[Post updated, 9/2/10]

A group of like-minded criminal justice reform advocates is soliciting donations to buy a full-page ad in the Times Picayune next week to protest Sheriff Marlin Gusman’s plan to expand the Orleans Parish jail.

Gusman is proposing a new jail that ultimately will housing about 5,800 people, says the group — up from its existing 3,552 beds. The advocates hope to start a citywide conversation about the proposal by soliciting donations of $22.39 — the daily cost the city pays the sheriff for each inmate. The group also is asking donors to consider what else the city could spend the $22.39 on.

“We’re hearing everything from mental health programs, after school programs, to better street lights and fixing the potholes in the French Quarter,” says Dana Kaplan, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which is headquartering the effort. “I think it really highlights the fiscal tradeoff the city is making when [it decides] to focus on expanding the jail instead of other services.”

The ad will cost $12,000 and is expected to run next week, Kaplan says.

“In just a few days we have had about 250 contributions, and we’ve raised over $5,000 in grass-roots donations,” she says. “I think what we’re seeing is definitely a groundswell of support for reform of Orleans Parish Prison. This is just through email solicitation and word of mouth.

“The donations are coming from all kinds of likely and unlikely allies. We’re seeing contributions from former judges, former city council members, local musicians, average citizens.”

Some private donors have agreed to match the funds raised by the effort. You can make a donate online through  Paypal until the end of today. There’s an anonymous donation button, if you don’t want your name to appear in the ad.

“A jail comfortable for our community needs to be no more than 857 beds,” says Norris Henderson, executive director of Voice of The Ex-Offender (VOTE), which supports the effort. “We’ve been locking people up for convenience.”

According to the group: Currently 3,500 inmates are in the Orleans Parish Prison, 2,700 of whom are “city prisoners.” That represents the highest rate of detention of any urban jail in the country and is three times the national average. There have also been a series of documented civil rights issues with conditions at the jail.

If you are interested in more details, Karen Gadbois at The Lens has been chronicling the city’s efforts to convene a private advisory committee around the jail expansion process.

Sheriff Gusman responded with an emailed statement through his public relations firm, the  Ehrhardt Group. He questioned the statistics cited by  the group, saying “all of the projections from the Juvenile Justice Project and percentages relative to our population are wrong.”

The sheriff wants a smaller, more efficient jail complex, he wrote, pointing out that the pre-Katrina jail complex housed over 7,500 inmates. Although 4,200 beds is still more than the current 3,552 beds.

The statement also focused on the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, writing: “This special interest group’s willingness to allow the current inmate housing situation to continue, while pursuing its own agenda, is short-sighted and a threat to public safety.”

“Demanding an artificially small facility just to satisfy a quest for national comparisons, in other words to wish New Orleans to be safer, is unrealistic and it puts the public’s safety at risk,” Gusman continued.

The full text of the planned ad is pasted, after the jump, along with the text of Gusman’s statement.

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During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

At what point are some in the media going to admit they Judy Millered the impact of the oil disaster?

The Washington Post: Scientists report undersea oil plume stretching 21 miles from BP spill site

Academic scientists are challenging the Obama administration’s assertion that most of BP’s oil is either gone or rapidly disappearing — citing, among other evidence, the discovery of an undersea “plume” of oil stretching more than 21 miles from the well site.

The New York Times: Gulf Oil Plume Is Not Breaking Down Fast, Research Says

“I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life,” Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University, told Congress in prepared testimony on Thursday. “The oil is not gone and is not going away anytime soon.”

The Wall Street Journal: Study Says Gulf Oil Spill Caused Manhattan-Size Plume

At the height of the Deepwater Horizon spill, oil escaping from the damaged well was trapped underwater in a drifting plume of hydrocarbons the size of Manhattan and helped turn the Gulf of Mexico into a test-tube of experimental petroleum chemistry, scientists who probed the submerged spill region said Thursday. …

By confirming the existence of this submerged plume, the new data also challenge government estimates that the vast majority of the 4.9 million barrels of spilled oil is already gone from the Gulf or being rapidly broken down by bacteria, several marine experts said.

Instead, some of that oil may persist deep underwater and in seafloor sediments—at levels thousands of times higher than those caused by the natural oil seeps that dot the Gulf sea floor—where it can elude conventional detection and clean-up efforts, scientists said.

Meanwhile, here’s ABC News’ front page at this moment. It contains news about Jennifer Aniston, the “Mystery of Beer Goggles Revealed,” the new girlfriend of cable star Jesse James, and something about blind waiters serving people in the dark … but not word one about the reappearing oil, much less the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico:

It was Michael Grunwald’s July 29 story in Time — “The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?” that set off a cascade of disingenous national media stories asking “Where is the oil?” And there’s nothing more disingenuous than the use of the question mark in that headline, which allows for all kinds of wiggle room and crawfishing when people sit down and consider the obvious: that an oil disaster several times worse than the Exxon Valdez spill does not just “vanish.” Grunwald may have been careful to make it clear that the long-term effects were unknowable, but that didn’t stop other media outlets from running with that horrible, misleading, crawfishing headline as the takeaway, and so we had things like this:

So today I’m wondering if this report by actual marine scientists — not BP officials, not BP-paid experts, and not cable-news blowhards — will get the same splashy treatment:

A report released today by the Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia concludes that up to 79 percent of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.

The report, authored by five prominent marine scientists, strongly contradicts media reports that suggest that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill remains.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” said Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant and professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

Download the UGA scientists’ report here … and then keep an eye out to see if it gets the same sort of screaming headlines that Grunwald’s story did.

Our dear departed music columnist Alison Fensterstock (who left to write for some paper or another) wrote the first major article about New Orleans’ sissy bounce scene for Gambit back in the summer of 2008. Since then, the scene has gotten national attention — partly due to Alison — from national magazines and various music festivals. But now sissy bounce has either made it or jumped the shark (depending on how you look at it): Katey Red, Vockah Redu, Big Freedia and the rest are all in a huge feature in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The story, “New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap,” by Jonathan Dee is … well, a mixed bag. Alison seems to have been Dee’s main source (and he quotes her extensively), but like so many well-meaning, well-written stories about the city, there’s still a New Orleans As Exotic Zoo feel to it, especially when Dee drops phrases like “the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans.” Dee follows Katey Red and Vockah Redu to Austin, Texas, for a performance in “a cruddy little venue” called the Beauty Bar:

Nothing if not old-school, [Katey] led the crowd (and her two backup singers) through a series of shout-outs to the projects and neighborhoods of New Orleans, even though very few in the audience would have any reason to know their names or to distinguish one from the other; she led them in a chant that made “Katrina” and “FEMA” into rhyming objects of the same obscene verb.

Why does it matter that no one in the Austin audience would know the Calliope from the Melpomene? It’s Katey’s song. Why would she alter her performance? Who would expect her to? If Beausoleil played Austin, would it be worth remarking on that very few in the audience knew Cajun French?

And why include this quote from Freedia’s DJ/manager, Rusty Lazer?

“I’ve lived in New Orleans a long time, and I know a lot of people, but you’ve just seen something that about 95 percent of my white friends will probably never see.”

Dude! I bet it’s a kick when you’re the only non-Chinese guy in the Chinese restaurant, too!

It’s cringey statements like that which led a Facebook commenter to note “This guy is treating NOLA bounce like he’s writing for National Geographic, which equals gross.”

Anyway, the rappers all come off really well in the story, and it’s great to see them get the attention they deserve (and Alison the attention she deserves), and the photos are good, but the whole article carried with it the whiff of that occasional New York Times/NPR attitude that the whole world — and, all too often, New Orleans in particular — is a subculture in a Petri dish that has to be “interpreted” and classified by outsiders. Which brings us to the smartest line in the whole story:

Vockah Redu — who lives in Houston now, having gone there six years ago to study performing arts in college — probably chafes at the “sissy bounce” label more than anyone. “My daughter’s gonna be reading that soon,” he told me with a tight laugh. “But I’ll be able to explain it to her. It’s just stardom, and I feel like it’ll die down eventually. Right now the media’s buying it, so ‘sissy bounce’ it is.”

P.S. to the sissies: If Madonna or Lady Gaga comes sniffing around after reading this piece, make her pay you a lot of money up front.

P.P.S. to readers: Alison’s story was better.

Along with our daily BP oil disaster updates, we’ll be taking an occasional look at how newspapers along the Gulf Coast are covering the oil spill — by taking stock of their headlines. Today is the Friday before the three-day Fourth of July weekend, which would normally mean lots of stories about patriotism, families, vacations and barbecue, but on the Oil Coast, it’s all petrol, all the time …

Here’s the Biloxi Sun-Herald, leading with an ominous story about how oil has entered the very beginning of the Gulf food chain:

The Mississippi Press in Pascagoula says there may be “months of oil” — but, hey, “the fish are biting”:

More front pages under the jump.

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