Committee agrees to OPP bed count
9th December 2013 · 0 Comments
By Tom Gogola
Contributing Writer
The Criminal Justice Committee of the New Orleans City Council voted Tuesday on a motion to increase the future bed count at the Orleans Parish Prison beyond a council-approved 1,438 beds.
In voting to push the motion to the full council for its eventual consideration, city officials moved one step closer to the realization of a “Phase III” jail facility that would be built between the state-of-the-art Phase I and Phase II buildings now under construction at the sprawling Orleans Parish penal colony along Interstate 10.
Indeed, aerial walkways have already been built between the new jail and the new kitchen-and-warehouse facility. They end in mid-air, looking for a building to hook up with.
Tuesday’s motion would authorize the City Planning Commission to hold a public hearing about using the decidedly not state-of-the-art Templeman V facility as a temporary measure “for the purpose of holding special populations of inmates, including medical and mental health,” according to the motion.
Two FEMA-funded temporary facilities, built in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, would also remain open for up to 18 months after the new jail opened – and the total additional bed count would be capped at 500.
A 2010 ordinance capped the bed size at the new jail under construction at 1,438. But in recent days, committee chair Susan Guidry said there had been “a conclusion drawn in most quarters that 1,438 [beds] cannot adequately hold all classes of inmates.”
The Mitch Landrieu administration spoke up in favor of the Templeman V rehabilitation, which would otherwise have closed once the new jail comes on-line in 2014.
Left for another day were questions about the wisdom of imprisoning mentally ill prisoners in a facility that the federal government yanked its immigration detainees from, in April 2012, citing the flagrant unconstitutionality of the facility.
The possible cost of the rehabilitation provided an ironic backdrop to the committee meeting, given that the Phase III building would likely be paid for with federal money – and that the city had just spent the better part of a year blasting Sheriff Marlin Gusman for his mismanagement of the funds it sends his way.
Now the city was agreeing to open the door to spending an unspecified figure to rehabilitate a building while it tries to figure out the dicey politics of the Phase III facility.
The politics will likely be less of an issue after citywide elections in February.
Activists had blasted the city for its behind-the-scenes discussions with Gusman about the Phase III building over a year ago, and took to the council floor again Tuesday to again oppose expanding the plan jail.
“Larger jails tend to be filled,” said Audrey Stewart, representing the local wing of the American Civil Liberties Unit. “Our concern is, as we get further from the 1,438 cap, we are going in direction of larger cap. Keep moving in direction of lower incarceration rates,” Stewart said.
Jail architect Gerald Hebert was also on hand for the meeting and said that Templeman V had “major issues” associated with it – mechanical and electrical issues arising from its having been flooded during Hurricane Katrina.
“We want to be real careful that that building goes away,” Hebert said, adding that a better, and possibly cheaper, temporary fix would be to give Gusman flexibility to use other buildings for the special needs populations. The council didn’t go for that plan, and instead passed the motion to limit Gusman to using Templeman V.
Hebert cautioned about the wisdom of having to “pump money into the building … if we are forced to do some stuff in Templeman V that we might not have to do if you let us manage with the other buildings. Any time you go into an existing building, you never know what you are going to find. The fear is if you dig into that much – it’s a cost issue.”
The Phase III building would have included space for a medical wing, beds for mentally ill inmates, and other special needs populations (including Orleans Parish residents doing work release programs to finish out their state time). Gusman and Hebert have both said that FEMA would likely pay for the Phase III construction.
Documents going back over a year clearly show that Gusman and a top city official were in behind-the-scene discussions about a new Phase III facility around the same time the immigration detainees were removed from Templeman V. Gusman sent Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin architectural design specs and two sets of proposed bed counts for the Phase III building, in spring 2012.
A May 25 letter from Gusman to Kopplin noted that “as we discussed,” the additional bed count at Phase III would be about 650, including 106 for medical and 164 for mental health prisoners. “To get it to 600,” Gusman said, “we may want to focus more on medical and mental health reductions.”
The new, 1,438 bed jail authorized by the council was built without an infirmary or any special housing units for mentally ill inmates, a fact that city officials seemed to only recently catch on to, despite the behind-the-scenes discussions about medical and mental health beds dating back over a year.
City Attorney Sharonda Williams told the committee that when the original ordinance had been approved, that she didn’t “recall that we had an expectation of what would be happening with the acutely mentally ill.”
The controversial discovery of the “Phase III” plans were soon overshadowed by a bitter fight over unconstitutional and inhumane conditions at the jail and who was responsible for paying to fix them.
As the elected parish sheriff, Gusman runs the jail, but the city funds him under the so called “per diem” budgeting scheme that sends $22.39 per local prisoner, per day to Gusman to run the jail.
A class-action lawsuit on behalf of OPP inmates was filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2011, and the U.S. Justice Department jumped aboard last year in order to leverage a federal consent decree at the jail. Gusman agreed to enter the consent judgment, and the city is now paying millions to implement it.
The OPP consent-decree hearings were infamous for the revelations about outrageous abuses going on in the now-closed House of Detention, and included a video that featured prisoners showing off a loaded pistol, drinking beer from a cooler, shooting heroin, and displaying large quantities of cash. The city owns that building and several others in the penal colony.
Sheriff Gusman told the council that his daily snapshot of the jail on Tuesday determined there were 1,725 persons locked up in its various facilities who were the legal responsibility of the city.
The actual number is higher.
Some prisoners are pretrial detainees unable to make bail; others are awaiting sentencing; others have been remanded there by judges out of a concern for public safety; still others are serving “parish time” for crimes committed under local laws. And there are other classes as well, including parole and probation violators who are housed in the parish but whose stay is billed to the state.
Tuesday’s meeting found newly elevated City Planning Commission Executive Director Robert Rivers describing the proposed special-populations amendment as an “interim step.”
He described the Templeman V plan as a temporary arrangement, “while a study is done to see what the next phase is going to look like.”
This article originally published in the December 9, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
