A common response to unsafe and overcrowded jails and prisons is to build new ones. Sometimes states and localities make that investment without prodding, but most often it’s because of pressure from the U.S. Justice Department and the federal courts.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach to the problem. Buildings wear out, especially those that take the kind of abuse that jails and prisons receive from those who are forced to live in them.
But a new facility, as demonstrated recently by the jailbreak in New Orleans, is not a panacea. A jail, no matter how recently built, can be unsafe or unsecure if those who run it and work in it are lackadaisical or corrupt.
After a previous jail scandal, New Orleans built a $150 million justice center that was supposedly state-of-the-art. It opened in 2015, but within a decade some of the same old dysfunction that plagued the previous facility had returned. For months there had been warnings that the jail was dangerously understaffed and undersupervised.
Those warnings played out on May 16, when 10 inmates — six of whom had been locked up on charges of murder or attempted murder — escaped, thanks to the negligence or cooperation of jail employees, plus a faulty cell door not getting repaired or replaced. The escape reportedly occurred when the guard responsible for monitoring the inmates’ cell pod took a meal break and left them unsupervised. And the escape was allegedly abetted by a maintenance worker at the jail who turned off the water to a toilet, so that there would not be a telltale flood when the inmates moved it out of the way of their escape route. The maintenance worker reportedly told authorities that he had been threatened with his life if he did not cooperate — a threat from which he apparently didn’t believe the guards or other jail personnel would be able or willing to protect him.
As of this writing, eight of the 10 escaped inmates have been recaptured, and there have been no reports of harm being committed by any of them on innocent people in their path. That’s been lucky, considering the violent criminal histories of most of the escapees.
As this escape shows, however, the people who run the jails are just as critical as the brick, steel and technology used to try to secure the lockups.
Rafael Goyeneche, the president of a New Orleans-based criminal justice watchdog group, summed up well that community’s frustration with jail problems that persist no matter how much has been spent on the facility.
“Now we’ve got a jail with 900 cameras, but that’s cold comfort if no one is watching them,” he said.
New Orleans’ jail problems may be extreme, but any community with a jail should be worried if either the facility or the staffing is not up to snuff.
