Louisiana Corrections in the 1980s: In Search of Alternatives

by Burk Foster

(July 1988)

Appeared in Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau, and Douglas Dennis, The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, 3^rded., Lafayette Louisiana: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995, pp. 70-79. Originally appeared in The Angolite, July/August 1988, pp. 37-51.

When Edwin Edwards returned to begin his third term as governor of Louisiana in March 1984, he found a state in far different circumstances than the one he had passed on to his Republican successor, Dave Treen, only four years earlier. Edwards might have felt a bit like the owner of a prosperous estate who goes on an extended vacation, only to return and find that his caretaker has allowed the place to fall into near-ruin.

The oil boom had gone bust, the golden days of the seventies were a fading memory. The state was beset with problems--economic, environmental, educational, ethical--that the Treen administration (aptly described as "government in slow motion") had been able to do little about. Coming into office, Edwards already faced a budget deficit of $100 million (or maybe as much as $400 million), a deficit that would steadily worsen during his term and eventually play a big part in denying him his matched set of gubernatorial terms; his quest for a fourth term would end in defeat in the 1987 primary.

The question at this point was: which division of state government was in the worst shape? Many were hurting, none more evidently so than the Department of Corrections. When Dave Treen was campaigning for governor in 1979, he promised to be tough on criminals. Seldom has a Louisiana politician kept a promise so well. Treen refused to confront the problems of prison overcrowding directly, declined to build new prisons and dismissed Edwards' holdover head of the DOC, Paul Phelps, when Phelps refused to support Treen's "double-bunking" plan to cram more inmates into existing spaces. Treen compiled the stingiest record on executive clemency (pardons and commutations) of any governor in modern Louisiana history, and it was toward the end of his term that capital punishment was resumed in Louisiana after a 22-year layoff. Finally Treen walked away and left the whole mess for Edwards to deal with.

Early in 1984, shortly before Treen left, the legislative fiscal office issued a report highly critical of the DOC. "The department has not managed its prison construction program in an efficient manner and has failed to adequately plan for future growth." Pre-fabricated prison cells, authorized in 1983 to house some of the thousand additional inmates by which the DOC's population was growing every year were never built. The backlog of state inmates in parish jails was greater than ever, bringing jails dangerously close to capacity.

The fiscal office projected cost figures that were truly staggering: three new prisons needed immediately, at a cost of $170 million; the DOC budget, which stood at $160 million in 1984, projected at $322.5 million in 1989; $240 million, much of it in state funds, needed for parish jail expansion.

The first thing Edwards did, to deal with this hand-me-down disorder (much of it, in all fairness to the Treen administration, readily apparent in legislative and judicial trends clearly established while Edwards was still governor in the 1970s), was to reappoint Paul Phelps to his old job. The first thing Phelps did was to start talking about alternatives to imprisonment, a recurring subject that would carry him through to the end of Edwards' term in 1988 and into his next career, as the once again former director of the DOC.

This time he would have four years (plus a bit of warm-up time, to follow up on his almost six years in office the first time) to sell Louisiana's people, its criminal justice officials and its lawmakers on the advantages of not locking up criminals. Like another Phelps on a once-popular television series (now defunct), his would prove to be a "Mission Impossible." Or at least a "mission unpopular," with Phelps and his allies fighting an uphill battle for every inch of new ground.

Phelps said, when Edwards announced his reappointment as secretary of the DOC on October 26, 1983, that he had "some very good ideas and a plan in mind." He said there was an absolute requirement for new prisons to be built. "There is no way around it that I can see."

But building more prisons was not the only answer Phelps had in mind; it never had been. Property criminals did not need to be locked up at huge taxpayer's expense, he said. "The basic solution has to be in the probation and parole area," though with a lot more supervision than exists today if it is to work.

Though Edwin Edwards had not been known as a prison reformer his first two terms, this time around he seemed more inclined to support Phelps' efforts to reduce the state's overemphasis on imprisonment. "You can look forward to an emphasis on prison alternatives, bearing in mind an emphasis on protecting society," Governor Edwards said, early in his term. "Off the top of my head, I'd say there are a significant number of people who could be let go with no danger to society."

While Phelps was promoting intensive probation on the Georgia model, Edwards was appointing the first of two study committees he wanted to look into ways of reducing prison overpopulation. The Forgotten Man Committee held its first meeting on April 25, 1984. This 80-member committee was the resurrection of a 1958 committee, appointed by Governor Earl Long, that had urged major penal reforms in a 1960 report. The new committee was intended specifically to consider the problems caused by the accumulation of a large number of "practical lifers" within the system; in a broader sense, it was to present the governor with a package of suggestions for safely reducing the prison population.

The committee set to work and Phelps did, too--trying to convince the 1984 legislature of the merits of intensive probation. Testifying before a legislative committee on the budget, Phelps said he could save the state $21 million a year by putting 3,000 convicts on intensive probation. He calculated the cost of the program at $10 a day, versus $31 a day it cost to keep a man in prison.

Phelps wanted to hire more regular probation and parole officers as well, citing full prisons and parish jails nearing their court-set capacity of 9,126 inmates (2,700 of whom were state prisoners). Phelps pointed out the facts: "If we don't do something very shortly, every cell in this state will be full."

It made sense to Phelps, but not to the public or the legislature. Rep. Ed Scogin, R-Slidell, said, "The public is still insisting that those who violate the law be taken off the streets." Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick was even more plain: "The purpose of having a penitentiary is to provide for the safety of the public, not to cut corners and save some money."

The Edwards administration received a strong indication of how its reform legislation would fare in two House votes on May 22. Legislators overwhelmingly rejected, by votes of 71-22 and 68-21, bills that would have increased the rate of "good time" from 15 days to 25 days a month for some less dangerous offenders and would have allowed second time felony probation for non-violent offenders. One legislator, deriding the second bill as "three strikes before you go to jail," summed up the mood of this first "reform" session: "People would prefer to spend money building new jails rather than putting criminals back on the streets."

In the off season Edwards went on to appoint his second committee, the awkwardly-named Governor's Prison Overcrowding Policy Task Force. The Task Force, which began meeting in September 1984, would have plenty to study. The state's prison population was increasing by an average of 124 inmates a month, and the legislature had made clear its preference for new prisons over substantive reforms (except that many of the anti-reform legislators were also anti-taxes, making it difficult to raise new funds for any purpose).

The Task Force was intended to follow a separate path from that of the Forgotten Man Committee. The Task Force was a much smaller group, a kind of insiders' club made up mostly of influential political leaders and criminal justice officials. It was supposed to come up with practical, immediate, politically acceptable measures to relieve overcrowding. The Forgotten Man Committee, on the other hand, was the broadly-based citizens' group, valued as much for public relations as for any specific proposals it might make. The Forgotten Man Committee was to dream, and to try to popularize its dream among the public; the Task Force had to face reality.

Paul Phelps was hard up against reality, too, as he prepared for the next legislative session in 1985. In speeches around the state, Phelps described Louisiana's overflowing prisons as the product of oil money and a get tough on crime policy. But with oil revenues dwindling, the state would have to borrow money to build new prisons. He urged that more money be spent on halfway houses and on probation and parole. The trouble was, he recognized, that "people think parole and probation is soft on crime." State legislators have "reflected the attitudes of their constituencies . . . that the only way to punish people is to lock them up."

The Prison Overcrowding Task Force, meeting early in 1985, was told by Pete Adams, the executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, that the public was not going to buy any task force recommendations based on cost alone. "If you have ever been victimized, your priorities changed very quickly," he said.

An editorial in the Lafayette Daily Advertiser a few days later made the same point. "We do not like prison overcrowding and we do not like the millions upon millions that it costs to maintain penal facilities. But more important than the expense is the protection of the public. Expense absolutely cannot become the sole justification for avoiding justice and thus increasing risks to the public."

Somewhere along the line, it seemed, justice in Louisiana had become equated with imprisonment: justice was locking people up, injustice was any lesser punishment. Paul Phelps would have been the first to admit that, conditions being what they were, there was considerable merit in the public's skeptical view of probation and parole. In November 1984, DOC figures showed 249 probation and parole officers trying to supervise 29,522 probationers and parolees. This was an average caseload of 119. Probation and parole services needed to be expanded, Phelps said, and the state ought to go ahead with intensive probation, which he had over-optimistically hoped would be ready to try in a pilot program by January 1, 1985.

A New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial on the prison crisis suggested that "the two publicly acceptable alternatives would seem to be to increase the number of parole and probation officers to realistic levels and to plan now for some more prisons. It is irresponsible to insist on tough law enforcement and sentences and then disregard the consequences faced by state and local correctional authorities."

Before the legislative session began, the Forgotten Man Committee submitted its first report to the governor. The introduction sounded an ominous warning:

"Discussions with decision-makers, top administrators and professional staff who work within the state's corrections system indicate clearly a developing crisis. Louisiana has outgrown its ability to incarcerate all those who commit felonies but has not defined or even generally agreed on the necessity of developing a range of alternative approaches to punishing felony offenders. In fact, legislators have traditionally shied away from serious discussion of any approach other than incarceration.

"Louisiana now faces a set of circumstances that it literally cannot build itself out of--cannot because the numbers are too large, the projected growth too fast and the costs too great. Over 11,000 offenders are now in the physical custody of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPS&C). About 3,000 more have been sentenced to the legal custody of DPS&C but remain in the parish prisons. The pool of all those sentenced to state custody is increasing by about 1,400 annually. At the same time, costs of construction average $35,000-$50,000 per bed. That means a 1,000 bed prison (which would accommodate 70% of next year's increase in total population, or 33% of the 3,000 presently backlogged in the parishes) would cost millions more to operate and would, after a year, leave the state in the same place it was before the new 1,000 bed prison was built--i.e., with over 4,000 inmates it has no space to house."

In its 31-page report, the committee offered 20 major recommendations concerning prison operations. Of these, several would directly affect alternatives to confinement, including: 1) increased use of work release centers; 2) an intensive probation supervision program; 3) second felony probation; 4) more probation and parole officers; 5) the use of shock probation (split sentences), with a prison term of up to two years; 6) to make all inmates eligible for parole consideration after 20 years.

With encouragement from these quarters, the legislature did finally get around to serious corrections legislation. In summary, the legislation adopted included: 1) planning funds for five new medium security prisons, 2) approval to hire 100 new probation and parole officers, 3) limiting probation and parole caseloads to 50, 4) reestablishing a program to have the state pay 70% of new parish jail construction costs, 5) expanding three existing prisons.

This approach, heavy on additional confinement and light on alternatives, did not set well with Paul Phelps. He warned, "In 1986, the financial crisis will be so great that the legislature will not have many alternatives."

Phelps had tried to get legislative approval of an early parole program. He described his proposal--in which offenders would serve six months in prison and then go home to house arrest--to a legislative panel and said a pilot program could begin soon in the New Iberia area. But the outcry from New Iberia political officials was so immediate and so strongly negative that the proposal was abandoned. The legislature killed the bill the next week.

Parole was not a popular choice in Louisiana at the time. A January 1985 opinion survey by the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate showed that even in economic hard times, 69% of registered voters preferred increasing taxes to lock up more prisoners. Only 4.2% preferred releasing more inmates on parole to relieve overcrowding.

A House committee showed the public where its heart was, late in the session, voting to require inmates to return to the good old days of wearing striped uniforms. The debate, heated at times, actually lasted longer than the discussion on some of the reform legislation. And three months later, another legislative committee voted to take back the 100 new probation and parole positions just created, then impose a further 3% budget cut on the probation and parole divisions.

Probation might be cut back, but prisons were popular as ever. At the end of 1985, bonds were sold to begin construction of five new medium security prisons with a capacity of 2,500 inmates, in five rural parishes. Politicians were perfectly willing to spend state money to help out the ailing economies of these rural areas, even as they ignored cheaper alternatives for supervising Louisiana's mostly urban offender population.

The Prison Overcrowding Task Force continued its work throughout 1985. At a November hearing, witnesses said that only legislators could solve Louisiana's costly prison crowding problems. Some of the state's mandatory sentencing laws should be repealed, they said. DA Paul Carmouche of Shreveport said, "I don't believe in minimum mandatory sentencing except in rare instances." District Judge Frank Marullo of New Orleans said, "We're putting people in jail who don't belong in jail. The public wants everybody who's convicted to be locked up in jail, but we're going to have to educate the public that this isn't always the best solution."

The Task Force would continue meeting through the winter and issue its second report on March 1, 1986, before the next legislative session. In this report, the Task Force made several major recommendations to reduce the use of imprisonment: 1) Hire 100 new probation and parole officers each year for the next five years (1986 to 1990), until the workload was 50 per officer. Probationers would help pay the cost of their supervision according to a sliding fee scale. 2) Set up an intensive probation supervision program. 3) Allow probation upon a second felony conviction. 4) Noting the declining use of parole (from 11% of all DOC offenders in 1975 to 6% in 1985), develop a parole risk assessment model. 5) Establish an intensive incarceration program: three to six months of participation in para-military "boot camp" training, as an option with first and second offenders serving terms of seven years or less.

Although these alternatives would help reduce Louisiana's prison population, the Task Force noted that the state would need another 6,400 prison beds by 1990, at a construction cost of $320 million. Parish jails, holding the backlog of state prisoners, would also need attention. Replacement and expansion of jail facilities was estimated at $300 million, with state and local governments sharing the cost on a 70/30 grant program. The Task Force recommended against the private management of state prisons and local jails and warned that with the children of "baby boomers" growing up, we could expect another crime wave in the early 1990s. That was the bad news. The good news was: deinstitutionalization was finding a larger measure of political acceptance.

In support of one of the Task Force's recommendations, Attorney General William Guste sent every member of the legislature a letter outlining his support for an "intensive supervision" probation plan. It would provide a "viable punishment" while requiring offenders to support themselves. Violent criminals would be excluded. Even so, Guste pointed out that over 1,500 first-time offenders serving sentences of five years or less remained as prime candidates for the program.

When the 1986 legislature met to consider the now-perennial question of what to do about prison overcrowding, the New Orleans Times-Picayune pointed out that legislators seemed to recognize the need for alternative programs but did not want to spend the money. "Think of what will happen if we don't do it," John Baiamonte, the chairman of the Prison Overcrowding Task Force, told the subcommittee on prisons, alluding to the thousands of additional prison beds that would be needed.

With the bells of doomsday faintly audible, the legislature did approve, by a vote of 96-2 on May 27, the use of a boot camp "intensive incarceration" program for first offenders. They would serve three to six months, then be recommended for parole. Only volunteers serving a sentence of seven years or less would be eligible. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Raymond Jetson, D-Baton Rouge, was estimated to save the state $25 million to $40 million a year.

By now the state needed every dollar it could save. On July 8, 1986, the DOC stopped accepting new inmates for three months, because of budget cuts that forced guard layoffs and reduced operating expenses. Staff cuts were estimated at about 500. Paul Phelps admitted that space was available to house more inmates, but he refused to lower the quality of care by reducing the ratio of staff to inmates (which would have required the approval of federal Judge Frank Polozola anyway, under the existing consent decree). One state legislator reacted by demanding that Phelps be fired, because one of the economies Phelps was considering was shutting down the girls' training school at Ball, in the legislator's district.

At least Phelps knew he had their attention now, and 1986 turned out not to be such a bad year after all. Funds were appropriated to hire 100 new probation and parole officers, just as in the previous year. Intensive probation trial projects were finally begun in Lafayette and St. Martin Parishes in March.

In the Fall, Governor Edwards spoke up for other alternatives. He recommended use of house arrest for first-time non-violent offenders. And he spoke out against mandatory sentencing. "The legislature may wish to look at some 38 to 40 laws that now require a mandatory jail sentence and hopefully modify some of them to give the judge more discretion in some areas where he thinks the mandatory jail terms may not necessarily be required," the governor said.

Jack Wardlaw, in one of his Times-Picayune columns, pointed out the continuing incentive for prison alternatives: between 1975 and 1985 the number of state prison inmates rose from 5,325 to 13,386, or 151%. During the same period, the crime rate increased by only 28%.

On February 9, 1987, one of the new alternatives, the military boot camp, opened at Hunt Correctional Center near St. Gabriel. About 30 inmates had been selected for the first class. For three months they would be subject to strict discipline and physical training; if they passed, it was on to the Parole Board.

Three months later, on May 19, the first 18 graduates were handed their parole papers. Of the ones who did not graduate, three dropped out and were sent back to prison, eight were held back to finish later and one died of a lung hemorrhage during physical training a month into the program.

The inmate graduates had good things to say about the experience. "It taught me a whole lot more than I knew," said inmate Timothy Jackson. "Self-respect. Discipline. The value of life. I've learned to deal with things in a positive way." They were nevertheless relieved to give their places to the 100 other inmates, including four women, making their way through earlier phases of the program.

The 1987 legislature, which would be the last to work with the Edwards administration, must have been encouraged to see one of the new alternative programs off to such a good start, and a well-publicized start at that. Many of the same reform measures legislators had debated the past three years would come up again this session. The pace of corrections legislation was definitely picking up.

HB 533, labeled a bill for geriatric offenders, could just as easily have been called a "prison retirement" plan. It made inmates serving sentences of 30 years or more eligible for parole consideration after serving 20 years and reaching age 60. Lest the public think they were getting too soft on the elderly, legislators retained a clause excluding lifers, unless their sentence had been commuted to a fixed term.

HB 12 was the 1987 reincarnation of a bill that had been around awhile, including earlier the same session under a different number. This bill made certain offenders eligible for second felony probation, provided at least five years had passed between offenses. A committee had earlier killed an amendment which would have required the DOC to reduce probation and parole caseloads to 50, but the main bill did pass.

HB 537, dubbed the "flagship" of 1987's prison overcrowding package, established the Louisiana Sentencing Commission. This 22-member permanent commission was instructed to develop a uniform policy on criminal sentencing for the state and to prepare advisory guidelines for judges. Its creation reflected a consensus that had developed among members of the Prison Overcrowding Task Force and others urging reform, that bringing criminal penalties under control was the first step in reducing the state's prison population. The 18 voting members of the Sentencing Commission would consist of legislators, judges, attorneys and sheriffs--not a group likely to run rampant through the fields of reform but one capable of making meaningful, responsive changes over time. The commission was given a start-up budget of $100,000 to begin its review of Louisiana's criminal sentencing statutes.

One bill which did not get past the legislature this time was HB 531, which would have given judges ex post facto power to reduce felony sentences--after the offender had served six months in prison. This bill was vehemently opposed by the Louisiana District Attorneys Association. "The principle and concept is repugnant to us," spokesman Pete Adams said. He pointed out that there were already numerous ways to cut short jail time. "Do you want to provide another mechanism, where a person is actually convicted, to go get out?" he asked.

The legislature apparently did not. But it did approve with less controversy the companion bill, HB 532, which allows the same practice--sentence reduction--in non-hard labor felonies (called relative felonies in Louisiana) and in misdemeanors, after the person has begun serving his sentence. The offender is allowed to make one request, like one phone call, to the court that sentenced him.

Several of the measures the 1987 legislature approved seemed more in the line of "safety valves" than truly sweeping reforms. As safety valves, these options would give legal authorities power to "vent off" small segments of the criminal population passing through the courts and on into the prison system. If prison overcrowding reached crisis proportions, the vents could be opened; when the crisis was over, they could be shut again.

If indeed these alternatives were adopted according to plan (whether Edwin Edwards' or Paul Phelps' or the Prison Overcrowding Task Force's or someone else's), the legislature deserved praise for its provident thinking. As 1987 went along, the twin crises--budget and correctional--continued locked in an irreconcilable confrontation. The state was deeply in debt, with no immediate prospect of getting out. Budget cuts were the order of the day, across all departments of state government. And yet, inexorably, the number of people locked up--in state prisons and local jails--continued to increase. Once again the prison system was caught between the rock of increasing numbers and the hard place of the federal courts--Judge Frank Polozola in Baton Rouge monitoring head counts, inmate to staff ratios, violence and escapes to insure that living conditions did not begin to deteriorate.

The DOC limped through the rest of the year, cutting back wherever it could. Edwin Edwards turned his attention from administration to reelection. He was one of six major candidates running for governor. None of them had much to say about prisons, though the rest all had plenty to say about Edwards' mismanagement of state government in general and budget woes in particular.

When he ran a weak second to Democratic Congressman Buddy Roemer in the September open gubernatorial primary, Edward capitulated the office to Roemer and then virtually dropped from sight, spending a good part of his last six months in office on his ranch outside Junction, Texas. Now it was his turn to play caretaker, and he demonstrated that he was not well-suited to the role. When Roemer's transition government wanted to start early with deep budget cuts to reduce deficits, Edwards made some cuts, refused more, and hinted that he would be available in four years to save the state from calamities of the "Roemer Revolution."

On March 14, 1988, Edwards went out of office; this time Paul Phelps resigned and went out with him. As Buddy Roemer was inaugurated governor on a cool, blustery Monday in Baton Rouge, he had not yet named a new Secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to take Phelps' place. It was the only cabinet-level post remaining unfilled, surely not a promising indicator of the DOC's standing in the new administration.

So in the end, in uneasy retirement, what did Paul Phelps and Edwin Edwards have to show for four more years together? How much success could they claim in their efforts to develop correctional alternatives at the state level? The answer is, objectively, not much. Try as they might, they had not been able to reverse the trends of the 1970s and begin de-emphasizing the state's reliance on confinement as a means of punishing criminals.

Phelps was right, undoubtedly, when he said that Louisiana's prison overcrowding problems were the product of oil riches and a punitive public mood. For a few years in the late seventies, Louisiana could easily afford to construct and staff new prisons. This period happened to coincide with hardening public attitudes on what should be done with criminals, and the result was an unprecedented growth in the number of persons in confinement. From the standpoint of the people trying to run the DOC from 1984 to 1988, the economic prosperity could not have come at a worse time. It encouraged the state to take the easy way out--locking everyone up--instead of diversifying its options. As an excessive dependence on oil revenues would devastate the state's economy when oil prices began to fall, so an excessive dependence on imprisonment would eventually devastate the corrections system, when the extra money needed to support the huge prison system was no longer available.

Probably the most curious aspect of the hard-headed public mood is how quickly it developed and then how firmly it took hold. Before the 1970s, Louisiana was not a particularly punitive state. It ranked 13th nationally in 1965, with a rate of 109.1 prisoners per 100,000 population. Like most Southern states, it sent a lot of people to prison, but with the executive's generous use of good time, commutations and parole, people who went to prison, even for very long sentences, were usually out again quickly. Until 1972, the standard was: any inmate who behaved himself in prison would be let go after ten-and-a-half years--the so-called "10-6 rule."

What happened in the seventies was that the state stopped letting people go. People who had once convicted offenders and sent them off to be managed by correctional and political authorities without public interference began to put their foot down. "Just say no!" we would be told later, in the war on drugs. In the 1970s the people of Louisiana had already discovered the phrase: they addressed it to convicted felons, who they did not want back in their communities, and to the authorities they did not trust to protect them.

Existing alternatives were de-emphasized. The 10-6 rule was disallowed, good time was cut back, parole and sentence commutations became less frequent. At the same time, the state jumped heavily into mandatory sentencing for violent crimes and drug offenses and judges began to apply longer sentences to repeat property offenders. This was not exactly a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, more like the right hand of imprisonment taking every opportunity to slap down the left hand of alternatives. Thus in the early 1980s, when the public, the media, and the legislature were confronted with evidence that lack of prison space was indeed a serious problem, it was as if they no longer remembered the old days of leniency. That part of corrections history had been erased from the collective memory. People did not want to hear about old alternatives, new alternatives, any alternatives at all, until finally they were left with no other choices.

That time is now at hand. Since U.S. District Judge Gordon West imposed his "cruel and unusual punishment" court order on the state penitentiary at Angola in 1975, Louisiana has opened six new prisons for men. Three more are now under construction and two others are authorized. The number of state prisoners has tripled, from 5,300 in June 1975 to 15,329 at the end of June 1987 (This is close to the same prison population as Louisiana's mother country, France, a nation of 55 million people). The state had custody of 11,758 of that total; 3,571 were in parish jails.

Set against these numbers, the alternatives adopted under the last Edwards administration seem puny; in practice they are probably even weaker than they look on paper. From following the course of legislation, for instance, it might appear that the state has invested heavily in the expansion of probation and parole in the last few years. Not so. The DOC budget has been cut back in two successive years, many of the cuts coming in non-institutional programs. The legislature giveth with the one hand and taketh away with the other; at the end of 1987 Louisiana had 320 probation and parole officers supervising 37,198 cases. This is about 70 more officers than four years earlier, but the caseloads have remained virtually constant during this time, averaging between 110 and 120 cases per officer. Intensive probation remains an interesting experiment, used selectively in a few parishes; it has not yet been adopted statewide.

Other alternatives have fared no better. The use of second felony probation is no more common in most state courts, now that it is legal, than it used to be when it was illegal and judges simply ignored previous convictions to put offenders on probation regardless. The high-powered Sentencing Commission has been put on hold, its operating funds withheld for now as one of the Roemer administration's economy moves. Boot camp continues to operate with only about 100 offenders in processing at any given time. Few people--on either side of the law--are even aware that judges can grant sentence reduction for non-hard labor offenses. And the new governor, Buddy Roemer, has indicated that he will look at the parole and pardon options "most severely," whatever that may mean.

That is one of the traditional problems of correctional administration in the states: just when you get organized, governors change, and off corrections goes in a different direction. Edwin Edwards and Paul Phelps may have planted the seeds of correctional diversification in Louisiana, but now the orchard belongs to Buddy Roemer; we will have to meet again in four years to see what the harvest will bring.