By Patrick Sloan-Turner
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana’s 2024 decision to treat all 17-year-olds as adults in courtrooms and jails has left them in a costly limbo that is straining local government budgets, parish leaders say.
While the state may consider those 17-year-olds adults — meaning they can’t be housed in juvenile detention centers — federal regulations still treat them as minors, which means they can’t be housed within sight or sound of adult inmates under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. That’s left most parishes with no place to put those teens, and no choice but to send them upstate — at a steep price — to one of the only Louisiana jails able to take them.
And over the past two years, the cost has continued to grow, local officials say.
Take St. Landry Parish.
In April 2024, officials there were forced to start paying to send these inmates to Jackson Parish, since the local jail isn’t equipped to keep 17-year-olds separate. It cost the parish $250 per day, per inmate.
Now, it’s up to $325 per inmate, says parish president Jessie Bellard.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” he said.
All told, Bellard says the added costs of the new law total about $500,000 a year — in a parish where the annual general fund budget is only about $10 million.
The 2024 law was meant to crack down on juvenile crime rates and reduce the costs to state government. But while the change may have lowered costs for the state’s Office of Juvenile Justice, it placed a financial burden on parishes, as nearly none of the parish jails in Louisiana were built to house 17-year-olds and keep them separate from adults.
And the small parish north of Lafayette is far from the only local government dealing with the issue.
A youth crime crackdown
Passed during the Legislature’s second special session in 2024, Senate Bill 3, by Sen. Heather Cloud, R- Turkey Creek, was part of a tough-on-crime legislative package supported by Gov. Jeff Landry.
The new law effectively made it so 17-year-olds would be prosecuted as adults, no matter the crime, and removed them from juvenile housing.
In his remarks to kick off the special session, Landry said much of the violent crime in Louisiana was being committed by juveniles and it was time to treat them tougher.
“These juveniles are not innocent children any longer; they are hardened criminals,” Landry said. “They violently attack our citizens, our law enforcement officers and even our juvenile correction officers without hesitation.”
In a committee hearing on the bill, Cloud said the bill would save money at the state level, since fewer youths would go to Office of Juvenile Justice custody. But as lawmakers debated, some warned that the change could have a negative effect at the local level.
“While there’s a savings on one end, who’s going to pick it up on the other end?” Sen. Gerald Boudreaux, D- Lafayette, asked during a Senate Finance Committee hearing.
Analysts told Boudreaux and others that locals could face new costs to retrofit their facilities, as 17-year-olds must be kept separate from adults under federal regulations.
Cloud did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The governor’s office also did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2024, Cloud said local costs were “indeterminate” and told her colleagues the bill had the support of the state’s sheriff and district attorney associations.
“They know what they’re getting into,” she said.
But in April 2024, when the bill became law, it spurred a small crisis in Baton Rouge and led to conflict between the mayor-president and sheriff.
Officials knew the change was coming, but did not have the time or money to retrofit East Baton Rouge Parish’s decaying jail.
Like most other parishes, Baton Rouge had no other option other than to send its 17-year-olds to Jackson Parish. It now also sends some of these pretrial inmates to Catahoula Parish.
The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office pays $100 a day to reserve a bed for a 17-year-old inmate, and $175 a day for each teen housed there. The total daily price per inmate will soon increase from $275 to $295, the Sheriff’s Office said.
In July, 19 East Baton Rouge 17-year-olds were housed out of the parish.
Financial records show that East Baton Rouge is now paying around $1.17 million more each year to house inmates out of parish than they did before the state made 17-year-olds adults.
‘That’s extortion’
Washington Parish Sheriff Jason Smith was elected in 2023 and took office just a couple months after the law changed.
The office was sending 17-year-olds to Jackson Parish. As a smaller parish, it only had one such detainee.
Smith said he was shocked at the price tag: $300 each day for that single inmate.
“That’s extortion,” Smith said.
That same day, Smith said he sent his transport staffer back up to Jackson Parish to pick the inmate up. He cleared out his cell block for women, moved them to Bogalusa City Jail and moved the single 17-year-old into that space.
Washington Parish is one of the most overcrowded local jails in the state, the sheriff said, and moving inmates around isn’t easy.
“I’ve got to have them segregated by sight and sound,” Smith said. “That means I have to keep one inmate in this space that I would normally have 10-12.”
During a visit to Jackson Parish, Smith said he saw some inmates being held in repurposed shipping containers.
The one to five 17-year-olds his parish has at a time are still being held in the former women’s cell block, which he decided was the best option, given the cost of transport and housing. Smith also did not like the burden housing them in Jackson Parish put on inmates’ families — inmates who haven’t been convicted of the crime of which they’ve been accused.
“It deprives the 17-year-old who, again, is presumed innocent, from visiting with his family, right?” Smith said. “It’s just not worth it to me.”
The Jackson Parish Correctional Center in Jonesboro is run in part by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company that has faced scrutiny over inmate deaths in custody and its contracts to house ICE detainees.
The Jackson Parish Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to request for comment.
‘Are we benefiting?’
Last year, the state broke ground on a new facility in Concordia Parish that will only house 17-year-olds. According to the application for the project, the new facility will have 80 beds and will only house state inmates from East Baton Rouge, Lafayette, LaSalle, Livingston, Madison, Tensas, West Carroll, West Feliciana and Winn parishes.
Boudreaux voted against the bill when it came before the Senate two years ago.
He said he is against charging 17-year-olds as adults for more crimes, but he said the costs were a concern too.
Like most other parishes, Boudreaux says the costs are piling up in Lafayette too. And while he says elected officials are going to have to figure out how to remedy these added costs, he’s not optimistic it will happen the next time the legislature is in session.
“Next year is a political year, so let’s be real; it’s not going to come up,” Boudreaux said, a reference to reelection campaigns next November. “But it’s definitely going to be something that needs to come up once the election cycle is over with.”
Two years ago, Landry defended the costs of his tough-on-crime measures in his remarks to kick off the special session.
“While many say focus on the cost, I say focus on the cost to society, I say focus on the cost to our citizens in loss of property, in the disruption of their lives and in the irreparable tragedy of losing a loved one,” he said.
But with two years of data, Boudreaux now wonders whether there was any benefit in making 17-year-olds adults.
“If we take a look back and see that, after two years, the cost is off the chain, what have we done for the rehabilitation process?” he said. “If we’re shipping them off somewhere and it’s costing more, are we benefiting?”
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