By Joseph Cranney and Ben Myers
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — Long before 10 inmates escaped from the Orleans Parish jail, the lockup had a pattern of unmanned tiers, faulty cell locks and inmates wandering without supervision, detailed records from the past five years show.
The records paint a chaotic picture of violence, cellblock fires, smuggled-in drugs and other contraband. Dorms housing even the jail’s most problematic inmates have had serious security breaches. Meanwhile, the front line deputies of Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson’s undermanned and overwhelmed department have faced near-daily attacks or harassment.
Inmates attack, spit on, sexually harass or threaten jail staff — among other altercations — at a rate around three times a week, jail records show. They’re also often allowed to roam freely within housing units that have no guards on duty.
Deputies are assigned to two or more housing units “more often than not,” federal monitors said, and they don’t make regular security rounds. An audit last year found the day shift only performed 15% of the checks they said they did; the night shift, 7%. Guards are supposed to conduct cell-by-cell checks every 30 minutes, but they typically only do them twice a day.
Inmates were written up for jamming or damaging the locks of their cell doors at least 25 times last year, weekly incident logs show. The number’s likely an undercount, since the logs only cover part of last year, and Hutson’s administration has frequently complained about a need for more secure locks.
The records show that the problems have grown worse under Hutson, who didn’t respond to a request to be interviewed for this story. But as she’s spoken out about the escape, she’s previously said the issues can largely be attributed to jail overcrowding and understaffing. Her staff can adequately supervise around 900 inmates, she has said. The jail is now housing around 1,300.
Hutson has placed part of the blame on the New Orleans City Council, which has blocked her repeated requests to increase her $65 million budget. Council members say Hutson has refused to provide sufficient details of how additional money would be spent.
Council member JP Morrell said Friday that The Times-Picayune’s findings are “deeply disturbing,” adding that “none of it was shared with the Council throughout this entire crisis.”
“Time and again, the Sheriff fails to provide any transparency about conditions inside the jail, refuses to explain her budget, and continues to demand large sums of taxpayer money without offering any receipts,” Morrell said.
The jail’s long-simmering problems exploded into public view on May 16. After the lone guard on duty for pod 1D left their post, 10 inmates — almost all of whom have been convicted of or face pending charges for violent crimes — busted open a cell door and escaped the jail through a hole in a wall behind a toilet.
Eight escapees have since been recaptured and transferred to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola , where they are being held without bond. Two, Antoine Massey and Derrick Groves , remain at-large.
Law enforcement announced last week that they’ve increased rewards to $50,000 for tips that lead to their arrests.
Old problems
The many problems at the New Orleans jail can be traced to the late 1960s, when the former Orleans Parish Prison was first placed under federal oversight over conditions that a judge said “shock the conscience as a matter of elemental decency.”
A little more than a decade ago, a dozen inmates filed a class-action lawsuit against the jail and former longtime Sheriff Marlin Gusman , describing allegations of violence, sexual assault and a near-total lack of supervision.
Guards often worked two floors at once, leaving entire tiers unwatched for hours, allowing violent offenders to jump people, sometimes wielding shanks as big as “kitchen knives,” according to the lawsuit.
“These facilities are not undermanned, they are unmanned,” an inmate wrote in a sworn statement in 2012.
A video from inside the jail later released as part of that lawsuit made international news in 2013. It showed inmates brandishing a loaded gun, shooting up and snorting drugs, drinking cans of beer and gambling with stacks of cash on games of dice.
New Orleans officials signed a consent decree the same year, which put the jail under a federal judge’s watch.
The Orleans Justice Center opened in 2015, a $150 million facility designed as a constitutional jail, whose opening Gusman hailed as “the end of an era.”
But the facility has had infrastructure and security problems, despite its newness.
And while the jail’s fluctuating population, which OPSO doesn’t control, has increased by as much as 70% since Hutson took office, records show inmate-on-inmate attacks under Hutson have increased about 150%.
There were a little under 300 in Gusman’s last full year in office in 2021, while there were 735 attacks last year, which monitors called an “all-time high.”
Attacks on staff are also up 25%, according to data compiled by jail monitors. The altercations include instances when guards were struck, sexually harassed, threatened, spit on or had bodily fluids flung at them, incident logs show.
And rates of contraband smuggled behind the jail’s walls are up 61%.
Council member Oliver Thomas , who chairs the criminal justice committee, said there’s one clear conclusion from those numbers.
“You cannot have any successful part of the criminal justice system, especially a jail, when the people that are remanded to it have free reign, control and drastically outnumber the people there who are supposed to maintain order,” Thomas said.
Thomas also acknowledged the difficult work that the jail demands of its front line deputies, whose pay starts around $18 an hour.
“Anybody who moves forward with a fix without considering what they’ve had to deal with doesn’t have a doesn’t have a heart or soul,” he said. The council agreed to pay deputies a $2.43-per-hour raise in 2022, but has stiff-armed Hutson’s requests for more money since.
‘Initiative to violate’
The Times-Picayune reviewed more than 1,000 pages of federal monitor reports, weekly incident write-ups, daily shakedown logs, use-of-force reports and news articles.
OPSO has yet to turn over a trove of recent incident reports, requested by The Times-Picayune, from pod 1D, where the escapees were housed. The newspaper obtained a batch of incident reports from Hutson’s first six months in office from 2022.
Though the incidents date several years, they provide a detailed look at the jail’s daily security challenges.
And they’re full of examples of what federal monitors, in their most recent report released last week, said is a persistent problem: Inmates who are “emboldened by their repeated refusals to obey orders from deputies.”
“The harm that results from not having a deputy in each pod, especially when inmates are out, is evident by the repeated serious incidents occurring when there is no deputy on the unit, including those resulting in serious injury and/or necessitating hospital routes,” monitors said.
Inmates have been observed smoking marijuana and narcotics, snorting crushed pills through empty pen covers, fashioning weapons from copper or metal door stripping. The reports also describe a culture of inmates openly harassing, threatening and disregarding jail security.
One report described a scene on the jail’s first floor, where the escape happened. A guard watched an inmate squeeze through an apparently faulty cell door, ignore commands, then descend a set of stairs and clock another inmate in the face, knocking him to the ground.
On the floor above, in pod 2E, an irate inmate cursed at a deputy and refused to exit a cell for a security check. When a guard found drugs in the cell, the inmate ripped them from the guard’s hand and flushed them down the toilet.
A female deputy on the third floor asked an inmate to move cells because of a plumbing problem. He yelled obscenities, pulled out his penis and gestured at her, threatening, “I’mma kill you in that world!”
Another guard wrote of his frustrations with inmates who brazenly continued to jam the locks of their cell doors: “These offenders have received (many) verbal warnings about tampering with the security measures of the doors and yet they still have the initiative to violate!”
Monitors continue to decry the jail’s failures to properly supervise inmates, writing in a May 27 report that the “majority” of the jail’s 24 housing units aren’t properly staffed.
Guards are supposed to make security rounds to every cell at least every 30 minutes, monitors said, but OPSO staff generally only performs cell-by-cell checks when they do inmate counts, once every 12-hour shift.
As for the 10 who escaped around 1 a.m. on May 16, they weren’t discovered missing until jail staff did the day’s first count, around eight hours later.
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