A boon for the GOP, the results will have stark consequences for state policy, easing the way for new legislation that would target LGBTQ+ residents, and empowering politicians who have championed draconian anti-crime measures and attacks on public education. They will likely set up more clashes between the conservative state government and the city of New Orleans. 

The results also signaled that election conspiracies continue to resonate with the GOP base, as several campaigns emerged triumphant after fueling false allegations of fraud during a critical juncture for the state’s voting systems. Jeff Landry, the incoming governor, tried to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as attorney general, and he doubled down on his alliance with the former president during his campaign this year.

Bolts covered the elections in the lead-up to Oct. 14, with an eye to its ramifications for criminal justice and voting rights. Below are seven takeaways on the results. 

1. Landry’s win hands the GOP a new trifecta

Jeff Landry, the state’s arch-conservative attorney general, easily prevailed in the governor’s race on Saturday, receiving 52 percent in a 16-person field. He will replace John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits. 

Landry’s victory hands Republicans full control of the state government for the first time since 2015, since his party also defended its large majorities in the state House and Senate.

The result will free conservative policy ambitions, which were held back over the last eight years by Edwards’ veto power. Even when the GOP gained a supermajority capable of overriding Edwards’ vetoes earlier this year, it remained frequently unable to do so. This summer, for instance, the GOP failed to muster the votes to override Edwards on a bill that would have prevented discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. 

Landry is sure to bring an entirely different outlook on such issues. Throughout his career, he has pushed Louisiana to restrict LGBTQ+ rights and block teaching of such issues in education, including at the collegiate level. Last year, Landry created a new tool for people to file complaints against teachers and libraries. He has also worked for the state to obtain information about Louisiana residents who travel out of state to obtain gender-affirming care or abortions.

Landry has fiercely fought local and state reforms meant to reduce the state’s near-record incarceration rate, Bolts reported in a profile of the attorney general in August. This year alone, he ran ads lambasting “woke DAs,” fought efforts by Louisianans on death row to seek clemency, and championed a measure, which ultimately did not pass, that would have opened the criminal records of children as young as 13 to the public—but only in three predominantly Black parishes. 

2. Things are about to get more complicated for New Orleans

Republican-run states commonly preempt liberal policies adopted in their cities, so just the fact that the GOP gained a trifecta in Louisiana would put New Orleans in a tough spot. But beyond that, Landry has been particularly aggressive in undercutting his state’s most populous city. As attorney general, he retaliated against New Orleans officials when they crafted policies to protect immigrants and to shield residents from anti-abortion laws, proposing to withhold flood protection funds. He has also undermined efforts to reform New Orleans police while also setting up a short-lived state task force with the authority to make arrests in the city. 

And Landry has made it clear he would double down as governor, telling Tucker Carlson last year that the governor’s office in Louisiana “has the ability to bend that city to his will,” and that “we will.”

New Orleans voters on Saturday signaled their appetite for a very different politics. Landry received less than 10 percent of the vote in the city, far behind Democrat Shawn Wilson who drew 71 percent. A former public defender with some progressive support, Leon Roché, also defeated a former prosecutor for a position as criminal court judge in the parish. And one of Louisiana’s most left-leaning lawmakers, Mandie Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry), defeated more centrist challengers in a heated state House race for an uptown district.

On Sunday, even as she celebrated her own win, Mandie Landry said she was preparing for a “sobering” stretch for her city. “I think there is going to be more of a push from Baton Rouge to interfere in New Orleans than usual,” she told Bolts. “I am not under any delusions.”

3. This was a low-turnout election

For an election that will deeply affect Louisiana, engagement was very low: just 36 percent of registered voters turned out on Saturday.

Turnout fell sharply in the state’s two most populous urban regions, which vote very Democratic. Compared to the 2020 presidential election, the number of voters who cast a ballot fell by 60 percent in New Orleans and by 52 percent in East Baton Rouge Parish. In the rest of the state, it only fell by 49 percent. 

Mandie Landry, the New Orleans lawmaker, faults the state Democratic Party for doing little outreach to her city’s voters. Compared to the “huge efforts to get out the vote” she witnessed in 2015 and 2019, “there was none of that this time,” she told Bolts. “I didn’t see any get out the vote effort.” The state Democratic Party, which scarcely spent money in the run-up to the primary, did not respond to a request for comment. 

4. Secretary of state race heads to a runoff, but a new frontrunner emerges

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin has tried to appease election conspiracists since 2020, for instance quitting a multi-state consortium that monitors voter registration after false claims that it was tied to George Soros. With Ardoin retiring this year, the big question on Saturday was which of the many Republican candidates would advance to a runoff. 

Ardoin’s deputy Nancy Landry (no relation to Jeff Landry or Mandie Landry) barely edged out her rivals, coming in first with 19 percent. Bolts reported earlier this month that, much like her boss, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals while also echoing unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities. 

Mike Francis, the Republican who most firmly rejected election conspiracies, very narrowly lost out on a runoff spot, coming in third with 18 percent. Brandon Trosclair, a little-known businessman who ran as a hardline election denier and called for fully hand-counting ballots, got 6 percent.

Landry will now face Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who snatched the second runoff spot. Collins-Greenup got 19 percent as well, but Landry will be the clear front-runner since all Republican candidates combined for 68 percent of the vote cast on Saturday. The state is at a crossroads on election administration since it has to soon replace its outdated voting equipment, an issue around which the far-right has mobilized.

5. In first referendum inspired by “Zuckerbucks,” voters ban private election grants 

Voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1, a measure that will block Louisiana’s election offices from receiving private grants from outside organizations. 

A non-profit with ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 to local election offices nationwide, in order to help them run elections during the early pandemic. The right quickly dubbed these grants “Zuckerbucks,” fueling conspiracies about election interference, and many GOP-run states proceeded to pass laws to ban such grants. To circumvent the Democratic governor’s veto, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana placed such a ban directly on the ballot for the first time.

Some elections experts critical of such bans share the reservations about private money flowing into elections, but they also stress that public funding is woefully inadequate, and that the bans risk further starving cash-strapped offices, threatening election security rather than protecting it. 

“Nobody’s got money to pay election officials what they’re worth (particularly in this new environment), to invest in new systems, to make improvements to back-end security,” Justin Levitt, a voting expert who now teaches at Loyola Law School, told Bolts on Sunday. “If the state actually responded by funding the elections we deserve, banning private money wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Private donations were only ever there to stop the bridge from collapsing entirely. They never should have been necessary. Yet they were.”

He added, “I think we can all hope that we’re not dealing with that kind of 10-alarm fire in 2024.”

6. In sheriff’s races, a sea of white men—again

Sixty-three parishes held sheriff elections, and only three even featured women running for the office. All lost on Saturday. 

This means that all 63 parishes have elected a man, or are sure to do so after the Nov. 18 runoffs. This dynamic is nothing new: All of these parishes already have a male sheriff. 

Nearly all incoming sheriffs will also be white. Across these 63 parishes, only three elected a Black sheriff on Saturday, with Black candidates advancing to a runoff in three additional parishes. By contrast, 57 of these 63 parishes elected a white sheriff on Saturday or will do so after the runoff. Louisiana’s population is 30 percent Black. 

This pattern is symptomatic of the societal biases regarding what law enforcement should look like, though breaking it up would not in itself change brutal conditions and treatment inside the state’s jails. And here again, New Orleans stands out from the rest of the state.

Its sheriff, Susan Hutson, is a Black woman who took office in 2022 (New Orleans holds its elections on a different cycle than all other parishes, and so Hudson was not on the ballot this fall). “As a woman and as a Black woman, I go through additional types of microaggressions in the job,” Hutson told Verite News last year. “So just having somebody else there who might be experiencing something similar with me, it’s good—it’s good to see someone like you.”

7. East Baton Rouge sheriff secures another four years 

The jail in Louisiana’s most populous parish is notorious for an alarming death rate and for the brutal treatment of people detained there. But, as Bolts reported in August, organizers and civil rights lawyers have run into Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, who has overseen the facility for 15-plus years, boosted by campaign contributions from people and groups that benefit from more jail spending. 

Gautreaux won reelection with 86 percent of the vote on Saturday. He is a Republican in a heavily blue jurisdiction but he faced no Democrat; two opponents were kicked off the ballot over the summer, though neither was expected to mount a serious challenge to the entrenched sheriff.

Reverend Alexis Anderson, co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a local organization that has pushed back against the sheriff’s practices, told Bolts on Sunday that she would continue to demand accountability regardless of these results. “I stand committed to working towards independent investigations of each and every death that has occurred in that facility under the Gautreaux administration,” she said. “We will continue engaging our community on the development of real public safety tools.”

Anderson added, “There are too many lives at stake to become discouraged.”

Piper French contributed reporting for this article.

The post Louisiana Takes a Hard Swing to the Right appeared first on Bolts.

Kaddarrius Marquise Cage was experiencing a severe mental health crisis when he entered the East Baton Rouge jail in late May. The 28 year old had stabbed his stepfather in the midst of an acute psychotic episode, but his mother, Kim, says that neither she nor her husband, who was badly wounded in the attack, thought that jail was the right place for Kaddarrius, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They were told there was simply no other option. 

The deputy who arrested Kaddarrius “assured me that he was being put on suicide watch,” Kim told Bolts. “It was all a lie.” 

Kaddarrius’s stay at the jail, formally known as the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison (EBRPP), disrupted his normal medication schedule, which Kim suspects destabilized him even further. On the morning of May 31, guards found him hanging in his cell. “I called the jailhouse every day for 12 days begging and pleading with them saying please let me—can you have my son call me, can I speak to my son, my son’s not in his right mind,” Kim said. “If I was able to get his medicine to him, my son would be alive today.”

Between 2012 and 2016, the EBRPP had a death rate more than twice the national average, according to a Reuters analysis. Since 2012, there have been 59 fatalities in custody. Jail staff have long faced allegations of neglect and deadly lapses in medical treatment, and in 2016, the brutal treatment of people arrested and jailed for protesting the Baton Rouge police killing of Alton Sterling sparked a movement for jail reform.

The man who has overseen the jail for 15-plus years, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, has often blamed the deaths on the building, which activists, politicians, and sheriff’s department officials alike agree is antiquated and dangerous. Gautreaux, a Republican, has for years sought to replace the current jail with a new, even larger facility, but voters have shot down requests for funding to build a new one. The sheriff, who is also the parish’s chief tax collector, has faced allegations of profiting off his office, raking in significant campaign contributions from contractors during elections where he has run unopposed or lacked a significant challenger. This includes thousands of dollars in donations from a law firm that has represented Gautreaux and his co-defendants against plaintiffs whose loved ones have died in his jail. 

Despite his track record, Gautreaux seems likely to secure reelection once again this year. East Baton Rouge has reliably voted for Democratic governors and presidents over the last decade, and Mark Milligan, a Democrat who challenged the sheriff in 2019, is running again, as well as two other candidates. But none of the three challengers appear to be actively campaigning less than two months out from the October 14 election. Four years ago, Milligan received only 17 percent to Gautreaux’s 70 percent.

“Unfortunately, again, because the majority of our residents are not in tune to what’s going on at Parish Prison until it hits them personally…he continues to fly under the radar,” said Baton Rouge Metro Council member Chauna Banks, a Democrat who has previously called the jail a “money grab.” 

Gautreaux didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. 

Family members of people who died at the jail, advocates for reform, and academics who have studied deaths behind bars there blame the sheriff as well as the warden, Dennis Grimes, and negligence on the part of guards and medical staff for these deaths. But they also blame larger systemic failures that have turned jails into a backstop for people experiencing addiction, instability and mental health crises. 

A paucity of mental health services across Louisiana, as well as the jail’s use of solitary confinement and other practices that can exacerbate mental health crises, only intensify the problems at the lockup, says Reverend Alexis Anderson, the co-founder of the EBRPP Reform Coalition, which has both established a support network for people who have lost loved ones inside the jail and fought to transmit their message to a broader community that remains largely unaware of its issues. 

Anderson said a new jail, which the sheriff continues to advocate for, won’t fix the problems illustrated by a steady stream of tragedies there. In her view, rampant criminalization, from schools to traffic stops to unhoused people, has contributed to a ballooning jail population. She also pointed to the defunding and privatization of state services that ramped up under Louisiana’s former Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, which led to the closure of the charity hospital where incarcerated people in mental health crisis were once sent and paved the way for a private, for-profit company with a long history of scandals to take control of healthcare in the jail. Meanwhile, high bonds and a lack of pretrial reform have also left people who are legally innocent to languish in jail with little treatment for years on end. 

“Mass incarceration is our number one industry,” Anderson told Bolts. “Conversations about the building take away from the real work that we as a community need to do…so we aren’t continuing to use a jail as a de facto mental health facility, as a de facto addiction detox center, as a de facto cooling center for people who are struggling with domestic violence.” 

Rather than building a new jail, the EBRPP Reform Coalition seeks to install an independent monitor to oversee healthcare and conduct investigations of deaths and abuses in custody, so that people aren’t effectively forced to file a lawsuit to try to figure out what happened in their relative’s last moments. Advocates also wish to put an end to the use of solitary confinement inside the jail, and they want fundamental changes in how the country treats residents struggling with addiction, homelessness, and mental illness, with the ultimate goal of incarcerating fewer people.  

In addition to these changes, the coalition is demanding accountability for the suffering the jail has already caused—something a new building alone can never address. “A facility didn’t kill my uncle,” said Sherilyn Sabo, the niece of Paul Cleveland, who died in the jail in 2014. “Three deputies tased him while he was having a heart attack.” 

Not long after Baton Rouge police killed Alton Sterling in 2016, one of Linda Franks’ clients called her to make a salon appointment. Over the phone, she told Franks that she had been arrested during the demonstrations roiling the state capital. “She was very, very, very upset,” Franks recalled. The client told Franks that she and other protestors booked into the jail were pepper sprayed, denied access to basic hygiene products, and left in a freezing cold cell without blankets. It seemed like the guards were retaliating against them for going out to protest Sterling’s death. 

The year before the protests, Franks’ son Lamar Alexander Johnson had disappeared inside that same jail after an officer pulled him over for having tinted windows and discovered that he had an old warrant for a bad check in another parish. “Lamar was like, ‘Mom, you know, everything’s fine. I know I had a traffic ticket,’” she told Bolts. “And four days later my son was hanging in a cell.”

Franks says that Johnson had never before experienced any issues with his mental health in his 27 years. “He was always the peacekeeper,” she said. “He was just an amazing loving father and very attentive to his children.” He lingered on life support for a week, enough time for Franks and her husband to make sure his vital organs went to save a 9-year-old boy who needed them.

Johnson’s passing, in early June 2015, marked the beginning of a furious quest for Franks to understand what happened to her son and prevent others from suffering similar tragedies. She founded an organization called the Fair Fight Initiative. Along with Reverend Anderson, Franks also established the EBRPP Reform Coalition, and started talking to her friends and customers about her work — including the client who called the salon to relay her detention horror story after the Alton Sterling protests. 

Around the same time, Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, began receiving a flurry of calls from students who were serving as legal observers during the protests. Their stories led to a 2017 report titled “Punished Protestors: Conditions in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison,” that detailed the abuses visited upon demonstrators during their stays in EBRPP. 

“I’ve been writing about jail and prison conditions for my entire career, but I had never necessarily focussed on a particular facility,” Armstrong told Bolts. She decided to dig deeper, especially after talking to Franks. Armstrong recalled her questions: “Was her son the only one to die this way? You know, ‘Are they telling me the truth about what happened to my son?’” 

Gautreaux, has downplayed deaths in his custody by citing the prevalence of addiction and comorbidities amongst people in his care. More than any other part of the criminal legal system, jails tend to admit people in a state of crisis—which is precisely why speedy medical and psychiatric care, addiction treatment, and regular observation are so important in that setting. But Armstrong also seeks to trouble the assumption that death is simply an inevitability, pointing to nationwide statistics that suggest that the vast majority of jails lack a fatality in any given calendar year. “Death is and should be a rare occurrence behind bars,” she told Bolts.

Diving into EBRPP’s statistics was no easy feat: there was next to no information publicly available. “When we started looking at it, nobody had a list. Nobody was tracking—not even the jail, in a publicly accessible way, at least—who was dying, and why and how,” Armgstrong told Bolts. When Armstrong got records for EBRPP from between 2012 and 2016, she found that 22 of the 25 men who had passed away during that time were legally innocent: They had died awaiting trial. “Their deaths were preventable,” she wrote in a follow-up report. Inspired by her work in EBRPP, Armgstrong would eventually go on to map deaths behind bars throughout the state. 

Despite its name, the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison is a jail, not a prison. The vast majority of its residents are pre-trial, and there’s very little in the way of programming for people incarcerated there, said Amelia Herrera, an organizer with the Baton Rouge chapter of the group Voice of the Experienced who was incarcerated there for a number of months in 2015. But at the same time, people often live there for months or years on end. “Entering jail now is like throwing the dice—you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “Every call is like a 911 call.”

Anderson has been court watching at the local district courthouse for nearly five years. Almost everyone she sees is eligible for bond, suggesting they’re not considered a threat to public safety, but the amounts are set so high that very few people have a hope of posting. Sabo’s uncle’s bail, for instance, was set at $300,000. “How many of the people that you’re holding, you’re only holding there because of poverty?” Anderson asked. “I watch one on one who’s coming in that jail, and I can tell you disproportionately that so many of those people are not medically stable when they get there…We have lots and lots of people [who] go in there because we’ve criminalized mental health.” 

Until 2013, when Republican Governor Bobby Jindal began decimating the state’s charity hospital system (he ultimately shuttered or privatized 9 of 10 facilities), people incarcerated at EBRPP who needed medical care—about 35-40 patients a month—would be taken to the Earl K. Long Medical Center. When the city took over the provision of healthcare services, moving all medical care inside jail walls, things quickly went downhill. A 2016 evaluation by an outside consultant group would deem healthcare at EBRPP “episodic and inconsistent.” ​​At the time, nurses who worked there told the Baton Rouge Metro Council that they frequently lacked basic supplies such as neosporin, and that the jail’s EKG machines could not effectively determine whether someone was in the midst of a heart attack or not. “I can personally attest to them not coming out to give insulin, not checking blood pressures,” said Herrera. The year after she was there, eight people died. 

However, a for-profit carceral healthcare company called CorrectHealth was already in touch with city officials before the 2015 evaluation was even completed. Problems with medical care persisted even after 2017, when the city passed responsibility for healthcare provision off to the company, which has been dogged by lawsuits and is run by a doctor who oversees prison executions in his spare time. 

EBRPP Reform Coalition has been active in the fight to send the company packing. They won a partial victory when the metro council underwent a more transparent contract bidding process and ended up choosing a different company, Turn Key Health Clinics, to take over healthcare provision. But Anderson stressed that without an independent healthcare monitor, any progress that might have been achieved by CorrectHealth’s ouster is incomplete. “We are getting the same bad results because we are doing the exact same things,” she said. Meanwhile, Anderson has counted at least nine fatalities since the new company took over in early 2022—a bleak form of déjà vu. “The deaths keep coming,” said Herrera.

A mental health facility called the Bridge Center for Hope opened in early 2021, an event city officials heralded as transformative for the provision of mental health care in the parish. The 24/7 taxpayer-funded crisis center––the only one in the state—includes a crisis observation unit, a short-term psychiatric unit, and a detox unit, according to their website. But Anderson stressed that most people with mental health issues who cross paths with the sheriff’s department may require longer-term care. In court, she told Bolts, “many of the people who come through with behavioral health issues are not short-term care people. They’re already in our existing mental health system. And so what they need to be connected to is their existing system.”

Jail staff also continue to put people with mental health issues in solitary confinement. Johnson, Franks’ son, was in solitary for a time before his death, and Herrera spent nearly a month there when she was in jail in 2015 after struggling with her mental health in the wake of her mother and husbands’ deaths. “The jail isn’t equipped to handle anyone with a mental illness,” she said. “Instead of receiving help that I really needed, being incarcerated and thrown into a cell….” Ultimately, Herrera said she wasn’t permitted to see a psychiatrist until four months had passed.

During the pandemic, in an effort to keep the isolation that incarceration engenders at bay, the EBRPP Reform Coalition staged a monthly “caravan of justice” outside the jail. “We wanted a way for people being detained as well as people that worked there, to let them know that someone is watching,” Franks said. “I just felt like someone needed to hear a horn blow. I just, I thought, you know, if Lamar heard a horn blow that morning….I don’t know what that would have accomplished, but god put that on my heart to do.”

Despite the body count and rotating cast of healthcare providers at his jail, Gautreaux has largely stayed out of the limelight, all while raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds, serving a term as president of the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association He has easily won every election he’s faced, even receiving endorsements from prominent local Democrats despite running as a Republican. 

Gautreaux has a powerful fundraiser and ally in Alton Ashy, a prominent lobbyist for Louisiana’s booming gambling industry who has also served as his campaign chairman and treasurer. Ahead of a December 2022 parish vote on a millage tax to fund the sheriff’s department, Ashy set up a PAC to advocate for the measure, raking in donations from casinos, bingo distributors, and a for-profit correctional services company. 

In a 2021 report, the government accountability group Common Cause singled out Gautreaux for the breadth and depth of donations he has received over his career that represented potential or outright conflicts of interest, including money from CorrectHealth. The report also pointed to a law firm, Erlingson Banks PLLC, that donated to the sheriff and handles the sheriff’s office’s public records requests. Court records show that the firm has also represented the sheriff and other jail officials in multiple lawsuits over jail conditions and in-custody deaths. Mary Erlingson, a partner at the firm who has served as Gautreaux’s general counsel, is also listed as treasurer on the millage tax PAC, which was created to advocate for funding for the sheriff’s office. 

Meanwhile, according to the Common Cause report, Gautreaux has accepted over $150,000 in contributions from construction companies since his initial campaign in 2008. One construction company owner donated $50,000 in one fell swoop to the millage tax PAC in 2022. 

Given all this, advocates are suspicious that the sheriff’s desire for a new jail is less about seeking to improve conditions than the potential for other collateral benefits. Gautreaux initially argued for a 3,500-bed facility, twice what the jail currently possesses, leading some to suspect that he intends to take advantage of a common practice in Louisiana where the state pays sheriffs a per diem to house people in the state prison system. (Under Louisiana’s only 287(g) agreement, the sheriff’s department also collaborates closely with ICE, including holding people in custody for 48 hours after a judge has said they’re free to go so that the agency has time to come pick them up).

“All the research indicated we needed a smaller jail, and we needed to operate in a more therapeutic way,” said Banks, referring to a report commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation, which recommends reducing the jail population. “I know for a fact that would not be a model that the current warden who is running the jail or Sheriff Gautreaux can actually execute.”

The gulf between the power Gautreaux has over parish residents’ lives and the amount of power that they in turn believe they have over his continued employment there frustrates Anderson enormously. “One of the things that I’m constantly in the business of doing is reminding people that you have to have skin in the game.” It’s difficult to convince people, though, when Gautreaux so resoundingly trounced his two opponents in 2019, and no one is yet running a robust campaign to defeat him with the primary just two months away. “If we don’t see a change, these may be some of the most historically low turnouts we’ve ever seen,” Anderson said. Still, “groups like ours will keep reminding people: there is a cost to not paying attention,” she said. 

For Linda Franks, a big part of the fight has been striving to make sure that the broader community understands the horrors of the jail as viscerally she and others who have lost loved ones inside do. She talks to her coworkers and clients at her salon about her work; the EBRPP Reform Coalition tries to do a press conference every time there’s a fresh death. But she recognizes that it’s an uphill battle.

Just last week, on August 10, a local news site reported that a 25-year-old man named Kiyle Maxwell killed himself in police custody while waiting to be transferred to EBR Parish Prison. 

“He didn’t even make it to the jail,” Anderson said.

Correction: A previous article misstated the city affiliation of organizers with the group Voice of the Experienced

The post Brutality and Deaths Inside East Baton Rouge Jail Spark Uphill Battle for Reform appeared first on Bolts.

Sid Gautreaux, the Republican sheriff of East Baton Rouge Parish, easily won re-election on Saturday. He received 70 percent against two Democratic challengers in this blue-leaning parish, which is Louisiana’s largest jurisdiction.

Gautreaux, who has been in office since 2007, oversees a jail that has had a string of deaths, and last month reports revealed a higher death toll than previously known.

He is also one of only three Louisiana sheriffs, out of 64, who have joined ICE’s prized 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents within local jails. His opponents had vowed to end this agreement amid local organizing against it.

In Ascension Parish, Sheriff Bobby Webre easily won a full term. His office faces a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Louisiana after Webre’s predecessor held a U.S. citizen for days to review his immigration status. The ACLU alleges a systematic policy of detaining Latinx residents, and one of Webre’s challengers told the Political Report last month that this is part of an “all-out war on Hispanics.” Webre has said he would defend his department.

“My big take-away is that sheriffs and local law enforcement are still not a salient issue in Louisiana, compared to other places [that voted] in 2018,” said Mirya Holman, a political science professor at Tulane University (in New Orleans) who studies sheriffs. 

In 2018, numerous longtime sheriffs lost their re-election bids in campaigns that centered on their ties with ICE. 

But the 2019 elections for sheriff have indeed been quieter affairs. Even when issues that sheriffs control (like immigration policy) resonate in national politics and structure its partisan fault lines, that has not translated this year in local arenas, in Louisiana or elsewhere. 

Case in point: U.S. Representative Cedric Richmond, Louisiana’s only Democratic congressmember, sent a mailer “paid for by the Richmond campaign,” and obtained by the Political Report, that endorsed Gautreaux. State Representative Ted James, a fellow Democrat, released a similar flyer in support of Gautreaux. Neither Democrat’s offices replied to numerous requests for comment.

Gautreaux won as a Republican among the same pool of voters that gave Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards 61 percent of the vote in the governor’s race. (Edwards received 47 percent of the vote statewide, and will be on a Nov. 16 runoff against Eddie Rispone, a businessman.)

“There’s growing evidence that partisanship is a very different creature among sheriffs,” said Holman, who pointed to the strong role that “incumbency effects” play in anchoring sheriffs as key local players. The bipartisan endorsements Gautreaux received in East Baton Rouge mirror the 2018 election in Florida’s Hillsborough County (Tampa), for instance, when a GOP sheriff with close ties to ICE won re-election with the support of local Democratic elected officials.

Bruce Reilly, the deputy director of Voice of the Experienced, a Louisiana group that champions criminal justice reform, told me in August that the emergent bipartisan consensus for lowering Louisiana’s record prison populations had flipped in favor of a rush to detain immigrants. He blamed financial incentives; ICE pays local governments to detain immigrants.

“People who didn’t want to be the number one incarcerator in the country have shifted their tune now that there are federal dollars behind it,” Reilly said.

A rare Louisiana parish that may still buck the trend is St. Tammany (Covington). Randy Smith, a Republican sheriff who has signed a detention contract with ICE, was forced into a runoff with Tim Lentz, a Republican police chief who told me last month that the local jail has “become a for-profit prison.” He added that if elected he would cut the jail population in half and that the ICE agreement would be “closely reviewed.” 

Elsewhere in the state, though, Election Night did not belong to candidates open to changing immigration policies. Many sheriffs at the forefront of Louisiana’s increasingly tight ties with ICE won re-election alongside Gautreaux and Webre.

Sheriffs who are supervising detention contracts secured new terms in Allen (independent Doug Hebert), Bossier (Julian Whittington, a Republican), Jackson (Andy Brown, a Republican), and Tensas (Rickey Jones, a Democrat) parishes.

Sheriff Jay Russell ran unopposed in Ouachita, the second of the three parishes with a 287(g) contract (alongside East Baton Rouge). In the third, Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry Larpenter did not seek re-election; Republicans Bubba Bergeron and Tim Soignet moved on to a runoff. Bergeron told me he would maintain the parish’s 287(g) contract; Soignet did not respond.

Meanwhile, in East Baton Rouge, detention conditions loomed large over the sheriff’s race as well. More than 40 people have died in jail since 2012; 16 have died since 2017. 

Local activists fault systemic issues including overcrowding, aggressive policing, and inadequate health services. Last week, the jail’s warden told the Appeal that the sheriff’s office “has no authority over decisions made by the medical department.” A private company, CorrectHealth, has provided healthcare in the jail since 2017. CorrectHealth gave Gautreaux’s campaign $1,000 days before the election, The Advocate reported on Saturday.

“I don’t think these issues got sufficient attention” in the sheriff’s race, said Sherrilyn Sabo, an organizer with the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition. She also called on all local officials to confront the jail conditions together. “They’re all culprits, they’re all responsible for this,” she said, noting for instance that decisions are made about excessive pretrial detention by prosecutors, police officers, and judges.

On Tuesday, three days after Gautreaux’s re-election, East Baton Rouge Parish DA Hillar Moore announced a new plan to arraign people within three days of arrest, rather than an average of 55 days as in the past. 

Sabo attributes the announcement to the organizing pressure. But it only throws into sharp relief how bad the jail situation has been, she notes. “It lets me know that they recognize that they have to address the problem because we’re not going away,” she said. She added, “They’re going to arrange 72-hour arraignment, but isn’t that part of our constitutional rights?”

The post Louisiana Sheriffs Have a Great Election Night appeared first on Bolts.

The Ascension Parish sheriff’s department detained a U.S. citizen as part of an immigration hold for four days despite a court order that he be released, according to a lawsuit by the ACLU of Louisiana. The ACLU alleges that this is part of a systematic policy to target Latinx individuals. Sheriff Bobby Webre, who was not yet in office during these specific events, told The Advocate that he would mount a “rigorous defense” of his department.

Moses Black Jr., however, takes issue with current practices. He is challenging Webre in the Oct. 12 sheriff’s election.

“The ACLU is doing the right thing bringing this to light,” he told the Appeal: Political Report this week. Local authorities are participating in a nationwide “all-out war on Hispanics,” he said, because “they can get away with it.” Webre’s office did not answer a request for comment on the ACLU’s allegations; Byron Hill, the third candidate in the race, also did not respond.

Louisiana will hold 63 elections for sheriff this fall. These could impact the reach of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as the scale of immigration enforcement and detention in the state.

Sheriffs nationwide have the authority to enter into various partnerships with ICE, both formal and informal. In Louisiana, many have taken full advantage over the past year to help the federal agency identify or incarcerate undocumented immigrants.

As Louisiana’s incarceration rate plunged in recent years, local agencies have rapidly entered in new contracts to rent now-vacant jail space to ICE, considerably expanding the federal agency’s capacity to detain immigrants. In addition, three sheriff’s departments have now joined ICE’s 287(g) program (two of them this year), which authorizes local deputies to act as federal immigration agents.

“This is a crisis happening in our own backyards, betraying the state’s commitment to decarceration and exposing thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers to brutal and dehumanizing conditions,” Alanah Odoms Hebert, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told the Political Report. Investigations have found that people detained by ICE in the state are held in poor conditions.

Black, the sheriff candidate, faults the underlying racial pattern in the resilience of incarceration, and links amplified immigration enforcement to the criminal legal system’s disparate impact on African Americans. “I see Blacks who go to jail for lower offenses, and what they’re trying to do to Hispanics who come to the United States to make a better life for themselves and their families—I see that right now the government is trying to prevent that,” he said, adding that part of his platform is to reduce arrests by issuing more summons instead. “They’re trying to send Hispanics to Mexico or Honduras and put Black men in jail. The United States is made for everybody.”

“It’s a business for them,” he added. ICE pays counties more money to detain an immigrant than the state pays them to incarcerate someone with a criminal conviction, according to the Times-Picayune.

The sheriff’s elections this year offer a platform for immigrants’ rights advocates to call these policies into question. There is an election in every parish except Orleans (New Orleans), which is on a different schedule.

“These sheriffs absolutely need to answer to voters about their role in this crisis that diverts resources away from other public safety priorities and makes everyone less safe,” Odoms Hebert said. She called on candidates to curb cooperation with ICE, starting with 287(g). “First it is vital that sheriffs reject the harmful 287(g) agreements that undermine public trust and weaken the effectiveness of local law enforcement. But much more broadly, local law enforcement needs to respect the rights of the people they’re sworn to serve: that means taking steps to combat racial profiling and racially-biased policing, and building greater trust with these communities.”

On 287(g), eyes are on East Baton Rouge

Three Louisiana parishes have joined the 287(g) program, which deputizes sheriffs’ deputies to research the immigration status of people they book in the parish jail and arrest those they suspect of being undocumented. Sheriffs have the power to terminate existing agreements.

The largest is East Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s most populous parish and also one of its least conservative as Hillary Clinton won it by 9 percentage points in the 2016 presidential race.

The Baton Rouge Immigrants’ Rights Coalition organized a rally last week demanding that the sheriff’s office terminate 287(g). Republican Sheriff Sid Gautreaux III renewed the contract earlier this year amid a significant increase in ICE arrests in the parish.

Dauda Sesay, a member of the Baton Rouge coalition and president of the Louisiana Association for Refugees and Immigrants, told the Political Report that the parish’s relationship with ICE causes fear among immigrant residents with whom he interacts, regardless of their status. “With the stress that comes with moving to a new land, and us refugees we have this trauma in us, and all of what is happening at the national level, and now we find out that the parish is using this policy to partner with ICE: all of this adds to the trauma, it adds to the fear,” he said. Sesay, who came to the United States as a refugee from Sierra Leone, is an advocate for refugee settlement.

He argued that people tend to not strictly differentiate between various agencies, so the sheriff’s policies color people’s perceptions of all local law enforcement, making it less likely for them to report crime or interact with police. “When you have that much fear in the community, public safety is at risk,” he said.

Stephanie Dugas Braswell, an organizer with Indivisible Louisiana Capitol Region, a group that helped organize last week’s rally, echoed Sesay’s point. “How are people supposed to put their trust in that when their family and friends are being deported?” she asked. Gautreaux did not answer a request for comment on this criticism.

East Baton Rouge Parish’s membership in 287(g) is now at stake in this fall’s election.
Two Democratic challengers, Mark Milligan and Carlos Jean Jr., are challenging Gautreaux. If none of the three reaches 50 percent in October, the top two will move to a November runoff.

Each challenger told the Political Report that they oppose the 287(g) program. Milligan wrote in an email that 287(g) is a “violation of Civil rights, and civil liberties.” “We can not afford to harass potential ‘Legal Citizens’” while trying to identify “undocumented residents,” he added. He also said he would refuse to honor ICE requests that he detain people beyond their release date. Milligan said that these administrative requests, known as detainers, violate due process.

Jean said he “would discontinue the 287(g) program on my first day” because it is hurting “public safety and community trust.” Jean added that he would allow ICE to be stationed at the parish jail to check immigration status, however. He did not respond to a follow-up question on whether he would honor detainers.

Ouachita and Terrebonne are the two parishes that newly joined 287(g) earlier this year. Ouachita Parish Sheriff Jay Russell, who signed the agreement, is now running for reelection unopposed. The Terrebonne Parish sheriff who signed the contract, Jerry Larpenter, is not running. Of the seven people running to replace him, the only one who answered my request for comment, Bubba Bergeron, said he favored maintaining the 287(g) contract.

Other jurisdictions with 287(g) are holding contested elections this fall, including in New Jersey and in Virginia.

Detention contracts have multiplied

While sheriffs who have joined 287(g) actively help ICE identify people who may be undocumented, many sheriffs’ departments have struck separate detention agreements: They provide jail space for ICE to detain people it arrests elsewhere in exchange for payments.

These can be lucrative arrangements. Tim Lentz, a Republican who is challenging St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Randy Smith, a fellow Republican, told the Political Report that he takes issue with the financial considerations that are ballooning incarceration in his parish. Lentz said he wants to shrink the jail population. “I have campaigned on the promise of reducing the current size of our jail by half,” he said in a written message.

“Unfortunately the jail has become a for profit prison with over half of the population either state or federal inmates.  The ICE contract will be closely reviewed after election.”

Still, these contracts have multiplied over the past year. “It seemed that Louisiana was ready to move away from its dependence on mass incarceration,” Jamila Johnson, a senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Advocate in May. “It’s disheartening to see that it continues to rely heavily on it through its switch to the mass incarceration of civil detainees.”

The Political Report contacted candidates in Allen, Concordia, Natchitoches, and St. Tammany parishes to ask whether they would keep or end the incumbent sheriffs’ existing partnerships; no one but Lentz responded.

Elsewhere still, sheriffs who have made deals with ICE are running for re-election unopposed. They include Jackson Parish’s Andy Brown and Bossier Parish’s Julian Whittington, who runs a jail where guards pepper-sprayed ICE detainees during a protest, Mother Jones reported.

And there are other opportunities for ICE to extend its reach. New sheriffs elected in any of the state’s parishes could apply for new contracts. “We are keeping a watchful eye around the state,” said Odoms Hebert, of the ACLU of Louisiana.

“We are just asking for a handshake, an opportunity,” Sesay said. “That opportunity is to not do things that make us feel unwelcome… A welcoming city is one in which diversity is celebrated to improve the opportunities of our residents. That is simple, that is all we ask for, and we want to extend that to the whole of the state of Louisiana.”

The post In Louisiana, Sheriff Elections Will Shape ICE’s Reach appeared first on Bolts.