Officials Announce Pact on Jail in Louisiana

December 11, 2012

Officials Announce Pact on Jail in Louisiana

ByCAMPBELL ROBERTSON

The Orleans Parish sheriff,United States Justice Departmentofficials and lawyers from the Southern Poverty Law Center announced Tuesday that a wide-ranging agreement had been reached to overhaul the troubled Orleans Parish Prison, long criticized as a place of violence, sexual assault and abuse.

But one of the most contentious topics in the dispute over the jail — financing — was left unresolved by the consent decree, assuring that the legal fight is not over.

Orleans Parish shares the same area with New Orleans.

The 53-page agreement, subject to approval by a federal judge, outlines measures to address violence prevention, mental health care, medical care and the treatment of young inmates at the jail, among other issues. It also calls for the appointment of a monitor to oversee the carrying out of the changes.

In a statement, Roy L. Austin Jr., a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, called it “another step in our ongoing efforts in the City of New Orleans to promote public safety through a contemporary criminal justice system that meets constitutional standards.” The agreement comes less than five months after a similar one for the city’s Police Department.

Justice Department officials assailed the conditions at the jail in aletterin 2009, and followed up this April with an even more scathingreport. The 2012 report described poor staffing and accountability measures, “shockingly high rates” of violence, “grossly inadequate” suicide prevention measures, “unreasonable barriers” to medical care and little to no help for prisoners who did not speak English.

By that time, the United States Marshals Service had already pulled all federal prisoners out of the jail.

Also in April, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class-action suit against the sheriff and other prison officials, citing the “abusive and unconstitutional conditions” in which inmates were kept. The Department of Justice intervened in that suit in September with the approval of Sheriff Marlin N. Gusman of Orleans Parish, who wanted all of the issues addressed together.

On Tuesday, Sheriff Gusman emphasized that the jail had already taken steps toward change, including the establishment of programs that allow nonviolent offenders to stay out of jail while awaiting trial. But the sheriff, along with others involved in the consent decree, said that some of the jail’s most critical shortcomings, including its inadequate staffing levels, could not be fixed without more money.

“Reaching our goals requires proper funding, not turning our heads and hoping the problem will go away,” the sheriff said in prepared remarks, adding that deputies in his office were “the lowest-paid law enforcement officials in our region.”

While the decree was still being negotiated, the sheriff argued before the city, which pays for most of the jail, that he needed a $17 million increase in his office’s budget allocation to begin instituting the changes. City officials, who have commissioned a separate staffing analysis and an audit of jail finances, balked at the request.

“We are not prepared to write a blank check,” a spokesman for Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a statement. “The additional funding being sought by the sheriff would have a crippling effect on the city’s operations, including services like police, fire and recreation.”

A federal trial over financing is scheduled to begin in April.

“The situation in there is really, really dangerous and has reached a crisis level,” said Katie Schwartzmann, the lead lawyer on the case for the Southern Poverty Law Center. She said her group’s request to the city “is for them to go ahead and allocate emergency funds even if it’s on an interim basis.”