Louisiana still incarcerates more people per capita than
most countries..
but, hey we're getting better.
Louisiana remains the country’s prison capital by a long shot, but a federal report released Tuesday shows the number of people imprisoned in the state has dipped slightly.
The report, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, indicates
Louisiana’s prison population fell by 2.2 percent to below 40,000 last
year after eclipsing the threshold for the first time in 2012.
Jimmy LeBlanc, head of the state’s Department of Corrections and
Public Safety, expressed cautious optimism about the trend in an
interview this spring.
“We’ve never been on a trend like we’re on now for so many months,
where it continues to drop,” LeBlanc said at the time. “So some good
things are starting.”
In a statement on Tuesday, LeBlanc partly attributed the
incarceration decline to work being done by the state to improve
re-entry programs that help integrate recently released prisoners back
into society. In addition, expanded pre-release education is being
provided to inmates preparing for freedom. Also, an effort has been made
to enhance services available to offenders who are out on supervised
release, Leblanc said in the statement.
Hell we're even "bucking the trend."
The change in Louisiana contrasted the national trend, in which the
country’s population of incarcerated people increased slightly
But let's not kid ourselves. As long as
the incentives to house more inmates exist, we're going to keep putting people in jail.
Today, wardens make daily rounds of calls to other sheriffs' prisons in
search of convicts to fill their beds. Urban areas such as New Orleans
and Baton Rouge have an excess of sentenced criminals, while prisons in
remote parishes must import inmates to survive.
The more empty beds, the more an operation sinks into the red. With
maximum occupancy and a thrifty touch with expenses, a sheriff can
divert the profits to his law enforcement arm, outfitting his deputies
with new squad cars, guns and laptops. Inmates spend months or years in
80-man dormitories with nothing to do and few educational opportunities
before being released into society with $10 and a bus ticket.
Fred Schoonover, deputy warden of the 522-bed Tensas Parish Detention
Center in northeast Louisiana, says he does not view inmates as a
"commodity." But he acknowledges that the prison's business model is
built on head counts. Like other wardens in this part of the state, he
wheels and deals to maintain his tally of human beings. His boss, Tensas
Parish Sheriff Rickey Jones, relies on him to keep the numbers up.
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