We have been talking about the lack of accountability in our criminal justice system in order to beat back those claiming that mass incarceration is a problem. I'm not sure exactly what folks think we should be doing with criminals who infringe upon the rights of others, who could care less about safety and security, and who are taking your lives and wreaking havoc in our communities. Are we supposed to be worried about the lives of habitual offenders?
New Orleans now has its first female and first black female Sheriff. Quite frankly, neither one of those really matter. What matters is that whoever is Sheriff understands the ills of society and how they’re going to go about trying to correct them. New Orleans needs to have a Sheriff who is able to assess, when we are talking about alternatives to incarceration, whether or not we have any meaningful programs. We should not implode incarceral strategies for the sake of hoping that we're going to have positive outcomes with the alternatives to prison time if there is not an adequate alternative in place.
The Orleans Parish Sheriff is just the caretaker of the jail, and the city administration finances the jail. If anybody really believes that a penny saved in that budget is going toward alternatives to incarceration, you're smoking crack. We keep hearing the same rhetoric from the grassroots organizations that really believe jail alternatives are going to happen. I'm all in favor of them if we could actually do it, and evaluate evidence-based outcomes of these programs to see whether or not they really make a difference.
As we cross the threshold of 200 murders in the city of New Orleans, we should spend more time talking about the size of the jail, because that’s something the Orleans Parish Sheriff is in charge of. Louisiana has the highest murder rate in the country with 15.8 people murdered per 100,000, and had 734 people murdered in 2020. There are only five states in double digits: Missouri at 11.8. Arkansas is at 10.6, Mississippi at 10.6 and South Carolina at 10.5. Are we trying to tell people we just don't understand the customs, the norms and the rules and the laws?
Looking at the evidence, maybe we are more inherently prone to violence. We have obligations and no accountability. We need to be more worried about victims of crimes instead of the humanity of the offenders!
