New Orleans’ jail system was troubled decades before 10 inmates made an audacious escape

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In the city that care forgot, the party had made its way into the prison.

More than a decade before the recent New Orleans jailbreak, the city’s lawless lockup went viral in a series of videos showing inmates chugging Budweiser, snorting drugs, gambling with handfuls of cash and ejecting bullets from a handgun.

“You can get what you want in here,” an inmate boasted without a supervisor in sight. “Medication. Pills. Drugs. Heroin.”

The jaw-dropping footage fueled a sweeping 2013 court order intended to reform one of the most violent jails in the country — a decaying emblem of the crime and corruption that have long plagued New Orleans.

A dozen years and tens of millions of dollars later, much of that makeover remains an aspiration despite oversight from a federal judge and the U.S. Justice Department.

The city’s correctional chaos reached a new nadir last week when a guard stepped away to get food, allowing 10 inmates to yank open a faulty cell door, remove a toilet and escape through a hole in the wall where steel bars had been cut away. No one noticed the men scaling a fence and sprinting across an interstate around 1 a.m. Hours passed before the public or even law enforcement was notified.

Five of the fugitives remained on the loose Friday as some 200 federal, state and local officers searched for them.

The dysfunction dates back generations and continued even after the 2015 opening of the state-of-the-art Orleans Justice Center, billed as a $150 million panacea when it replaced its seemingly-cursed predecessor. There were major issues with the building from the outset, including a lack of supervision and adequate housing for mentally ill inmates.

“Now we’ve got a jail with 900 cameras, but that’s cold comfort if no one is watching them,” said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is 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,” Goyeneche added. “If the sheriff or anyone was thinking about terminating the jail consent decree, this escape has ended any serious discussion about that.”

Jail monitor warned about lax supervision

Conditions for catastrophe had been ripe for months. An independent jail monitor warned of “extremely inadequate” staffing levels and dangerously lax supervision — both factors in a jailbreak that exposed figurative and literal holes in security. At the same time, court records show the number of “internal escapes” within the jail has skyrocketed over the past two years, underscoring jailers’ inability to govern the nearly 1,400-inmate population.

“Too often the failure to follow policy is blamed on the lack of staff or training,” the monitors wrote in a report. “Neither is an acceptable excuse.”

Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson initially deflected blame for the jailbreak, implying without evidence that it was politically motivated as she runs for reelection. Appearing before the City Council several days later, she accepted “full accountability” for the “failures.”

She told the City Council she needs millions of dollars to fix “outdated surveillance, aging infrastructure, blind spots in supervision and critical staffing shortages.” The council pushed back, saying the jail had received substantial injections of taxpayer dollars without sufficient oversight.

Perhaps most startlingly, Hutson warned she “cannot guarantee” inmates would not be left unattended 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 said in a statement.

55 years ago, a judge said New Orleans’ jail was unconstitutional

The escape has drawn new attention to deplorable jail conditions that have persisted for decades in New Orleans, a history of neglect that stands out even in a state long associated with overincarceration. The situation became so dire in 2016 that Hutson’s predecessor, Marlin Gusman, was stripped of control of the jail as part of a deal to avert federal receivership.

“I think it’s gotten worse,” said Ricky Peterson, who recalled inmates roaming the facility “at their own leisure” when he was jailed about a decade ago.

“As time progressed, it started going down and down and down,” added Mario Westbrook, 48, who was jailed around the same time on gun possession and marijuana charges. “You shouldn’t have to go through those type of conditions.”

In 1970, a federal judge declared the overcrowded Orleans Parish Prison to be unconstitutional, saying conditions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and “shock the conscience as a matter of elemental decency.” A later lawsuit alleged that female inmates were shackled during childbirth. Suicides and in-custody deaths abounded, including the fatal beating of a man by two deputies in 2004.

Then as now, the sheriff accused the city of chronically underfunding the jail, while city officials countered the lockup was most afflicted by incompetent management.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 wrought unspeakable havoc at the jail, as inmates found themselves stranded in chest-high water and the lockup lost power.

A 2009 Justice Department report warned of “calculated abuse” by deputies who would beat inmates so frequently they developed a code of ordering an inmate to “tie his shoes” when they wanted to brawl.

The jailhouse videos

A major landmark came in 2013 when a class-action lawsuit resulted in the consent decree, a detailed plan for overhauling jail policies, reducing violence and improving inmate medical treatment.

That litigation unearthed the viral jailhouse videos, which also included a 2009 clip of an apparently escaped inmate cavorting on the city’s famed Bourbon Street for what the Justice Department described as “an evening of leisure.”

“The conduct in the video may have occurred several years ago,” the Justice Department said at the time, “but the policies, practices and culture that enabled the outrageous conduct remain relevant.”

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Mustian reported from New York.