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The original was posted on /r/keep_track by /u/rusticgorilla on 2024-03-28 11:41:43.
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Louisiana imprisons so many people that a 2012 Times-Picayune investigation dubbed the state the “world’s prison capital” for its high incarceration rate — “nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.” In recent years, Louisiana’s rate has fallen below Mississippi’s, largely driven by former Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ criminal justice reforms. With Bel Edwards now out of office, replaced by Gov. Jeff Landry ®, Louisiana Republicans immediately used their new trifecta to roll back the reforms and introduce harsher policies than the state has seen in decades.
A quick history lesson
Louisiana’s prison system, like that of many southern states, traces its modern origins to the abolition of slavery. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, banned slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” opening the door for states to use the criminal justice system as a legal way to oppress African Americans and extract value from forced labor.
An array of laws designed to criminalize Black people, called Black Codes, were enacted throughout the South in the wake of emancipation. A central element of these laws charged unemployed or unhoused Black people with “vagrancy,” a crime punishable by a term of labor if a fine was not paid. Thomas W. Conway, the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner for Louisiana, described how this system, known as convict leasing, was abused in Louisiana:
“In the city of New Orleans last summer, under the orders of the acting mayor of the city, Hugh Kennedy, the police of that city conducted themselves towards the freedmen, in respect to violence and ill usage, in every way equal to the old days of slavery; arresting them on the streets as vagrants, without any form of law whatever, and simply because they did not have in their pockets certificates of employment from their former owners or other white citizens.
”I have gone to the jails and released large numbers of them, men who were industrious and who had regular employment; yet because they had not the certificates of white men in their pockets they were locked up in jail to be sent out to plantations…”
One of these plantations later became a prison under state control: the infamous “Angola” Louisiana State Penitentiary. To this day, prisoners at Angola are forced to perform grueling agricultural labor, supervised by armed guards on horseback.
The old system of convict leasing also continues in a new form. After a 1975 lawsuit challenging the brutal and dangerous conditions at Angola, a federal judge limited the population at the prison. So Louisiana, instead of building more prisons or reducing incarceration, began offering local parishes a per diem for each prisoner they board. Incentivized by $177 million a year in per diem payments from the state, sheriffs expanded local jails to hold more state prisoners. Because these are pre-trial facilities, there is no legal requirement to allow outside visits or develop enrichment programming, even though many state prisoners will spend years of their sentence inside.
Now, combine the above factors—forced prison labor that financially benefits the powerful and a per diem incentivizing jailing people—with the incorrect perception that crime is on the rise. The result is a raft of bills recently passed in Louisiana that will increase incarceration rates and keep people in jail, providing dirt-cheap labor and facilitating a cash influx for longer sentences.
The bills
Mass incarceration
Four bills signed into law by Gov. Landry work together to increase the length of sentences, requiring jails and prisons to house more inmates for much longer.
House Bill 9: Eliminates the opportunity for parole for anyone who commits a crime after August 1, 2024. Contains an exception for those given life sentences as juveniles.
House Bill 10: Reduces the amount of time that can be taken off of someone’s sentence due to good behavior and requires incarcerated people to serve 85% of their sentence. The previous law, enacted as part of the state’s 2017 reforms, required nonviolent offenders to serve 35% of their sentences before being eligible for “good time” release. Before that, the minimum was 40%.
House Bill 11: Increases the amount of time a person on probation can be sent back to jail for a technical violation (e.g. missing an appointment with their probation officer) and allows judges to imprison people on parole or probation for merely being arrested, not convicted. The bill also extends the length of probation required for those released from incarceration from three years to five years and allows probation to be extended due to the inability to pay fines or fees.
Senate Bill 5: Makes it more difficult to obtain parole by requiring a unanimous vote (instead of a majority vote) by the parole board and limiting terms of eligibility.
According to the Crime and Justice Institute, the costs of House Bill 10 alone will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars per inmate:
According to CJI’s research, persons released from Louisiana prisons in 2022 served an average of 41% of their sentence. If they would have served 100%, it would have resulted in an additional 6,347 days in prison. More than half of that amount would be served in local jails, where 53% of individuals serve their time. That would result in another $151,000 in cost per inmate for sheriffs, even after factoring in state reimbursements.
If the 2022 releases would have served 85% of their sentences, they would have spent an additional 2,497 days incarcerated at a reimbursement-adjusted cost of $121,000 per person for local jails.
Due to the increased cost, sheriffs are likely to begin “lobbying the state legislature for higher per diem rates,” Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, told Bolts Magazine.
“We’re going to see sheriffs organizing and pushing to expand their jails for this moment,” she said. “We are going to see sheriffs mobilizing and organizing to get either property taxes or millages or sales taxes to get more jail space to incarcerate the state prisoners. I also think we’re likely going to see them lobbying the state legislature for higher per diem rates.”
Juveniles
A trio of other bills will change how prosecutors charge juvenile offenders—incarcerating more young people—and release information on juvenile records that was previously kept private.
Senate Bill 3: Charges all 17-year-olds who commit a crime as adults, placing them in adult prisons and jails.
Louisiana already has a mechanism to transfer juveniles accused of serious crimes into the adult justice system. SB 3 would result in courts sentencing 17-year-olds who commit petty crimes more harshly and funneling them into the adult system, with fewer rehabilitation options and [poorer outcomes](https://ojjdp.oj…
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