Louisiana still leads nation for state prisoners held in local jails

NEW ORLEANS — More than half of Louisiana prisoners in state custody are serving their time in local jails rather than state facilities, recently released federal data show.

As of 2022, more than 14,000, or 53% of prisoners under the jurisdiction of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, were in local jails — the highest rate in the country, according to a report released late last year by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The only states that came close to Louisiana, according to the data, were Kentucky, where 47.3% of state prisoners were held in local jails, and Mississippi, at 33%. In the vast majority of other states, less than 10% of prisoners are serving sentences in local jails.

Louisiana has for decades relied on parish sheriffs to supplement state prisons with local jail capacity in order to avoid overcrowding at state prisons. Sheriffs have a financial incentive to agree. The state pays them a per-diem, which generates millions of dollars per year in revenue for some local agencies. Smaller parishes have built out their jails far beyond their local detention needs and, in some cases, handed operations over to private prison companies.

Some criminal justice experts say that while it might be a good deal for the state and local sheriffs’ offices, it can come at the expense of the prisoners serving out felony sentences at facilities primarily intended to house pretrial and misdemeanor detainees.

Loyola University law professor Andrea Armstrong is the co-author of a 2022 report on the state’s criminal justice system, focusing in part on the state’s reliance on local sheriffs. Prisoners in jails often have less access to education and treatment for chronic health conditions than their counterparts in state prisons, she said.

“I’m troubled by the significant number of people that we have housed in jails,” Armstrong said in an interview.

A Department of Public Safety and Corrections representative did not respond to interview requests from Verite News.

How we got here

Prior to the 1990s, Louisiana jails held a much lower percentage of the state’s prisoners. The rate of people under state jurisdiction serving their sentences in local facilities also grew from 24%, or about 4,100 prisoners, in 1989 to 44%, or just under 15,000, by the end of 1999. By that time the total number of incarcerated people under DOC jurisdiction had nearly doubled, from 17,268 to 34,012, from a decade before. By the end of 2012, the state had more that 40,000 people in its custody, and about half of them were in local facilities. That rate has held since.

The growth in the use of local jails happened as Louisiana was under a federal court order to reduce overcrowding in its prisons, as The Times-Picayune reported in its 2012 series “Louisiana Incarcerated.”

Instead of building more prisons or reducing incarceration, the state encouraged local sheriffs to build larger facilities. The local parishes are offered a per diem – currently $26.39 – for each prisoner they board, a fraction of the nearly $70-a-day it costs to house people in state prisons.

Meanwhile, local jail capacity has skyrocketed. The number of parishes with more than 1,000 jail beds has nearly tripled since 1999, from 5 to 13, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

Madison Parish has the largest number of people serving state time in local jails at about 1,200, according to Armstrong’s report. All of them were held in privately operated facilities. Operations for the Madison Parish Correctional Center, which has 898 beds, was contracted out to LaSalle Corrections in 2014 and later to a Tallulah company called Security Management, LLC.

A representative at the Madison Parish Correctional Center declined to comment.

Some state prisoners housed locally are in transition or reentry programs, such as work release, rather than serving their sentences full-time at local jails. According to DOC population data from last year, about 12% of state prisoners housed in local jails were enrolled in a work-release program.

Orleans Parish’s state prisoner population — which was more than 1,000 per day in the early 2010s, has since stopped housing DOC prisoners on a permanent basis. As of September, the city’s jail held fewer than 100, most on a temporary basis, including prisoners on work-release programs, awaiting transfer to another facility and being held locally for pending court hearings, according to a 2023 report in The Times-Picayune.

Armstrong said when people serve their sentences in jails – which are designed for short-term pre-trial stays of six months or less – they are often cut off from educational and vocational programs that can help them earn parole.

Armstrong’s report noted that the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where 84% of the state’s prisoners serving life without parole sentences are housed, is the “highest-resourced facility in the state with respect to vocational and educational training.”

Participation in these programs can be significant for people seeking release through the Parole Board. People serving their sentence in jails, accordingly, may have fewer opportunities to participate.

There’s also evidence that serving time in jail can increase a person’s chance of being locked up again, according to the report. Nearly half of the people released from Louisiana prisons and jails return within five years, with return rates being higher for people released from the jails, according to the report.

Between 2014 and 2019, approximately 39% of people released from state prisons were re-incarcerated within five years. During that same period, more than 44% of people who served time in local facilities were incarcerated again within five years.

Armstrong said jails are set up for short-term stays and are more likely to prioritize emergency health care over long-term treatment, whereas people with chronic illnesses are more likely to be placed in prisons where they might receive speciality care. Prisoners in local jails may also face copays for medical services depending on what facility they are in.

“If a person is serving their sentence in a jail, what that means is the health care they receive is likely less robust because the staff there is managing their symptoms and not looking to their overall health or even necessarily providing any preventative care,” she said.

This article first appeared on Verite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.