Today, Louisiana takes a sharp turn in the wrong direction, to the tune of at least $1 billion wasted on prisons and punishment.
That’s because today, August 1, our state’s most dangerous new laws go into effect. Louisiana is expanding execution methods, making it a crime to get too close to a police officer, and ending parole for everyone convicted of a crime committed today and any day from now on.
On top of that, the governor made a lot of line-item vetoes to the state budget that ripped away many positive supports: removing money for housing for formerly incarcerated people; money for children and teachers; and money that should have been put toward infrastructure, education, health, recreation, food programs, and career and job development for youth. These are stabilizing forces proven to prevent crime, keep us safe, and help our communities thrive.
This day weighs heavy on my heart, as a mother, as someone raised in New Orleans just like my child, and as someone who cares deeply about safety.
I think all of us care about safety. We want our neighborhoods to be safe. We deserve to feel safe.
But I am also a researcher who has studied crime and what truly affects it, and I can tell you with confidence that these new approaches – very harshly punishing people who commit crime while defunding social services – will not contribute to safety at all. Not in our communities, and not for those who work or live in our prisons and jails. We know this because of decades of data, studies, and experience.
Instead, what we have here is the governor and a supermajority of the Louisiana legislature deciding to exploit the uptick in violence that arose out of the destabilization of the pandemic. Crime has now plummeted. It had begun a steep descent even before Gov. Jeff Landry took office and the special session on crime began. In New Orleans, that was even more true than in other places across the country.
Still, our state’s officials decided to exploit the pandemic-related increase in violence to pass policies that they describe as “tough on crime.”
We would describe these policies as tough on people and soft on crime. They do nothing to deter crime or prevent violence. And polling shows that most Louisiana voters – even those who may have voted for Gov. Landry and a lot of the people who are in the legislature – also agree that longer sentences do not keep us safe at all.
Counting the ways we have been harmed
Louisiana has been the top incarcerator in the country for a long time, but that hasn’t made us any safer. We have enacted laws and shifted policies that changed our prison population many, many times – and no matter what changes we made, it had no effect on crime. Sometimes crime went up and sometimes crime went down.
So we really have to look at other factors.
During this legislative session, the governor and his allies said that crime had risen because of the Justice Reinvestment reforms of 2017. But the reason crime went up – and it’s going down very quickly now – was because of the destabilization and economic d\ownturn of the pandemic. Similar increases were seen all across the nation at the same time.
There were also claims during the session that criminals had more rights than crime victims because of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. Actually, because of the reforms of 2017, Louisiana was transferring nearly $20 million of savings each year from the prison system into crime-victim services. About $6 million was paying for new programs for victims of domestic violence and roughly $6 million was going into the crime-victims reparations fund.
Now, that money will vanish.
Instead, we have these new, draconian laws – and we must fight to even be able to measure their effects.
One of the things that the Vera Institute of Justice is working toward is having data that helps track our policies and the impact on other systems, but also on the safety of our communities.
Since 2021, Vera has run a data hub analyzing the costs of our prisons and jails, using data from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC). That data gets sent to Louisiana’s treasurer, but it’s largely hidden from the public. This year, at Vera’s urging, legislators passed a resolution urging the DOC to publish this data and analysis to its website. We are now pushing the DOC to implement the resolution.
The kind of information in our data hub is really vital to understanding how these recent changes to the criminal justice system will actually impact resources for public safety – and whether the results of all of these bills is actually increased public safety. It’s important for taxpayers, of course, to know how our tax dollars are being spent and where and why.
According to some estimates, because of the new legislation that takes effect today, the prison population will double in six years.
In 2016, we were desperate. Two decades of rapid expansion of our jail and prison infrastructure and punitive policy had given us the highest imprisonment rate of any state in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world – but we certainly were not the safest. We realized we needed to reduce the size of our jail and prison population, that we were locking up too many people for technical parole and probation violations and low-level offenses, and that we were wasting money without any benefit to the people of Louisiana.
Conservative smart-on-crime experts forged policy alongside more progressive justice advocates and created the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. Other states successfully modeled reforms on the Louisiana model.
But now we’re going back to where we were in 2016, if not worse. We’ll see our budget decimated again by how much we’re spending on incarceration. We’re going to see our communities suffering the effects of the defunding of social services, food programs, and health departments.
If people want to see what this looks like, look to Florida. Florida did away with parole and ramped up stricter sentences. Some of its prosecutors are trying to prosecute everything in sight.
As a result, Florida is dealing with overcrowded, crumbling jails and prisons. A recent audit found that the Florida Department of Corrections had already built up approximately $2.2 billion in “immediate needs.” The state senate recently budgeted $3 billion toward prison repair and new construction.
That’s categorically not the way you create safety. We proved that ourselves, in Louisiana, too.
Two bills, $1 billion, and how many lives wasted
If a person commits a crime today, on August 1, and they’re convicted of that crime, they are not eligible for parole. They will be sent to prison and will have to serve whatever sentence they’re given. The opportunities to earn time off their sentence through committing to programming and good behavior, called “good time,” have been severely reduced.
Good-time incentives were implemented by prison personnel because it gave incarcerated people an incentive to strive during their sentences. Without good time, work will also be tougher for prison personnel.
Beyond the harm to thousands of lives, there are monumental monetary costs.
Essentially, those two bills together will cost the state at least a billion additional dollars over the course of time these people are incarcerated, because they won’t benefit from good-time credit or opportunities to gain parole.
That’s $1 billion putting more people behind bars for longer and that could have instead been used for the supportive, positive programs that actually prevent violence and crime in the first place. Instead, we are going to be spending all our money on making sure that people stay in jail and prison for as long as possible.
Sadly, if we look back seven or eight years ago, we know better. We’ve seen the closely tracked safety improvements – and savings – of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative.
We should have learned our lessons on this before. But now we’re giving second chances to bad policy – when we should be giving second chances to our neighbors.
Sarah Omojola is the director of Vera Louisiana.
