Gusman fends off critics, making progress on consent decree

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

More than a year after a federal judge approved a sweeping consent decree to improve conditions at Orleans Parish Prison, efforts to reform the troubled facility remain mired in a political back-and-forth over who should foot the bill for the prison’s overhaul and whether a lack of funding from City Hall or mismanagement by the sheriff’s office is responsible for the current state of affairs. Meanwhile, violence continues to make headlines at the prison, something critics of Sheriff Marlin Gusman contend underscores the need to implement rapid reforms at the prison long before a new jail is opened.

“We know that very little has changed at the prison since the approval of the consent decree,” said Norris Henderson, a member of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, following a June 25 meeting with federal monitor Susan McCampbell, who urged better cooperation between arms of the city’s criminal justice system. “It appears the more things change, the more they stay the same,” said Henderson, who also heads an advocacy group for formerly incarcerated residents, known as Voice of the Ex-Offender. Henderson and others are highly critical of Gusman’s handling of reforms at the prison and described being “appalled at the pace” of change that would make the prison a safer environment for inmates.

“We wanted a new sheriff,” Henderson said. “Because we know that a new building is not going to fix all of the problems at the prison when there are management issues that are affecting the pace of change.” A debate over Gusman’s stewardship of the jail took center stage during his 2014 bid for reelection, with Gusman ultimately fending off two candidates billed as reformers to win a third full term. Fiscal and personnel management of OPP have also been aspects of the sheriff’s public squabbles with Mayor Mitch Landrieu as Gusman fights for more dollars for the jail and City Hall calls for more transparency.

Gusman, however, staunchly defended his record in an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, charging that his critics often engage in a “circular argument” about conditions at the jail while ignoring the facts. “Do we have violence? Yes, we have violence and that’s because we house the most violent people around,” Gusman said, pushing back on criticism that the jail is rife with violent attacks on inmates. “We also house the sickest of the sick and when they get here they want to receive the best possible medical care. We try to afford that to them and take them to care facilities out of an abundance of caution.”

But in an open letter to Councilmember Susan Guidry, who chairs the City Council’s committee on criminal justice, members of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition blast the jail’s track record for hospital visits. The letter, sent to Guidry in March and published on the group’s website, states that “up to 73 inmates a month were routed to the emergency room due to conditions at the jail, including for lacerations/punctures, fractures/disclosures, trauma, mental health crises, broken bones and sexual assault.” The group says the medical figures hail from data compiled between January and October of last year, numbers that far outpace the seven inmates sent to emergency care in a single year at a similar jail in Memphis.

“I haven’t seen this comparison, so I can’t comment on it directly,” Gusman said, referring to the letter. “But I suspect that the figures being cited are probably misplaced. We take inmates to the hospital for a number of reasons, including one inmate who has been recently hospitalized for sickle-cell [anemia]. People who choose to include every single hospitalization in a particular set of numbers are distorting the picture. The same is true for violence at the prison; there has only been one death since I have been here related to violence at the jail. Others have died for different medical reasons, including heart attacks.”

But while conditions at the prison continue to be a source of controversy, a matter many hope will be addressed by the construction of a new jail that is slated to open in late December, others are pushing the sheriff to make structural changes to staffing levels and the number of inmates housed in the prison. “I don’t want to point fingers, but there’s not enough being done to address the current situation at the prison like the creation of an investigative team to probe complaints about violence and conditions,” according to Dana Kaplan, head of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which has sued the city over corrections policies at the juvenile detention center and remains a part of current reform efforts.

“There’s a shortage of police officers in New Orleans, right?” Gusman asked. “Well, there’s also a shortage of officers nationwide and there’s a lot of competition for officers all over the country. We’re not facing anything here in Orleans Parish that others aren’t facing elsewhere. We are doing everything we can to increase staffing levels at the prison and to retain the quality officers that we have and that’s why I increased wages from about $6.50 an hour to $12.10 an hour. But that part of our effort is not what’s being told.”

Gusman also said inmate levels at the prison will decrease once prisoners from Plaquemines Parish can be returned to a new jail being built by the federal government in the wake of damage to the old facility during Hurricane Katrina. “We’re not truly housing prisoners from Plaquemines Parish,” Gusman said. “They’re here under an agreement with the federal government, at a facility that was built for them, and are being supervised by deputies from Plaquemines Parish. We’re compensated for their presence here.” He also beat back criticism on what has been reported as the sheriff’s penchant for housing state inmates, stressing that state prisoners only enter the jail en route to other state-owned facilities.

But, ultimately, prison reform will take more than simply changing conditions at Orleans Parish Prison, Gusman said. “I am not the party responsible for the number of arrests in our city; I am not the party responsible for the rate of prosecutions; and I am not responsible for drafting criminal legislation,” he argued. “But for the things that I am responsible, I want the friends and families of inmates at the prison to know that safety and care is our number one priority and that we take that responsibility very seriously.”

This article originally published in the June 30, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.