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The Incarceration Capital of the U.S.
A Struggle Over the Size of New Orleans’ Jail Could Define the City’s Future
by Jordan Flaherty
New Orleans’ criminal justice system is at a crossroads. A new mayor and police chief say they want to make major changes, and the police department is facing lawsuits and federal investigations that may profoundly affect the department. But a simultaneous, and less publicized, struggle is being waged and the results will likely define the city’s justice system for a generation: the city’s jail, damaged during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, needs to be replaced. City leaders must now decide how big the new institution will be.
At first, it seemed like an expansion of the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) was inevitable. This is a city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the U.S., and politicians rarely lose votes by calling for more jail cells. But in a city that has led the nation in incarceration, residents across race and class lines are questioning fundamental assumptions about what works in criminal justice.
With 3,500 beds in a city of about 350,000 residents, Orleans Parish Prison is already the largest per capita county jail of any major U.S. city. Sheriff Marlin Gusman, the elected official with oversight over the jail, has submitted plans for an even larger complex. A broad coalition is seeking to take the city in a different direction. They want a smaller facility, and are demanding that the money that would be spent on a larger jail be diverted to alternatives to incarceration, like drug treatment programs and mental health facilities.
Criminal justice experts and community leaders are speaking in support of a smaller jail. This is an issue that has allowed the religious foundation Baptist Community Ministries and prison abolition organizers from Critical Resistance to find common ground. The online activist group Color of Change (www.colorofchange.org) also recently joined in the conversation, with an appeal that has generated hundreds of emails to the mayor and City Council. “In all the work we’ve been doing on criminal justice reform, this is definitely a pivotal moment,” says Rosana Cruz, the associate director of V.O.T.E. (Voices of the Ex-Offender), an organization that seeks to build power and civic engagement for formerly incarcerated people. “We’re finally getting local and state government to think about public safety from a perspective of real safety, not an incarceration perspective.”
The OPP Reform Coalition, a pre-Katrina alliance that has recently been revitalized, has led the campaign. In September 2010, when it seemed like the prison expansion was proceeding without public debate, they took out a full-page ad in the city’s daily paper listing other things that the money spent on OPP could be spent on. The ad featured an assortment of New Orleanians – including musicians, local politicians, community leaders and members of the cast and crew of the HBO show “Treme.” The diverse assembly of public figures not only signed the ad, but also helped pay for it, donating $22.39 each, the amount that the jail currently charges the city for every prisoner it holds. In the aftermath of the ad, attention turned to a working group formed by the mayor to address the issue.
Incarceration Industry
Orleans Parish Prison is a giant complex in mid-city New Orleans, made up of several buildings spread across a dozen blocks employing nearly a thousand nonunion workers.
The city jail is a small empire under the absolute control of the Sheriff, who can use jail employees for election campaigns and send out prisoners to work for local businesses. The majority of the metropolitan area’s mental health facilities are also located within the jail, meaning that for many who have mental health issues, the jail is their only option for treatment.
Louisiana’s incarceration rate is by far the highest in the world – more than ten times higher than most European countries and twenty times higher than Japan. Pre-Katrina, OPP had 7,200 beds. In a city with a population of around 465,000 at the time, that came to about one bed for every sixty-five city residents. Neighboring Jefferson Parish has 100,000 more people than Orleans Parish, and has only 900 jail beds. Caddo Parish – in the northeast of the state – has more violent crime but still imprisons far less people. If OPP had the same number of beds as the national average of one jail bed for every 388 residents, the jail’s capacity would shrink to about 850.
Aside from its size, OPP is unique in other ways. Under the terms of a lawsuit over prison conditions filed in 1969, the jail’s budget is based on a per-diem paid by the city for every prisoner held at the facility. The more people locked up in OPP, the higher the funding Sheriff Gusman has at his disposal. “Our current funding structure is creating a perverse incentive to lock more people up,” explains Dana Kaplan, director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a criminal justice advocacy organization and member of the OPP Reform Coalition.
The institution of OPP is also exceptional in that it is a county jail and a state prison combined into one entity. About 2,700 people in the jail are mostly pre-trial detainees – the majority being held for drug possession, traffic violations, public drunkenness or other nonviolent offenses – and are legally innocent until proven guilty. An additional 800 people are state prisoners who have been convicted and who may spend years or even decades at OPP.
Almost 60,000 people passed through OPP from 2009 to 2010, a staggering figure for a city of this size. The average length of stay was 20 days. The largest portion of pre-trial prisoners in the jail are there for nonviolent, municipal offenses that even under conservative standards should not warrant jail time, including 20,000 arrests in 2010 for traffic violations. “New Orleans is basically the incarceration capital of the world,” says Kaplan. “You’re hard-pressed to find a resident of New Orleans – especially in poor communities – that hasn’t had their lives disrupted in some way by this institution.”
An article by journalist Ethan Brown in one of the city’s weekly papers noted, “thanks to the profound misallocation of law enforcement resources in New Orleans, you’re more likely to end up in Orleans Parish Prison for a traffic offense than for armed robbery or murder.” Ultimately, this struggle over the size of the jail is also about the city’s incarceration priorities. If the city builds a larger jail, it will have to keep filling it with tens of thousands of people. If a smaller facility is built, it will change who is arrested in the city and how long they spend behind bars.
Because much of the jail was underwater during Katrina, many of the buildings have either been closed or need massive renovation. By one estimate, the new jail that the sheriff seeks would cost $250 million, much of that to come in reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The sheriff has yet to reveal how much of the construction costs would come from federal dollars, although the state affiliate of the ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information. Even if most of the construction were paid for by FEMA, as the Sheriff has indicated, the continued upkeep would fall to the city.
Sheriff Gusman did not respond to requests for comment, but he has said, at a meeting of the mayor’s task force on the jail, “I’ve always advocated for a smaller facility,” and spoke of being satisfied with 4,200 beds. The plans he has submitted to various planning bodies, however, indicate otherwise.
The Sheriff has issued several conflicting statements and reports about the size of the new jail, as well as where the funding will come from. A Justice Facilities Master Plan, prepared in collaboration with the Sheriff’s office, called for 8,000 beds, which would give the jail the capacity to imprison nearly one of every 40 people currently in the city. A planning document prepared by the Sheriff called for 5,800 beds. No plans or public documents issued by his office have called for building a jail smaller than the current facility.
Spotlight on Abuse
With seven reported jail deaths as of November 2010, OPP is under the spotlight for violent and abusive treatment of prisoners. A September 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found that “conditions at OPP violate the constitutional rights of inmates.” The DOJ went on to document “a pattern and practice of unnecessary and inappropriate use of force by OPP correctional officers,” including “several examples where OPP officers openly engaged in abusive and retaliatory conduct, which resulted in serious injuries to prisoners. In some instances, the investigation found, the officers’ conduct was so flagrant it clearly constituted calculated abuse.” [See: PLN, March 2010, p.30].
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people who had not been convicted of any crime were lost in the city’s prison system. [See: PLN, May 2007, p.18; April 2007, p.1]. In October 2010 a federal jury awarded two men from Ohio a $650,000 judgment for their treatment after the storm. The men, Robie J. Wagenfeald and Paul W. Kunkel, Jr., were on a road trip and stopped in New Orleans for a drink on Bourbon Street. They were arrested for public drunkenness and spent a month disappeared in the OPP system, without being allowed even one phone call to their families.
In a city under fiscal crisis, advocates have focused not only on the decades of evidence that mass incarceration has only made people in the city feel less safe, but also on the financial costs of building a massive jail. In addition to calling for reforms that would cause less people to be locked up, the reform coalition demands that “funds dedicated to building a bigger jail must be reallocated to building the infrastructure of a caring community, including recreational, educational, mental health, and affordable housing facilities.”
Andrea Slocum, an organizer with Critical Resistance, says that when she talks to city residents, the idea of redirecting money from the prison has wide support. “Parents are crying out, saying where’s the recreation for our children,” she says.
“It’s an exciting time for the city in a lot of ways,” says Michael Jacobson of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization that has been advising the city, including the Sheriff. Jacobson, who served as correction commissioner for New York City in the mid-90s, managed to reduce the population of New York City’s jail system even in the midst of the mass arrests of the Giuliani administration. He believes similar change is possible in New Orleans. “You can’t create or innovate unless you’re willing to step out and change what you’re doing,” he says. The Vera Institute has received funding from the U.S. Department of Justice for a pre-trial services program that has reduced incarceration in other cities, and they project New Orleans will also be able to see a reduction.
But the drive to build more jail cells is hard to stop, and many barriers remain. Sheriffs in Louisiana have no term limits, and there are few leverages on their influence. Sheriff Gusman was first elected in 2004 and has faced little opposition since then. The previous Criminal Sheriff held the position for 30 years, only leaving when he became state Attorney General.
As the debate continues, the Sheriff’s department has already begun construction on a temporary building to hold 400 additional beds. Gusman initially told reporters that he would close other facilities and the new construction would not result in increased capacity. However, in a letter to the State Bond Commission, he predicted increased revenue from holding additional prisoners in the new building.
Advocates believe that the tide is beginning to turn, but the new construction already underway indicates that there is still a lot of work to be done and not much time. “We really need to keep the pressure on and the momentum consistent,” says Rosana Cruz of V.O.T.E. “They’ll shake our hands and make these promises but meanwhile these deals are being made behind closed doors.”
Update – A Smaller Jail Prevails
In 2010, due to a number of criminal justice reforms, the population of the Orleans Parish Prison dropped to its lowest level – 1,744 prisoners. “As further reforms go online over the next year, we should see steeper reductions in demand for jail beds,” said Jon Wool, who directs the New Orleans office of the Vera Institute of Justice.
On February 3, 2011, the New Orleans City Council approved an ordinance to build a new 1,438-bed jail using funds from FEMA. The jail would be about one-third the size of the originally-proposed facility, and after it opens the city’s existing jails will be closed, including the 400-bed temporary building.
Sheriff Gusman, who did not attend the City Council meeting, criticized the ordinance, citing public safety concerns. He maintains that a larger jail is needed.
A group of 50 religious leaders in New Orleans praised the Council’s decision, saying building a larger jail would “threaten the city’s efforts to transform our criminal justice system into a more humane, effective and efficient system that is capable of ensuring equal justice for all.”
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. His new book is called FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. [See: PLN, Feb. 2011, p.44]. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about his work can be found at www.floodlines.org. This article is reprinted with permission.
by Jordan Flaherty
New Orleans’ criminal justice system is at a crossroads. A new mayor and police chief say they want to make major changes, and the police department is facing lawsuits and federal investigations that may profoundly affect the department. But a simultaneous, and less publicized, struggle is being waged and the results will likely define the city’s justice system for a generation: the city’s jail, damaged during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, needs to be replaced. City leaders must now decide how big the new institution will be.
At first, it seemed like an expansion of the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) was inevitable. This is a city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the U.S., and politicians rarely lose votes by calling for more jail cells. But in a city that has led the nation in incarceration, residents across race and class lines are questioning fundamental assumptions about what works in criminal justice.
With 3,500 beds in a city of about 350,000 residents, Orleans Parish Prison is already the largest per capita county jail of any major U.S. city. Sheriff Marlin Gusman, the elected official with oversight over the jail, has submitted plans for an even larger complex. A broad coalition is seeking to take the city in a different direction. They want a smaller facility, and are demanding that the money that would be spent on a larger jail be diverted to alternatives to incarceration, like drug treatment programs and mental health facilities.
Criminal justice experts and community leaders are speaking in support of a smaller jail. This is an issue that has allowed the religious foundation Baptist Community Ministries and prison abolition organizers from Critical Resistance to find common ground. The online activist group Color of Change (www.colorofchange.org) also recently joined in the conversation, with an appeal that has generated hundreds of emails to the mayor and City Council. “In all the work we’ve been doing on criminal justice reform, this is definitely a pivotal moment,” says Rosana Cruz, the associate director of V.O.T.E. (Voices of the Ex-Offender), an organization that seeks to build power and civic engagement for formerly incarcerated people. “We’re finally getting local and state government to think about public safety from a perspective of real safety, not an incarceration perspective.”
The OPP Reform Coalition, a pre-Katrina alliance that has recently been revitalized, has led the campaign. In September 2010, when it seemed like the prison expansion was proceeding without public debate, they took out a full-page ad in the city’s daily paper listing other things that the money spent on OPP could be spent on. The ad featured an assortment of New Orleanians – including musicians, local politicians, community leaders and members of the cast and crew of the HBO show “Treme.” The diverse assembly of public figures not only signed the ad, but also helped pay for it, donating $22.39 each, the amount that the jail currently charges the city for every prisoner it holds. In the aftermath of the ad, attention turned to a working group formed by the mayor to address the issue.
Incarceration Industry
Orleans Parish Prison is a giant complex in mid-city New Orleans, made up of several buildings spread across a dozen blocks employing nearly a thousand nonunion workers.
The city jail is a small empire under the absolute control of the Sheriff, who can use jail employees for election campaigns and send out prisoners to work for local businesses. The majority of the metropolitan area’s mental health facilities are also located within the jail, meaning that for many who have mental health issues, the jail is their only option for treatment.
Louisiana’s incarceration rate is by far the highest in the world – more than ten times higher than most European countries and twenty times higher than Japan. Pre-Katrina, OPP had 7,200 beds. In a city with a population of around 465,000 at the time, that came to about one bed for every sixty-five city residents. Neighboring Jefferson Parish has 100,000 more people than Orleans Parish, and has only 900 jail beds. Caddo Parish – in the northeast of the state – has more violent crime but still imprisons far less people. If OPP had the same number of beds as the national average of one jail bed for every 388 residents, the jail’s capacity would shrink to about 850.
Aside from its size, OPP is unique in other ways. Under the terms of a lawsuit over prison conditions filed in 1969, the jail’s budget is based on a per-diem paid by the city for every prisoner held at the facility. The more people locked up in OPP, the higher the funding Sheriff Gusman has at his disposal. “Our current funding structure is creating a perverse incentive to lock more people up,” explains Dana Kaplan, director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a criminal justice advocacy organization and member of the OPP Reform Coalition.
The institution of OPP is also exceptional in that it is a county jail and a state prison combined into one entity. About 2,700 people in the jail are mostly pre-trial detainees – the majority being held for drug possession, traffic violations, public drunkenness or other nonviolent offenses – and are legally innocent until proven guilty. An additional 800 people are state prisoners who have been convicted and who may spend years or even decades at OPP.
Almost 60,000 people passed through OPP from 2009 to 2010, a staggering figure for a city of this size. The average length of stay was 20 days. The largest portion of pre-trial prisoners in the jail are there for nonviolent, municipal offenses that even under conservative standards should not warrant jail time, including 20,000 arrests in 2010 for traffic violations. “New Orleans is basically the incarceration capital of the world,” says Kaplan. “You’re hard-pressed to find a resident of New Orleans – especially in poor communities – that hasn’t had their lives disrupted in some way by this institution.”
An article by journalist Ethan Brown in one of the city’s weekly papers noted, “thanks to the profound misallocation of law enforcement resources in New Orleans, you’re more likely to end up in Orleans Parish Prison for a traffic offense than for armed robbery or murder.” Ultimately, this struggle over the size of the jail is also about the city’s incarceration priorities. If the city builds a larger jail, it will have to keep filling it with tens of thousands of people. If a smaller facility is built, it will change who is arrested in the city and how long they spend behind bars.
Because much of the jail was underwater during Katrina, many of the buildings have either been closed or need massive renovation. By one estimate, the new jail that the sheriff seeks would cost $250 million, much of that to come in reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The sheriff has yet to reveal how much of the construction costs would come from federal dollars, although the state affiliate of the ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information. Even if most of the construction were paid for by FEMA, as the Sheriff has indicated, the continued upkeep would fall to the city.
Sheriff Gusman did not respond to requests for comment, but he has said, at a meeting of the mayor’s task force on the jail, “I’ve always advocated for a smaller facility,” and spoke of being satisfied with 4,200 beds. The plans he has submitted to various planning bodies, however, indicate otherwise.
The Sheriff has issued several conflicting statements and reports about the size of the new jail, as well as where the funding will come from. A Justice Facilities Master Plan, prepared in collaboration with the Sheriff’s office, called for 8,000 beds, which would give the jail the capacity to imprison nearly one of every 40 people currently in the city. A planning document prepared by the Sheriff called for 5,800 beds. No plans or public documents issued by his office have called for building a jail smaller than the current facility.
Spotlight on Abuse
With seven reported jail deaths as of November 2010, OPP is under the spotlight for violent and abusive treatment of prisoners. A September 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found that “conditions at OPP violate the constitutional rights of inmates.” The DOJ went on to document “a pattern and practice of unnecessary and inappropriate use of force by OPP correctional officers,” including “several examples where OPP officers openly engaged in abusive and retaliatory conduct, which resulted in serious injuries to prisoners. In some instances, the investigation found, the officers’ conduct was so flagrant it clearly constituted calculated abuse.” [See: PLN, March 2010, p.30].
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people who had not been convicted of any crime were lost in the city’s prison system. [See: PLN, May 2007, p.18; April 2007, p.1]. In October 2010 a federal jury awarded two men from Ohio a $650,000 judgment for their treatment after the storm. The men, Robie J. Wagenfeald and Paul W. Kunkel, Jr., were on a road trip and stopped in New Orleans for a drink on Bourbon Street. They were arrested for public drunkenness and spent a month disappeared in the OPP system, without being allowed even one phone call to their families.
In a city under fiscal crisis, advocates have focused not only on the decades of evidence that mass incarceration has only made people in the city feel less safe, but also on the financial costs of building a massive jail. In addition to calling for reforms that would cause less people to be locked up, the reform coalition demands that “funds dedicated to building a bigger jail must be reallocated to building the infrastructure of a caring community, including recreational, educational, mental health, and affordable housing facilities.”
Andrea Slocum, an organizer with Critical Resistance, says that when she talks to city residents, the idea of redirecting money from the prison has wide support. “Parents are crying out, saying where’s the recreation for our children,” she says.
“It’s an exciting time for the city in a lot of ways,” says Michael Jacobson of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization that has been advising the city, including the Sheriff. Jacobson, who served as correction commissioner for New York City in the mid-90s, managed to reduce the population of New York City’s jail system even in the midst of the mass arrests of the Giuliani administration. He believes similar change is possible in New Orleans. “You can’t create or innovate unless you’re willing to step out and change what you’re doing,” he says. The Vera Institute has received funding from the U.S. Department of Justice for a pre-trial services program that has reduced incarceration in other cities, and they project New Orleans will also be able to see a reduction.
But the drive to build more jail cells is hard to stop, and many barriers remain. Sheriffs in Louisiana have no term limits, and there are few leverages on their influence. Sheriff Gusman was first elected in 2004 and has faced little opposition since then. The previous Criminal Sheriff held the position for 30 years, only leaving when he became state Attorney General.
As the debate continues, the Sheriff’s department has already begun construction on a temporary building to hold 400 additional beds. Gusman initially told reporters that he would close other facilities and the new construction would not result in increased capacity. However, in a letter to the State Bond Commission, he predicted increased revenue from holding additional prisoners in the new building.
Advocates believe that the tide is beginning to turn, but the new construction already underway indicates that there is still a lot of work to be done and not much time. “We really need to keep the pressure on and the momentum consistent,” says Rosana Cruz of V.O.T.E. “They’ll shake our hands and make these promises but meanwhile these deals are being made behind closed doors.”
Update – A Smaller Jail Prevails
In 2010, due to a number of criminal justice reforms, the population of the Orleans Parish Prison dropped to its lowest level – 1,744 prisoners. “As further reforms go online over the next year, we should see steeper reductions in demand for jail beds,” said Jon Wool, who directs the New Orleans office of the Vera Institute of Justice.
On February 3, 2011, the New Orleans City Council approved an ordinance to build a new 1,438-bed jail using funds from FEMA. The jail would be about one-third the size of the originally-proposed facility, and after it opens the city’s existing jails will be closed, including the 400-bed temporary building.
Sheriff Gusman, who did not attend the City Council meeting, criticized the ordinance, citing public safety concerns. He maintains that a larger jail is needed.
A group of 50 religious leaders in New Orleans praised the Council’s decision, saying building a larger jail would “threaten the city’s efforts to transform our criminal justice system into a more humane, effective and efficient system that is capable of ensuring equal justice for all.”
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. His new book is called FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. [See: PLN, Feb. 2011, p.44]. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about his work can be found at www.floodlines.org. This article is reprinted with permission.
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