OPP adopts pre-trial program to screen for risk
14th May 2012 · 0 Comments
By Zoe Sullivan
Contributing Writer
Nathaniel Meredith is a tall, skinny young man of 24. On a sunny Friday morning in May, Meredith was waiting for his brother to be released from Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) who had been arrested on a drug charge, his first offense, in October. “I hear the longer you sit in here, they get paid off you,” Meredith told The Louisiana Weekly. According to Meredith, the charge against his brother was dropped, although he languished in the jail for seven months.
Stories such as this have been common in OPP. For many detainees, the issue has been an inability to post bond, one factor that plays into the stark disparity between the average length of stay in OPP for Blacks and whites charged with the same crime. This disparity was highlighted in a 2010 report prepared by James Austin for the City of New Orleans as it began discussions around building a new jail. According to the figures in Austin’s report, the average length of stay for a Black person charged with murder was 257.1 days versus 67.1 for whites.
This kind of disparity is one thing that the new pre-trial services program unveiled on May 4 should help alleviate, according to Jon Wool, Director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office.
“Everyone agrees that there are undoubtedly people detained who don’t pose a significant risk to the community,” Wool told The Louisiana Weekly. He also explained that people “essentially are detained because they don’t have the money to pay a commercial bond, and by focusing the detention decision on risk…we can ensure we only detain people who pose a significant risk to the community.”
The Vera Institute was one of the key players in launching the pre-trial services program, which uses a statistical model to determine whether an arrestee is a good candidate for release prior to trial and what level of bail should be required. This is somewhat familiar territory for the Vera Institute since its first project was a pre-trial service program to tackle similar issues with the New York City jail system in the early 1960s.
For the moment, the pre-trial services are only available 5 days week from early in the morning until mid-afternoon. One of the people assisting arrestees is Darrick Holmes, a native New Orleanian who has been working on criminal justice issues since 2004 and is currently completing a master’s degree at Southern University of New Orleans. Sporting long braids and a crisp white shirt, Holmes explained that being a young, Black man with local roots helps establish trust with the arrestees. “We’re able to communicate,” Holmes said. “They tend to trust a bit more, especially when you drop down into that New Orleans dialect, but I think ultimately that as the program grows in popularity and status…both the court work group and the arrested individuals will start to trust us a bit more.”
The program did not blossom overnight. It is the outcome of months of efforts by a working group that brought together representatives of the courts, the Sheriff’s Office, criminal justice advocates and city officials. Councilmember Susan Guidry is one of these. She told The Louisiana Weekly that the benefits to the city should be multiple.
“People who get into the jail system are more likely to offend again,” Guidry pointed out. “So we want to keep that part of the society that’s made some mistake, but who shouldn’t be introduced to this world, from doing so.” Guidry also underlined that the program should result in a net savings to the city. “If we’re not jailing ‘em, we’re not paying for those people to be in jail beds, and the cost of the pre-trial services program is small, comparatively.”
These aren’t the only potential benefits to the program, however. “Whether or not someone is incarcerated pre-trial has a huge impact on that person’s case,” Jee Park, Special Litigation Counsel with the Orleans Public Defenders, told The Louisiana Weekly. Park outlined that people who are released from jail have a greater ability to meet with their attorney, and, consequently, to investigate and prepare more fully.
Just a few weeks before the program was unveiled, The Micah Project, a faith-based organization focused on addressing the problems that most concern its constituents, held a forum with a range of public officials. Daniel Schwartz, executive director of the Micah Project, estimates that there were 450 people at that event. Speaking of the long stays in OPP that Micah’s members witnessed or experienced in person, Schwartz said that the faith community felt compelled to organize to confront “a system that is harvesting the poor and making money off the poor.”
Noting that the pre-trial services program had been slated to begin on earlier dates that had been pushed back, Schwartz commented that he hopes the commitments made at the forum will be respected. “When public officials are seeing hundreds of people standing up, that sends a much different message than just five or six people meeting in private.” The pre-trial services program was just one of the promises made at that forum. The other two concerned reforming the per-diem payment system that currently funds the jail, and capping the size of the new jail to 1438 beds.
The judges are ultimately responsible for making the final determination on whether an arrestee can be released on his or her own recognizance and what the appropriate bail amount is. They are using the information that the Vera Institute’s staff are compiling to enhance this process. In a phone interview, Magistrate Judge Gerard Hansen told The Louisiana Weekly that while it is too early in the program to make a full assessment of its impact, the additional information is useful. “It has been a help. There have been some individuals who have been released…but [the additional background] gives me a bit more security to say that it’s OK to release them.”
This article was originally published in the May 14, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
