By Meghan Friedmann
The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.
NEWS ORLEANS — For years, Louisiana’s prison system often failed to release inmates on time, holding them past their release dates — sometimes for months.
Under Gov. Jeff Landry and Gary Westcott, the state prisons chief for most of Landry’s tenure, the Department of Public Safety & Corrections said it had resolved the problem, commonly known as overdetention, thanks to technological advances that sped up the release date calculation process.
Now, a new lawsuit filed by criminal justice advocates says that isn’t true. It accuses the agency of continuing to routinely hold prisoners beyond the limits of their sentences.
“DOC employs a meandering bureaucratic process that delays release by days, weeks, and even months,” says the lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the Middle District Court of Louisiana and names Westcott as the main defendant.
The two plaintiffs in the case, Lisa Andres and Jaren Brignac, say Louisiana violated their constitutional rights by overdetaining them. Andres claims she was kept 101 days too long, and Brignac alleges the state kept him in custody for nine days after he was supposed to get out of prison.
Attorney General Liz Murrill, who represents the state in civil matters, has called allegations of systemic overdetention overblown, outdated or out of context.
“My office has worked with the LDOC tirelessly for several years to build and implement a new system, train staff, train sheriffs, and train court and clerk staff across our state,” Murrill said in a statement Friday. “These lawsuits are nothing more than an attempt at a money grab. The activists behind these suits do not want progress and actively obstruct it. That’s a shame because LDOC continually works at improving its systems.”
The Promise of Justice Initiative, a criminal justice advocacy group based in New Orleans, is handling the case alongside several other firms. The plaintiffs’ attorneys are requesting that a judge certify the case as a class action lawsuit, meaning more people with overdetention claims could join as plaintiffs.
In recent years, state officials have blamed Louisiana’s record of overdetaining inmates on delays in sentencing paperwork submissions by sheriff’s offices and clerks of court offices. They also have argued they adequately addressed those issues by implementing technological advances that reduced bureaucratic delays.
But Friday’s lawsuit argues the advances have not fixed the problem – and it says the state has failed to make any policy changes or set deadlines that actually require officials to release inmates in a timely manner.
Between August 2024 and the end of 2025, approximately 1,200 people were held past their release dates, it says.
Murrill’s statement also said, “Calculating time is a complex task due to the plainly evident fact that detainees do not come into state custody legally or physically until after they are sentenced.”
The Department of Public Safety & Corrections declined to comment on pending litigation.
A long-running dispute
Allegations of overdetention in Louisiana are not new: since at least 2012, problems related to release date calculations have been described in the state’s own reviews and lamented in federal court decisions. The practice has sparked numerous civil lawsuits and even a federal investigation.
Both civil rights attorneys and the DOC previously agreed the problem was largely related to inmates who are held long enough pretrial that they are due for release on the day they are sentenced.
But even when inmates were ordered released by judges, the state would wait to let them out until it processed sentencing paperwork. Critics said that process moved far too slowly. Friday’s lawsuit also says the state has a sluggish system for processing parole revocation paperwork, which exacerbates the problem.
In the past few years, the Department of Public Safety & Corrections has set up an online portal where sheriffs can submit sentencing paperwork instead of mailing it. And in February, the agency rolled out a new software that performs automated release date calculations.
Still, Friday’s lawsuit alleges, “none of these tools ensures DOC promptly obtains files from the courts or requires a single Department or jail employee to release individuals entitled to immediate release within any period of time, and Secretary Westcott has never required any of those things,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit takes aim specifically at Westcott, alleging he has not taken overdetention seriously enough.
Citing pending litigation, the state previously declined to provide data showing that overdetention was no longer a problem.
Last year, a federal judge allowed two older yet similar lawsuits, which name former prisons chief Jimmy LeBlanc as the lead defendant, to move forward as class action lawsuits. The state has appealed that decision.
Staff writer Blake Leschber contributed to this story.
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