By Joseph Cranney
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — By the time 10 detainees escaped the Orleans Parish jail in May, the doors and locks on holding cells across the facility were failing so frequently that maintenance workers were scrambling to fix them at a rate of around twice a day, records show.
“NONE OF THE DOOR(s) WANT TO CLOSE,” worker Stephen Carter wrote May 15 when he serviced the top level of pod 1C on the first floor, according to maintenance logs.
Just one day later, the escape happened on the same floor, a tier over.
Easily compromised sliding-cell doors were among the many security breaches that helped to facilitate the escape. They are used to house the jail’s general population on the first floor, even though the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office has since acknowledged the doors are the facility’s most prone to tampering.
Now, Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson wants to replace all of the jail’s locks with expensive, electromechanical terminals made by an Alabama company that mount directly to the door, which experts say are among the most tamper proof on the market.
OPSO declined to answer questions about how much the project would cost taxpayers. The total is likely somewhere between the $5.1 million the agency previously estimated for “locking system” improvements and the $15 million in bonds that OPSO issued last month for security upgrades.
In Carter’s missive, he wrote that “doors are jammed constantly,” adding that management ought to address the “monetary consequences of constant servicing of these slider doors.” Attempts to reach Carter failed.
The sliding doors have long tracks that require routine lubrication and can easily be gunked up when detainees stuff them with foreign objects.
In the 60 days up to the escape, records show case after case of locks jammed with tissue paper, towels, socks, latex gloves, playing cards — even deodorant caps and Scrabble tiles. Maintenance workers noted doors that weren’t “locking at all,” allowing detainees to “pop out” of their cells.
In the wee hours of the day following Carter’s warning, surveillance footage later showed escapees ripping open a locked sliding door before escaping through a hole in the wall of a holding cell, behind a toilet.
Nine escapees have since been recaptured. The manhunt for the 10th, convicted murderer Derrick Groves, could enter its fourth month by the end of the week.
New locks
The Orleans Justice Center is far from being the only jail that’s dealt with chronic lock tampering. And experts say sliding-cell doors can still be found in most jails across the country, though corrections officials in other states have continued to flag them as particularly problematic.
Still, moving toward surface-mounted locks would bring the Orleans jail in line with others that have recently opted for maximum security upgrades, said Mark Adger , who was the chief jailer in Fulton County, Georgia for nearly 35 years and has studied locking mechanisms in local jails.
Adger’s jail in the early 2010s had daily problems with a lockset that dated to the late 1980s. His jail was the first to install the so-called “wedge” locks made by Alabama -based Willo Products, which house the lock’s latch bolt in reinforced steel.
“We surveyed the entire region on what (jails) were using — electronics, electromagnetic, hydraulics — inmates found a way to defeat every last one of them,” Adger said in an interview. “They weren’t able to defeat the Willo.”
Two of OPSO’s 24 pods have been outfitted with the Willo wedge so far, an OPSO spokesperson said.
The Willo locks have indicator lights affixed to their hood, which can connect to a control panel for remote monitoring. By design, if a door is locked properly, the lights glow green. If they’re open or jammed, they glow red.
Gary York, a former jail officer and Florida -based corrections analyst, said the lack of those lights in the Orleans lockup was another problem with its sliding doors.
“The sliders make it easy for the inmate to jam because there’s no indicators to the control room,” York said. “It doesn’t really have any signs for the officer unless they physically go to every cell door and check. With the sliding door, you must do constant, constant, surveillance.”
The jail’s doors are also being fitted with hinges that run the length of the door, which are “much more difficult to access from the inside of a cell, making them harder to damage or manipulate,” an OPSO spokesperson said.
‘Major design flaws’
Up for reelection, Hutson continues to face questions about broken locks. She told CBS News in an interview Thursday that faulty locks were evidence that she inherited a broken jail when she took office in 2022.
“There are major design flaws in it that make it unsafe for those who are housed here and make it unsafe for those who work here,” Hutson told CBS News , including “the locks and other mechanisms.”
Hutson never mentioned sliding doors, specifically. In an email, the jail’s architect, Jerry Hebert , defended his design’s inclusion of sliding doors.
Hebert, also the former chair of the chair of the Design Committee of the American Correctional Association , said he forbade the project from including “chain driven” sliders, notorious within the industry for their lack of security.
An OPSO spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about the types of sliding doors used at the jail. The facility opened in 2015.
Fortifying and hardening
Facing rock-bottom approval ratings and a host of challengers in her reelection campaign this fall, Hutson in recent weeks has sought to make the case that the jail’s security failures boil down to a lack of money.
At a candidate’s forum in late July, Hutson told a crowd of nearly 100 that it costs "$500,000 a pod,” to change the locks, money she said the New Orleans City Council has denied her agency. “And there’s 24 pods,” she added.
The City Council has said Hutson failed to present detailed line items in her budget requests. They rejected Hutson’s latest ask in early July to help cover what OPSO says is $19 million in needed upgrades for the jail’s security, including adding fencing to recreational yards, razor wire for perimeter walls and locks.
Most of those costs will be covered by the $15 million in issued bonds, which the State Bond Commission signed off on in mid-July. Hutson has vowed that “every dollar from the bond will go directly towards fortifying and hardening the jail.”
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