Change, corrections focus
By ALLEN M. JOHNSON JR
The Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — Jailers and prison wardens attending the 138th American Correctional Association convention ended their gathering Wednesday, while their Louisiana hosts vowed to reverse the state’s reputation as a world’s incarceration capital.
“We’re neck and neck with Texas, but we’re ahead of China, South Africa - pick a place,” said retired Judge Calvin Johnson, former chief jurist of New Orleans Criminal Court.
In 2006, there were 36,376 inmates in Louisiana’s 105 jails and 13 prisons - or 846 prisoners per 100,000 people - 52 percent higher than the national average, according to the National Institute of Corrections. That year, Louisiana’s crime rate was 22 percent higher than the national average, the Institute reported.
State corrections spokeswoman Pam Laborde cited several factors for Louisiana’s high incarceration rate: historically high poverty rates, high-school drop-outs topping 14,000 a year, tough sentencing guidelines and a 47.2 percent offender recidivism rate that’s only slightly below the national average of 50 percent.
"(Corrections) Secretary James M. LeBlanc knows the department can do better,” Laborde said.
A former warden at Dixon Correctional Institute at Jackson, LeBlanc is reorganizing the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in an effort to duplicate his successes at Dixon, including lowering recidivism rates of DCI offenders to the mid-30s, saving taxpayers millions of dollars, Laborde said.
LeBlanc also has met with Louisiana’s sheriffs to inform them of DOC’s “Re-entry Initiatives,” with the goal of establishing similar facilities for the state’s 64 parishes.
“We must include offenders on the local level in re-entry planning if we are going to lower recidivism numbers and thus reduce incarceration rates, reduce crime and reduce victimization,” she said.
Re-entry programs are the buzz in corrections circles. Such initiatives include vocational training for incarcerated inmates upon release - a housing plan, job opportunities and access to substance abuse treatment.
“It used to be - ‘you cuff ‘em, we stuff ‘em,’ but now we try other strategies,” Cathy Fontenot, an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, told a panel last week in New Orleans hosted by the RAND Corp., a think tank.
Fontenot, a 16-year corrections veteran, said rising incarceration rates of women and juveniles in Louisiana signaled a need for a change of corrections strategies.
The quicker an offender gets a job upon release, “the more successful he or she will be in not returning to prison,” Laborde said Wednesday.
The department’s Office of Probation and Parole supervised 38,057 probationers and 24,663 parolees in 2006, according to the National Institute of Corrections.
Johnson, who now chairs the New Orleans Area Metropolitan Human Services District, said Wednesday his office will soon join the corrections department for the opening of the state’s first “Day Reporting Center” - a pilot diversionary program aimed at reducing the number of parolees who return to prison for technical violations. The center is a collaborative effort with the department, the state Office of Addictive Disorders and Baptist Community Ministries, he said.
“We will have wrap-around services for that person who is placed on parole: mental health, substance abuse treatment, job training - all of things that keep that individual from becoming productive,” he said. “The goal is to reduce the recidivism rate.”
The program will involve 75 parolees in its first year of operation and cost more than half-a-million dollars. Scheduled to open this month, but delayed by a leasing squabble, the center will open about Oct. 1, at a former state Job Service office, he said.
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