There might be no more polarizing issue in the race for Orleans Parish sheriff than the proposed 89-bed jail for people with mental and physical health problems.
Longtime incumbent Marlin Gusman says a gleaming new jail addition on Perdido Street would deliver care for people with serious health issues and bring his operation into compliance with an eight-year-old federal reform mandate.
Susan Hutson, the former independent police monitor for New Orleans, who came second in the Nov. 13 primary election, says the building would be a $51 million white elephant. She backs Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s idea of renovating part of the existing central jail to accommodate inmates with health problems.
That retrofit idea got a vote of confidence Tuesday from the City Planning Commission, an advisory body. But Gusman has the backing of a federal judge, who has ordered Cantrell's administration to follow through on a 2017 agreement to build a separate addition.
Renderings of the proposed mental and physical health expansion building for the New Orleans jail.
The voting public’s mood on the two-story building could tip the Dec. 11 runoff. Gusman had a 48% to 35% lead in the primary and entered the runoff’s waning days with $115,000 to spend, compared to Hutson’s $57,000. However, outside groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the PAC for Justice are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into advertising that hammers the sheriff on the proposed addition.
The two candidates talk about the building in starkly different terms.
Gusman says it would be a moderately sized, forward-thinking treatment center, and that it’s no longer optional due to federal court order.
He called in 2014 for the addition to contain a minimum 380 beds, but the plan was downsized in negotiations with former Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration. During the primary campaign this year, Gusman bristled at the idea that the current, more modest plan for an 80,500 square-foot addition should be called an "expansion" of the central jail, preferring instead to call it a "completion" of the overall lockup.
Throughout her campaign against Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, Susan Hutson has cast herself as from the same mold as District Attorney…
“I’m puzzled as to why people [who] want to call themselves reformers would not be for what’s really a clinic, a medical and mental health clinic, that’s going to help people who are suffering from acute mental illness and medical needs. Those folks cannot be put in general population,” he said in an interview with WWL-AM radio on Nov. 23.
Hutson frequently points out that the existing main jail has 1,438 beds for a population that currently sits around 850.
Gusman says the bed count at the Orleans Justice Center is misleading. Renovating part of that lockup would leave little wiggle room for separating inmates who can’t be housed together, due to factors such as street gang affiliations or vulnerability to being sexually assaulted, and would deprive the jail of a medical infirmary, a visitation center and a laundry, he said.
Susan Hutson, left, and Marlin Gusman are battling for the position of Orleans Parish sheriff in the Dec. 11, 2021, runoff.Â
In the radio interview, the sheriff also said that Federal Emergency Management Agency money for post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction could cover “all” the cost of the addition. Cantrell’s administration has said FEMA would cover only about $36 million, or 71% percent of the total cost, and a Cantrell spokesman last week said the sheriff’s assertion was “completely and totally incorrect, and at odds with the facts.”
Besides the construction cost, City Hall says the new building would require roughly $9 million a year to staff and operate. Gusman calls that figure overstated.
Hutson says employee turnover at the Sheriff's Office - not a lack of floor space - is the root of inadequate health care in the jail.
When the Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman postponed his 2022 budget presentation to the New Orleans City Council shortly before the Saturd…
Higher wages were finally helping the Sheriff’s Office reverse longstanding staff shortages when the coronavirus pandemic hit last year. The jail’s security staff dropped from 586 employees in February 2020 to 542 in October 2021. Federal monitors say that without guards to accompany nurses and counselors, incarcerated people go without treatment.
“Who is going to staff this new jail?” Hutson said in her own interview with WWL radio. “This is a waste of funding when we can retrofit, at a good cost of taxpayer money and a good use of taxpayers’ money, an efficient use, and we can treat these people humanely.”
The question of whether a retrofit could serve incarcerated people just as well was put to the test in a dayslong, mini-trial in federal court in October 2020. U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael North heard from experts contracted by Cantrell’s administration about renovating the main jail’s second floor for special needs inmates.
When people locked up in the New Orleans jail call their loved ones, the costs add up fast. Phone calls are 21 cents a minute, according to th…
James Austin, a longtime consultant on jail operations, said retrofitting the main lockup would provide ample space for the roughly 60 to 65 “acute” and “subacute” mental health patients who need special housing. A smaller footprint in a single building makes more sense given Sheriff's Office staffing constraints, he said.
“I'm looking for an option that deals with that reality, and trying to come up with an option that provides services that everyone agrees are not being provided because of one and one reason only, in my opinion," Austin said. "Lack of security staff.”Â
North and U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, who oversees the jails' reform agreement with the federal government, were unconvinced. The Cantrell administration's retrofit plan would be endangered by even a modest increase in the jail population, North said. It also lacks enough space for “programming” services such as counseling, North said, a point on which Austin disagreed.
The judges also said City Hall's plan doesn’t address the additional need for a dedicated medical infirmary. Right now, the jail has only a small medical clinic.
Federal monitors were harsh in their assessment of the New Orleans jail last month, but a judge overseeing the consent decree offered Sheriff …
Looming over Hutson’s stance on the new building is that even if she’s elected, there are limits on her authority to stop it. Under Louisiana law, it’s the city’s responsibility - not the Sheriff's Office - to provide “good and sufficient” jail buildings.
That is why Cantrell’s administration has been roped into the consent decree litigation, and why it is fighting a court order to build the addition. City Hall's appeal is pending at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
