Sheriff Gusman closes House of Detention

16th April 2012   ·   0 Comments

By Zoe Sullivan
Contributing Writer

Embattled over the conditions in Orleans Parish Prison, Sheriff Marlin Gusman announced last week that he was closing the House of Detention (HOD), one of seven jail facilities in the Parish. According to the She­riff’s Office, 628 people were moved out of HOD over the course of the week so that the facility could be closed. To provide room for these inmates 400 state prisoners were transferred to other locations outside of Orleans Parish. During the press conference where he announced the closure, Gusman emphasized that an additional 100 inmates might also be moved.

The Sheriff’s announcement came on the heels of a report issued on April 9 by the Department of Justice’s Review Panel on Prison Rape decrying the conditions in Orleans Parish Prison (OPP). The report stated that the Panel was “deeply disturbed by the apparent culture of violence at the OPP.” Addi­tionally, it went on, “in­mates approached the Panel privately,” during its tour of the jail, “stating that their grievances went unanswered.” Just a few days prior to this report’s release, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the Sheriff and Orleans Parish Prison for inhumane conditions at the jail, and late last month, the U.S. Marshall’s Office removed all the prisoners it had at OPP, again due to the conditions at the jail.

Testimony given to the Panel at a September 2011 hearing included accounts of anal rape, failure to investigate rapes and assaults, and a disregard for the vulnerabilities of lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender and questioning (LBGTQ) inmates to sexual and physical assault.

Asked about this report during the press conference, Sheriff Gusman said “a lot of those allegations were false, and we proved them false during the hearing.” Additionally, when asked whether the closing of the jail had to do with an inspection earlier this month by federal officials, Gusman replied: “The mounting criticisms, the inspections by the federal people, they all play a factor.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Managing Attorney, Katie Schwartzmann, told The Louisiana Weekly that her organization’s investigation of conditions contradicted the Sheriff’s protestation about false allegations. “Prisoners have filed thousands of grievances about the conditions in that facility,” Schwartzmann said, pointing out that approximately 200 inmates have filed lawsuits against the sheriff on their own, without the aid of an attorney.

Schwartzmann said she welcomed the news of the closure, but that “closing the House of Detention is not going to fix the problems that have long plagued that facility.” The Department of Justice issued a scathing report on conditions at OPP in 2009, calling them unconstitutional, but Schwartzmanntold The Loui­siana Weekly that “if anything, they’ve gotten worse.”

“Fundamental policy changes are needed to transform the way the parish’s jail is operated,” she explained, stating that this “transcends the House of Detention.” Schwartzmann said that one factor needed to change the situation is a jail that is appropriately sized for New Orleans. According to her, an assessment performed James Austin for the City found this to be a facility with 1,438 beds.

One of the groups that will be adversely affected by the closing of HOD are those charged with assisting the inmates in court, the Orleans Public Defenders (OPD). The defense attorneys filed a lawsuit against the Sheriff in late March due to lack of access to their clients. Affidavits attached to the lawsuit describe multiple visits to the jail on a given day and hours of waiting in order to meet with an inmate facing trial. The accounts also detail conditions such as having to shout through a plexiglass window in order to communicate, a situation that eliminates any privacy the attorney-client conversation might have.

Acknowledging that closing HOD is necessary for the long-term improvement of the parish’s jail system, OPD attorney Jee Park told The Louisiana Weekly in an email that shifting inmates to jail facilities in other parishes “will immediately present problems for OPD’s attorneys and our clients, most of whom are incarcerated pretrial because they can’t afford to pay their money bonds…Having roughly 100 pretrial detainees spread across various parish jails is going to slow down the process and hurt those clients’ rights to access their attorneys.”

Park’s point about bond raises one of the larger issues that closing HOD does not address: The disparity in length of stay in the jail. According to a report prepared for the City of New Orleans in 2011 on the appropriate size for the city’s new jail, between 2010 and 2011 Blacks arrested for murder stayed in the jail for 378.4 days compared to 209.7 for whites arrested for the same crime. Blacks arrested on a weapons charge sat for 39.0 days as opposed to 6.9 days for whites.

Perversely, however, while an extended jail stay may cost taxpayers more, it also brings in more revenue for the sheriff since the jail is currently paid for under a “per diem” rate. Ac­cording to Pam Laborde of the State’s Department of Correc­tions, state inmates bring in $26.39 per day for food, housing, and medical expenses. Moving 400, and possibly more, state inmates out of the Orleans Parish system, thus raises questions about what will happen to the sheriff’s budget and whether his office will have to downsize.

Through a spokesperson, the Sheriff’s Office told The Louisiana Weekly that: “[w]e expect that some staffing adjustments will need to occur at some point. We also believe that the closing of the House of Detention will have an effect on the Sheriff’s Office resources. How­ever, it is too early to determine what the exact impact will be.”

Testifying before the Panel last September, attorney Elizabeth Cumming stated that “[t]his per diem funding structure allows the sheriff’s office to create a budgetary black hole, receiving money from the city with functionally no oversight or line item accounting required and incentivizes the sheriff to keep OPPs population high, even while the office is in a state of financial crisis.”

This article was originally published in the April 16, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper