the flood's anniversary to tout all the city's improvements in these past ten years, Bright says, "New Orleans is the worst city I have been in, man."

Bright tries not to think about it too much, or about what happened during Katrina. "But it always be in the back my mind yeah," he admits. "Every time I pass by that jail in that area I think about it. Any time I am on the interstate out of the town, yeah, I think about it a lot and I have to hurry up and block it back out. You just block it out and keep pushing forward.

"If I looked backwards," he reiterates, "I would go crazy."

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