Concordia Parish extends tall and narrow along the Mississippi River, where the ankle of Louisiana meets the instep. Almost one-third of its 20,000 residents live below the federal poverty line. Strip malls dominate Vidalia, the parish seat. Smaller satellite towns are home to Pentecostal mega-churches, defunct gas stations, and tin-sided shacks selling crawfish for $2 a pound. State highways run through low fields once flush with cotton that was picked by slaves and sold across the river to Natchez.
Near the river is the parish courthouse, a low-slung building made of concrete and set behind a grassy berm. The court opens at 9:30, but the halls fill before then. People sit on the floor outside the double-doors of the courtroom entrance, crowd together on benches, wander around to find the offices where they can get the documents or signatures that they need.
Concordia suffers from a drug problem and, though rural, “feels like an urban area in terms of case volume,” Derrick Carson, the district’s chief public defender, explained. His office handles about 3,300 cases per year. Divided among his staff of part-time support attorneys, this amounts to more than triple the state’s recommended caseload.
[For more of this story, written by Dylan Walsh, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...he-defensive/485165/]
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