Hundreds of inmates are about to get early releases from Louisiana prisons and jails, a milestone in a push to reduce the nation’s highest incarceration rate.
The early release of roughly 1,500 inmates on Wednesday is the product of a new package of laws overhauling the state’s criminal justice system.
The legislation won bipartisan support from state lawmakers, but some elected officials have denounced the changes. Outrage has been stirred up by racially charged remarks by a sheriff who warned that “bad” prisoners will be freed from his north Louisiana jail and also complained that he’s losing free labor from the “good ones.”
The law allowing for earlier “good time” releases is limited to inmates serving sentences for nonviolent offenses, a designation defined by law, according to state corrections secretary James LeBlanc. They are getting out an average of eight weeks early.
“Sitting in a parish jail for another 60 days is not going to make them a better person,” LeBlanc says.
The inmate releases are among the changes in 10 laws that Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed in June. Another law requires about $184 million of the estimated $262 million in savings over the next decade to be reinvested in services for crime victims and programs designed to keep people from returning to prison. Louisiana spends approximately $700 million annually on correctional costs.
The measures are projected to reduce the state’s prison population by up to 10% over 10 years. Louisiana, which now has the nation’s highest incarceration rate, could lose that status by the end of 2018, according to the governor’s office.
State Rep. Tanner Magee, a Republican who sponsored one of the bills, says the changes are patterned after laws enacted in other Southern states, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas.
“We didn’t come up with this whole cloth,” Magee says. “It’s a proven model.”
