It's no utopia

The federal monitors say Gusman's jail is still not ready to come out of.. uh.. detention.  A few months ago, Gusamn complained that he was being held to an unreasonable "jail utopia" standard. But this seems like the bar he's failing to clear is a good deal lower than that.

Reviews of deaths and near-death attempts like suicide attempts “remain perfunctory and they lack self-critical analysis,” according to the report.

Meanwhile, despite reams of policies and years of concern around suicide attempts, precautions remain lacking. Although the monitors conducted their tour of the jail in late May virtually due to the coronavirus outbreak, they still saw obvious shortfalls.

On one virtual round of the jail’s mental health unit, the monitors spotted an inmate making a rope out of a blanket, and a nursing assistant was chatting with a deputy instead of monitoring inmates on suicide watch.

Maybe next time if they find inmates trying to tunnel out with spoons rather than fashion ropes out of blankets, that will be a sign that morale is up at least. 

Ideally, we wouldn't put anybody in jail at all.  But our political leadership has demonstrated at several points that even during a pandemic, their first priority is "law and order" and punishing people, in general.

This doesn't say anything about the jail budget.  The city has indicated that it believes the jail may be ready to come out from under the consent decree.  And the mayor has even more emphatically called for an end to federal monitoring of NOPD. But in both cases the city's position seems primarily motivated by cost.

Others have argued that it would save a lot of money to de-fund the police and get rid of the jail altogether. But, again, no one in leadership here takes any of that seriously.