NEW ORLEANS — The party had infiltrated the prison in the city that care had forgotten.
More than a decade before the recent New Orleans jailbreak, a series of films showed inmates slurping Budweiser, taking narcotics, gambling with handfuls of cash, and firing shots from a revolver.
“You can get whatever you want in here,” an inmate boasted, with no supervision in sight. “Medication. Pills. Drugs. Heroin.”
The shocking footage sparked a comprehensive 2013 court order to repair one of the country’s most violent institutions, a rotting symbol of New Orleans’ long-standing crime and corruption problems.
A dozen years and tens of millions of dollars later, most of that transformation remains a pipe dream, despite oversight from a federal judge and the United States Justice Department.
The city’s correctional anarchy reached a new low last week when a guard left to get dinner, allowing 10 convicts to wrench open a defective cell door, remove a toilet, and escape through a hole in the wall where steel bars had been hacked away. Nobody observed the men scaling a barrier and dashing over the freeway at 1 a.m. It took hours before the public or even law enforcement were told.
Five of the fugitives remained at large Friday as over 200 federal, state, and local officials hunted for them. Four others were arrested for allegedly assisting the escapees after they broke out of jail. In addition, Attorney General Liz Murrill’s office said on Friday that a convict was charged with helping in the escape. Authorities declined to comment on his alleged role.
The dysfunction goes back generations and has persisted even after the 2015 opening of the state-of-the-art Orleans Justice Center, which was heralded as a $150 million cure when it replaced its allegedly cursed predecessor. There were severe concerns with the structure from the start, including a lack of monitoring and proper housing for mentally ill convicts.
“Now we’ve got a jail with 900 cameras, but that’s cold comfort if no one is watching them,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a New Orleans-based watchdog group.
“The inmates-gone-wild videos from years back don’t even approach this,” says Goyeneche. “If the sheriff or anyone was thinking about terminating the jail consent decree, this escape has ended any serious discussion about that.”
Jail monitor warns about weak oversight.
Conditions for a disaster had been ripe for months. An impartial jail monitor warned of “extremely inadequate” staffing numbers and dangerously negligent oversight, both of which contributed to a jailbreak that revealed figurative and physical security flaws. At the same time, court records reveal that the frequency of “internal escapes” within the jail has increased dramatically over the last two years, highlighting jailers’ failure to manage the roughly 1,400-inmate population.
“Too often, failure to follow policy is blamed on a lack of staff or training,” the monitors stated in their report. “Neither is an acceptable excuse.”
Susan Hutson, Orleans Parish Sheriff, first deflected criticism for the jailbreak, saying without evidence that it was politically motivated as she seeks reelection. She appeared before the City Council several days later and acknowledged “full accountability” for the “failures.”
She informed the City Council that she requires millions of dollars to address “outdated surveillance, aging infrastructure, blind spots in supervision, and critical staffing shortages.” The council argued that the institution had received significant taxpayer funding without enough control.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Hutson stated that she “cannot guarantee” that detainees would not be left alone in the future.
“The jail is the same today as it was a week ago, the same as when we submitted our 2024 budget request, and the same as it has been for years,” Hutson stated in a news release.
55 years ago, a judge said New Orleans’ jail was unconstitutional.
The escape has brought new attention to New Orleans’ appalling jail conditions, which have existed for decades, highlighting a history of neglect in a state long plagued with overincarceration. The situation deteriorated so badly in 2016 that Hutson’s predecessor, Marlin Gusman, was relieved of authority of the facility as part of a settlement to avoid federal receivership.