Sheriff alleges mayor behind the takeover

21st June 2016   ·   0 Comments

By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer

Negotiations are currently underway in the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) attempt to take control of the Orleans Parish Prison from the city’s first Black sheriff. The receivership hearings are suspended but the blistering attack on Sheriff Marlin V. Gusman by federal monitors in District Judge Lance Africk’s courtroom went beyond the facts, raising questions about the integrity of the feds’ complaints.

Gusman, an attorney, former councilmember and former CAO for the City of New Orleans, sat quietly as the feds engaged in a strategy of name-calling and nit-picking analyses (even down to the issue of stopped-up toilets), to make the case for taking prison operations from under Gusman’s leadership.

Federal monitors described the sheriff as “unqualified, unwilling and incapable,” of making the substantial changes to the prison system. They claimed in a written motion that any progress that the sheriff made became regressive. The feds took more than a week to paint the sheriff as “non-compliant” with mandates in a Consent Decree, which is less than three years old.

The optics in the courtroom and the federal building unmasked the de facto segregation that still exists at the U.S. segregation that still exists at the U.S. Eastern District Court in downtown New Orleans. Judge Africk and his staff are white, the DOJ’s federal monitors and attorneys, white, the majority of federal judges, white; the building’s staff, predominately white; the City of New Orleans attorneys and staff at the Gusman hearing, all white.

So it comes as no surprise that Sheriff Gusman sees the move to take over OPP as one that is being orchestrated, behind the scenes, by a white mayor who wants to take the money and power from the city’s first African-American sheriff.

In a recent conversation with The Louisiana Weekly, Gusman said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has sabotaged his efforts to comply with the federal Consent Decree by withholding funding for a new mental health building and underpaying prison staff.

“This is about a white mayor who is trying to cloak himself under the law, so he can take over,” says Gusman. “We can’t be held for compliance until the proper resources are provided for the mandates in the Consent Decree.”

“They want to force a Black man out,” Gusman told The Louisiana Weekly. “I deserve the opportunity to do my job. It’s in the law that the mayor must fund” prison operations. “I’ve been doing this for almost 12 years,” he adds.

“It is ironic that the city withholds funding, withholds building permits, withholds cooperation, and then criticizes the OPSO for the pace of our progress. Mayor Landrieu issued a stop-work order on construction of the new jail, less than one month before we were scheduled to move in. We had to go to court to fight them. The mayor then refused to issue an occupancy permit once construction was complete. We had to go to court again to fight them. Now we’ve had to go to court to try and resolve the constant funding shortfalls by the City in their obligation to pay for a constitutional jail,” Gusman explained in an OPSO newsletter.

It was Gusman who stayed during Hurricane Katrina to make sure prisoners were brought to safety. When he won the office in 2004, Gusman inherited a decaying, decrepit, outdated facility. “OPP was built in the 1920s and should have been closed in the 1950s,” he explains.

“When you look at the progress we made, going to a modern, humane prison, and a system of direct supervision, we’re way ahead of most jails,” Gusman continues.

The Orleans Parish Center has 956 cameras, a good security system, and incidences of violence are significantly lower, says the sheriff. “We’ve made progress, period. That’s why this move stinks.” The sheriff says allegations that progress has not been made are “simply not true.”

“Even the lead monitor (Susan McCampbell) admitted “I’ve done what I could and we were making progress,” adds Gusman.

“Clearly this is about having the money and resources to hire staff,” he says of the feds complaint that the prison is understaffed. Gusman’s deputies make $12.30 an hour, while neighboring sheriff department personnel make $16.00 an hour. The sheriff says he hires and trains staff but they leave for better pay. “I had one lady who told me she was leaving because she could make four dollars more an hour, somewhere else.” According to state law, the City of New Orleans sets salaries, not the sheriff’s office.

Gusman continues to fight on all fronts for a living wage for his deputies. He won a decisive victory last month on the issue of supplemental pay for trained deputies and staff, as the Louisiana Treasurer’s Office dropped its opposition and agreed to a judgment, after being presented with additional information during a court hearing in Baton Rouge. “We took action to protect the livelihoods of the law enforcement professionals of the Sheriff’s Office. We will continue to do so moving forward,” he said back then.

‘The notion of the city doubling the OPSO’s budget is a lie,” Gusman said in a recent OPSO newsletter. “The budget submitted by the Mayor’s Office and approved by the City Council allocates revenue to the OPSO for programs and activities that do not exist. For example, the City tried to allocate more than $3 million in interest payments for the Law Enforcement District funding as operational funds for the OPSO. That cannot be done. The City also projected that the OPSO would receive $400,000 in revenue from the electronic monitoring program in 2016. The OPSO has not operated the electronic monitoring program since 2015.”

Efforts to reach Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s office for comment have been unsuccessful.

“It is unreasonable for the plaintiffs and U.S. Department of Justice to expect complete perfection in only two years when we are overhauling a system that was broken for 30 years before I became sheriff. These situations do not even account for the state of the City’s current consent decrees with the New Orleans Police Depart-ment and the Sewerage and Water Board. Both of these consent decrees have gone on longer without any talk of a federal takeover. While I believe that we will be able to come into compliance quicker than those other places, we must have the cooperation of the city on funding and salaries to accelerate the pace of reform.”

“I think the seed (for a takeover) was planted by Landrieu in 2013. This takeover is not going to happen. The law doesn’t warrant it and the facts don’t warrant it. “

“Progress has been made. I’m going to fight this thing the whole way. We’re going to show, factually, that this guy (Landrieu) is trying to divert control of the jail to someone of his choice,” says Gusman.

This article originally published in the June 20, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.