Marlin N. Gusman, right, the Orleans Parish sheriff, with James Stark of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2007.  So when the sheriff proposed a large new jail complex, it came as no surprise. The surprise was that the city pushed back.  It has been said so often as to become hackneyed, but the destruction from Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding has allowed New Orleans to reconsider nearly everything.  Not all the proposed changes have been universally welcomed, but by wide agreement, the targets of reform have been ripe. A struggling school system, an ineffective tax assessment structure and a profoundly troubled police force are either undergoing an overhaul or facing one.  Then came the jail. Or, to be precise, then came Sheriff Marlin N. Gusman of Orleans Parish last April, with a proposal for badly needed new facilities to replace those damaged by flooding.  The proposal states that the sheriff’s department’s long-term goal is to have room for about 4,500 inmates, with extra capacity to account for fluctuations. This would make the jail substantially smaller than it was before the storm. It would still, however, be more than four times larger than the national average, based on the city’s size.  In Louisiana, the sheriff generally gets what he wants. But nonprofit groups, civic activists and City Council members had already begun questioning the city’s criminal justice practices, particularly the size of its jail.  The Orleans Parish Prison, as the system is called, grew to such a vast scale for a couple of reasons: a statewide practice of putting state prisoners in local jails and a local tendency to throw in jail just about everyone who appears before a judge.  The practice of paying local jails to hold state prisoners took off in Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the state faced a growing prison population but lacked the money to build new prisons. The state began paying sheriffs a per diem to hold its prisoners, an arrangement that was economical for the state and lucrative for the sheriff’s departments.  But, said James LeBlanc, Louisiana’s reform-minded secretary of public safety and corrections, “it’s gotten to the point over the last eight years that it’s a little bit out of hand.”  Currently, more than half of Louisiana’s state inmates are being held in parish jails, a proportion unheard of elsewhere.  Charles C. Foti Jr., sheriff of Orleans Parish for 30 years, was particularly adept at this arrangement. When he left office in 2004, he was overseeing 7,000 state and local prisoners and detainees — nearly nine times as many as when he came into office — bringing in tens of millions a year, justifying an ambitious jail-building program and giving the sheriff’s office a considerable force of inmate labor.  But state prisoners are not the only people in jail here.  According to Jon Wool of the Vera Institute of Justice, which has been studying the city’s criminal justice system for the past four years, virtually every person arrested in New Orleans is sent to jail and held on a money bond. As a result, he said, a significant portion of the jail population, perhaps 40 percent, is made up of people detained on nonviolent charges who cannot afford to post bond.  For this and other reasons, the Orleans Parish Prison became, in the words of James Austin, a consultant with the National Institute of Justice who prepared a report on the jail, “spectacular in the annals of local correction.”  Even discounting state prisoners, the jail holds more people per 1,000 residents than any other urban jail in the country.  Efforts at change have already started taking root, including expedited sentencing and a shift from arrests to summonses for certain offenses. Sheriff Gusman says that these reforms are in their early stages, and that it would be unwise, possibly dangerous, to start reducing the jail’s size at this point. New Orleans, he points out, is still a rough city.  “You can’t sit back and say you’re going to let chance be an option,” the sheriff said in an interview.  “If you’re wearing a size 12 and you try to put your foot into a 9, it just won’t fit,” he said. “We might be cutting some toes off.”
The New Orleans City Council has cut back the sheriffâs proposal for a new jail as part of an effort to reconsider the cityâs criminal justice practices.