Orleans Justice Center inmates held well past release date
9th October 2017 · 0 Comments
For more than a year, the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office has utilized other prisons across the state to offset overcrowding, and attorneys representing five former inmates say that practice led to prisoners being held several months past their release dates.
“We know of at least about maybe a dozen more that definitely were over-detained that we’ve been in contact with. I think the numbers are a little unknowable,” MacArthur Justice Center attorney Emily Washington told FOX 8 News.
Two of her clients were held three months past their release date, another for four months and two others five months past their release date, according to Washington.
The men were transported to the Riverbend Detention Center in East Carroll Parish in northeast Louisiana.
They were released after Washington notified OPP, Riverbend and the Louisiana Department of Corrections of the complaints.
The practice has continued despite the Orleans Justice Center, formerly known as Orleans Parish Prison, began implementing a federally mandated consent decree aimed at bring the troubled prison up to federal standards for constitutional jailing in 2013.
Washington filed a lawsuit on behalf of the former inmates which claims that claims “violations of their right to due process of law and seek to redress of the false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress perpetrated on them by defendants”.
“For several of our clients… this was their first criminal conviction,: Washington told FOX 8 News last week. “I realize they still had a conviction, but they had served their time and were entitled to go home to their families. Many of them have children. Many had jobs and have jobs now.”
Washington is representing Eddie Copelin, Phillip Dominick III, Donald Guidry, Jessi Crittindon and Leon Burse.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, Orleans Parish Independent Jail Compliance Director Gary Maynard, OPP “Classification Manager” Corey Amacker, East Carroll Parish Sheriff Wynette Williams are among the nine people named in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claims OPP employees recorded the proper release dates for the former inmates, yet they remained at the East Carroll facility.
“Orleans said ‘We did the paperwork and we sent it.’ East Carroll said ‘We were just housing these guys,’ and the Department of Corrections said ‘We don’t have any record of these people,’” Washington said. “From our perspective, all of these agencies had a role to play in making sure that people were appropriately and timely processed into and released from the system and nobody did their job.”
FOX 8 News reported that spokesmen with the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office as well as the Louisiana Department of Corrections would not talk about these individual cases because of “pending litigation,” but when asked specifically whether any measures were being put into place to possibly keep other inmates from being kept past their release date, they did not respond.
East Carroll officials did not respond to any request for comment.
“The lack of urgency by these agencies to fix the problem when they were notified about it or to correct the practices now is really disturbing,” Washington said.
“As long as you have inmates housed out of parish, you have the potential for this type of mistake occurring going forward,” Metropolitan Crime Commission executive director Rafael Goyeneche told FOX 8 News.
The Orleans Justice Center’s population hovers between 1,500 and 1,600 inmates but can only house 1294 inmates at one time.
The prison shifts inmates to different facilities based on their court appearances.
Goyeneche said the Orleans Justice Center is working to update its inmate tracking system because it does not translate with the systems used at other prisons.
“I would expect that it will be in place in the next several months. I think they’ve identified the firm, the software that they want. It’s a matter of installing it,” Goyeneche said.
He also warned the problem may even become greater with millions of dollars being funneled to NOPD while there has been a budget freeze at the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office and cuts to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
“When the police rebuild their numbers and are able to respond to calls for service in a more timely manner, it will mean more arrests and more inmates in the local jail,” Goyeneche said.
In other criminal justice news, an estimated 1,400 Louisiana prison inmates will receive an early release on November 1 as a result of changes in the law that retroactively shortened criminal sentences. The change is part of a series of criminal justice reforms supported by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and passed this spring by state legislators.
With 1,500 inmates being granted release from prison every month, the changes will double the number of inmates being released in November.
After the law takes effect November 1, the changes will spur high numbers of released prisoners for several months as the inmates impacted by the reforms make their way through the system.
Nola.com reported that Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc was unable to say how many inmates will receive early releases after the law takes effect Nov. 1 but did say that 3,000 to 4,000 sentences could be changed to make inmates eligible for release before the end of the year.
The records of 16,000 inmates who could be impacted by the changes are currently being reviewed by prison staff, according to Nola.com.
That number represents about 45 percent of the 36,000 inmates in state custody in June.
The estimated Louisiana prison population for November is about 36,500.
In addition to the thousands of records of nonviolent offenders currently being reviewed by prison staff, several hundred inmates convicted of murder — mostly as juveniles — are also eligible for parole under the law changes. But those inmates will have to go before the parole board, along with victims’ families, before a decision can be made in those cases.
LeBlanc said that 60 to 100 Louisiana inmates are scheduled to be released from prison on medical furlough in December and transferred to nursing homes.
“I think it’s too early to tell right now whether these are going to be successful,” Orleans Parish D.A. Leon Cannizzaro said of the law changes.
He added that he is concerned that those who will be released will not have enough support or structure to be successful.
“I understand that the intentions are good, but there has to be some structure in keeping the person on the straight and narrow,” he said.
This article originally published in the October 9, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
