What we’ve got here is failure to communicate…
And what a dangerous, industrial-sized failure it was. Anyone who's seen Cool Hand Luke knows the line I’m referring to, which, under the circumstances, I use in a quite different light than in the movie.
But the words fit for what happened Friday on too many levels. And I wish I didn’t have to be so heavy-handed with the cliches in the case of the escaped inmates from the Orleans Justice Center. But it was all so staggeringly dramatic, you couldn’t help but feel like it was a sequence straight out of Hollywood.
Inmates dream of humiliating the people who keep them locked up. And on Friday, they won the Oscar, because they made Sheriff Susan Hutson and her staff look like fools.
Just think about it: A lapsed and likely compromised prison staff. Faulty cell doors, useless locks, and a blind camera system. Images of a broken steel toilet with expletives and taunts scrawled around a makeshift escape hatch. A video of inmates bursting from the prison doors and into the free world. The final escape over the prison wall and across the interstate, resulting in a statewide, potentially nationwide manhunt.
Welcome to New Orleans, folks. We're doing just fine.
But here’s the thing. As much as you could focus on the drama of it all, the wild narrative, and even a few of the comical elements of this public humiliation, we must recognize the real implications of what just happened.
Just as one example, the family of Jamar Robisnon, which included children, was uprooted and moved into protection because Derick Groves, one of the escapees, poses extreme physical danger to them. I guarantee you they aren’t laughing or buying a t-shirt or bumper sticker of the prisoner’s artwork.
If you look at the charges for those who escaped, you quickly realize that what happened on Friday endangers our community in a big way.
So what now? Six of the ten inmates remain on the lam, five of whom are accused of murder or attempted murder charges, all of them with weapons charges. Now we’re left — as we so often are in this city — to evaluate what happened, and work toward preventing a recurrence.
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But you don’t have to be a forensic scientist to see what went wrong. It was a systemic breakdown in standard operating procedure softened by a warped ideology espoused by weak leadership.
On one hand, I know how hard it is to maintain a jail. Trust me, it takes a lot of work to do it right. It’s the most difficult asset in the criminal justice system to manage, bar none.
But on the other hand, just because it's a massively complicated asset doesn’t excuse ineptness, laziness, and corruption. And what we saw Friday was a complete failure from the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office. Not only in the fact that prisoners escaped, but all that unraveled after.
First off, it took OPSO seven hours to learn of the escape. Then, OPSO delayed notifying other law enforcement agencies of the jail break. And I'd bet every cent it was because they were struggling to pull together the identity of the ten escapees, initially reported as 11. They failed to identify the media and the public in a timely fashion. The NOLAREADY notification that went out at 2:34 pm was basically a joke.
There’s no other way to put it: Friday was a three-ring circus, Sheriff Hutson the ringmaster.
Now, similarly to what we saw with the terror attack, the blame machine is firing on all cylinders. Sheriff Hutson is refusing accountability, blaming staffing issues, insufficient funding, and a dilapidated infrastructure.
Governor Landry is highlighting DA Williams' slow prosecution process, pointing out, "Nine of the 10 escapees have been in the pretrial stages in OPCC for years now."
The DA Jason Williams wasted no time getting political, endorsing the Sheriff’s opponent the day of the escape, as if that was the time or place. I understand you're upset. But as the DA, you have to work with Hutson and her staff through this mess. And right now we’re focused on getting these escapees back, not political grandstanding.
The only useful thing to come out of this so far is Landry’s and Moreno's proposed course of action, a full-scale audit of the Orleans Justice Center's infrastructure and procedures.
That’s the action we need right now. We need to reassure the public that an event like this will not happen again. And we need to know who didn’t do what, when, why, and how. We need to reprimand and fire those who were involved or negligent.
There's also no use in avoiding it: Ideology contributed to this debacle.
Governor Landry put it well when he explained that this event was emblematic of a progressive mentality that dilutes the boundaries between inmates and guards, and erodes the very concept of justice.
Sheriff Hutson routinely refers to inmates in custody as “residents.” And while everybody should be treated with dignity and respect, I think the most dignifying thing is to respect those whom these inmates have harmed. They're not in there on baseless claims, and that means treating them in regard to their actions.
What happens when you start referring to them as residents? Might they think, "Hey, maybe I don’t deserve to be in here after all. Maybe the people in here might be willing to help us out."
And maybe twisting language like this could eventually have an effect on your staff. Maybe it could soften them up to the idea of assisting an escape.
I'm shocked that this has to be said, but you're not running a hotel; it's a jail. Doing so requires a hardline stance to protect the community from the people you’re paid to keep isolated.
This is what happens when you lose sight of the basics and elect people who are more intent on activism than public safety.
And for all the talk on the campaign trail, where is the sheriff now?
She’s out deflecting, denying, and evading responsibility. She’s not addressing the public when there are a thousand unanswered questions. It's another uniquely New Orleans catastrophe brought on by uniquely poor leadership.
I guess it's time to queue Plastic Jesus…
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