Appeared in Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau, and Douglas Dennis, The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, 3rd ed., Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995, pp. 54-69. Originally appeared in The Angolite, March/April 1988, pp. 19-39.
The picture is of four young men in prison garb crowded together--doing nothing--sitting in a small, bare cell at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The caption underneath describes the scene as an isolation cell, where an inmate would normally be kept separate from his fellow prisoners. This photo, from a 1975 issue of Corrections Magazine, ironically but accurately describes conditions in Louisiana's prison system in the early 1970s and lends further credence to the ancient Chinese proverb: "One picture is worth more than ten thousand words." It graphically portrayed the problem that would be the subject of considerably more than ten thousand words of litigation, journalism and public debate over the next ten years--rison overcrowding and its effects on the state's correctional system.
The many problems of prison overcrowding were not Louisiana's alone during the seventies. Several states were already under court orders to deal with prison overpopulation and deteriorating conditions of prison life, and several more would join the list before the decade was out. But because of a persistent inattention to prison needs in Louisiana, a "blind eye" going back to the post-Civil War convict leasing period, Louisiana would have much more to make up for with its reforms. It would find the road to reform slower to travel and would find, ten years after starting out, that rather than the problems being resolved, they were actually intensifying.
LSU history professor Tom Carleton, writing in Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System in 1971, described the environment that would challenge the prison reform efforts of the seventies: "Underlying and sustaining deficiencies of Louisiana's system have been three interrelated and historically pervasive factors (1) public opinion, the ultimate arbiter of policy formulation in a democracy, has in Louisiana generally ignored the penal system and has been disinclined to bestow upon it the kind of support readily bestowed upon other state agencies; (2) political control of the penal system has easily occupied the near-vacuum caused by public apathy, with the result that penal policy on all levels in Louisiana has been formulated exclusively by politicians, who have been able until recently to subordinate completely penological objectives to political considerations of cost, race and patronage; (3) modern penology, with its necessarily higher costs, professional personnel and popularly exaggerated overtones of convict-coddling, has had a difficult time supplanting the old ways in Louisiana, where public officials have preferred to utilize the penal system as a patronage mill, where public opinion has been satisfied when it could be assured that convicts were being punished, and where both officials and public opinion have long agreed that the least expensive penal system is the most desirable one."
Louisiana had passed through the tumultuous decade of the sixties with its old-fashioned prison system relatively intact. The racial antagonisms and political rebellions, the arguments about rehabilitation and reintegration, the deep questioning of the basic role of the prison that occurred in more progressive states never caught on here. In Louisiana prison meant Angola, and Angola was simply a big old prison farm in the Mississippi River where most inmates did agricultural labor.
The only other men's prison in the state, the medium security reformatory officially titled the Louisiana Correctional and Industrial School (LCIS), had opened at DeQuincy in 1957. Most Louisianians did not know it existed.
The state had made a brief feint at modernizing its prison system in the 1950s, when a rash of inmate Achilles tendon-slashings focused attention on Angola and encouraged reform efforts. Professional penologists were imported from the federal system and state politicians pledged to keep their hands off the prison to give new rehabilitation programs a chance to succeed.
In 1962, in the administration of Governor Jimmie Davis, the budget of Angola was cut by about 30%. Employees were laid off (inmate guards returning to take their places), programs abandoned and the professional administrators gradually squeezed out. Angola had nine wardens between 1964 and 1968, the year the state Department of Corrections was created. In Louisiana's prisons, it was back to business--and politics--as usual.
The inmate population of Angola held fairly constant during this period, from an average of 3,523 in fiscal year 1962 to 3,463 in fiscal year 1966 to 3,390 in fiscal year 1972. The average cost per day to house inmates remained steady in the $2.50 per day range during the first part of this period and then increased sharply toward the end ($4.86 in fiscal year 1972) as free people were hired to replace the inmate guards.
The prison population's stability or slight decline was not unlike what was going on across the rest of the country, and the trend came to an end in Louisiana at the same time as it did elsewhere--in 1972.
If you were an Angola inmate, 1972 seemed to promise a new period of enlightened prison administration in Louisiana. The populist Edwin Edwards was inaugurated governor and Elayn Hunt, recognized as a progressive in prison reform, was appointed director of corrections. Back-breaking labor in the fields was ended, the use of inmates as guards was stopped, the notorious Red Hat Cell block (where escape artist Charlie Frazier had once been welded inside his seven-by-three-and-a-half foot cell for seven years) was closed, radical revision of the disciplinary procedures occurred and unnecessary restrictions were removed, giving the inmates a little more freedom of choice. In short, life at Angola became less harsh, a little more humane.
Those who anticipated change soon saw it, but in a form different from what they expected. Tougher sentencing practices drove the inmate population up steadily, an average increase of twenty to thirty inmates per month. The legislature failed to appropriate funds to hire new staff or make improvements to the prison's physical plant. And the relaxation of discipline, though more humane in one sense, broke down the old forms of social control: the prisoners ran wild.
From 1972 to 1975, Angola was a full-blown monster, with potential as dangerous as the quality of life in its bowels. It was a particularly vicious period. Forty prisoners were stabbed to death and more than 350 treated with serious knife wounds. It was a dog-eat-dog jungle and having a knife was almost a prerequisite to survival.
Gang wars and clique power struggles kept the stretchers rolling, to the point where "One on the stretcher!" became a morbid call that was soon ignored, generally accepted as a routine risk factor of doing time. One senior correctional officer, who was a rookie guard during this violent era, tells of working the late night shift--often the only guard on duty in a 200-man dormitory. It was a rare day indeed, he says, when he came to work without finding fresh blood on the floor somewhere in the dormitory.
Half the prisoner population wasn't working, dope traffic was rampant, pilferage and exploitation were the rule. The strong ruled, and the weak either served or perished. Sexual abuse and homosexual slavery were widespread, with inmates auctioned, sold and traded like cattle by other inmates. By mid-1975, Angola was the number one prison in America on two counts: with 4,300 inmates, it was the largest, and with one or two inmate stabbing deaths each month, it was also the bloodiest.
State district court Judge Frank Marullo, taking a tour of Angola during this period, described the prison as "essentially unmanageable." He said: "Everyone knows that the mammoth prison must be broken up into several smaller institutions in the future but (they) are unwilling to do anything about Angola today." "Part of the problem," he said, "is educating the general public that improving prisons is not coddling criminals."
Although state officials, including the prison Warden Murray Henderson and corrections director Hunt, were working diligently to correct Angola's problems, the simple fact was that they lacked the resources to undertake substantial lasting reforms. As would be the case in so many other states, it would take federal court intervention to finally bring the prison out of its "dark ages."
A lawsuit filed by prisoner Hayes Williams and other Angola inmates protesting the prison's poor living conditions had been kicking around the federal courts since 1971. United States magistrate Frank Polozola had been designated by federal district judge Gordon West to look into the complaints, and in late April 1975 he issued his 55-page report. Despite "good faith" efforts by state officials, prison conditions were terrible. Polozola found a lack of adequate physical protection of inmates, including the failure to detect and remove weapons, dormitories beyond capacity, and safety and health hazards in abundance. To clean up these conditions amounting to "cruel and unusual punishment," the report made several recommendations. To the 585 guards then employed, another 365 should be added. More medical personnel, especially physicians, were needed. The physical plant needed to be modernized. And the prison had to work to end the segregation of its predominantly black inmate population.
The state vigorously objected to the report's recommendations, some of which it was already putting into effect and others is said simply could not be done--such as hiring 385 new guards immediately. Mrs. Hunt said there was not enough money available to bring about real prison reform. Even if there was, she said, "The legislature could give me a blank check, and we still couldn't clean up Angola . . . because of where and what it is." She said she wouldn't mind if it was closed down altogether. Her prime hope for prison reform was decentralization, breaking up Angola into smaller prisons closer to cities.
Officials of the Department of Corrections almost seemed to be anticipating Judge West's decision to sign the magistrate's report, thereby giving it the effect of a court order. The judge's action was expected to give them the leverage they needed to get funds from the state legislature.
Judge West did in fact sign the order, on June 10, 1975, and Louisiana's corrections system has not been the same since. In signing the order, Judge West observed that conditions at the prison "not only shock the conscience," but also fragrantly violate basic constitutional requirements. The order touched upon practically every aspect of prison life: security, health and medical care, food service, religion, fire safety, overpopulation, mail service, prison disciplinary procedures and the physical facilities. Some changes were to be made immediately, and state officials were to file long-term improvement plans in his court within 180 days.
Douglas Murphy, writing in the Times-Picayune on June 12, gave this summary of Judge West's 20-page "Judgment and Order:"
--that the penitentiary within six months hire about 400 more corrections officers (guards), to bring the staff up to a minimum of 950;
--that at least two guards be placed in each cellblock or dormitory at Angola on a 24-hour a day basis, equipped with walkie-talkies and telephones, to prevent homosexual rapes, fights and gambling in the living areas;
--that the warden immediately remove overt and aggressive homosexuals from the general prison population;
--that inmates known to engage in or constantly cause fights and violence be separated;
--that temporary housing be erected to eliminate as much as possible overcrowding at Angola, which is bulging with some 4,000-plus inmates;
--that Angola immediately hire more and more competent medical personnel, and that doctors at the New General Hospital at the prison be fully licensed by the state of Louisiana;
--that each newly-arrived inmate be examined by a physician within seven days of arrival;
--that all inmates presently held in the so-called "Psychiatric Unit" at Angola be placed in a "therapeutic environment" and cared for. The "PU," as it is known, has often been described as a "hellhole."
The court judgment also ordered that the prison buildings and facilities be brought up to state fire, safety and health standards, something that has so far never been done, according to the inmates and some prison officials.
Perhaps Judge West expected the state to get right to work on prison improvements. If he did, he should have paid close attention to a remark Governor Edwards made on being told the order had been signed. "We didn't take the magistrate's recommendations that seriously," the governor said. "Now that it's been elevated to the status of a formal court order, we'll have to treat it with more deference." How much deference was "more deference?" Not enough to satisfy Judge West apparently. A July newspaper article, titled "Judge Unhappy Over Angola," contains his criticisms of the state legislature, which had just ended its 1975 session without dealing in a substantive way with prison reform.
Judge West was most irritated by the legislature's decision to appropriate funds for expansion of the LSU football stadium while failing to approve additional operating revenues for Angola. State officials told the judge that the prison monies had gotten lost in the maze of bureaucratic procedures through which budget requests had to travel, and consequently no funds were available for the 1975-76 fiscal year. Judge West commented, "I find it's always so easy for people to say what can't be done rather than what can be done." The legislature's only real prison-action--and a portent of things to come--was to appropriate $15 million for prison construction, five million for additions to Angola and ten million for two new first-offender prisons in other parts of the state.
State officials were not so sure they wanted to go ahead with Judge West's reforms--at least according to his time-table. They did what all red-blooded Southerners would do in the face of a federal court order: screamed that the federal courts were interfering in state business and appealed to the Fifth Circuit. They would eventually lose their argument, and in September Judge West turned up the heat. He placed a population limit of 2,640 prisoners on Angola, at a time when the prison had 3,751 inmates officially confined in its cellblocks and dormitories and another 200 in-processing. Prison officials reported a net population increase of 64 a month, 200 coming in and only 136 going out. There could be no new admissions, the judge said, until the population was brought down. The only reply from the legislature, which was not then in session, was silence.
Meanwhile state corrections officials were pursuing their answer to the Angola problem--decentralization. Their idea was to build new prisons across the state, gradually decreasing the reliance on Angola and eventually phasing it out. Let it be a farm again, Mrs. Hunt had said.
Faced with increasing political pressure from Judge West, no proposal to reduce the inmate population was too bizarre to consider. In late September, Mrs. Hunt was reported to be exploring the use of a mothballed U.S. Military Transport Ship for use as a work release center. She had already been to the Norfolk navy yard shopping.
The prison ship idea soon sank without a trace (someone probably ran across the tales of the horrors of the British prison hulks), and so did other hopes for early reforms. Prison reformers and the inmates themselves would later admit that they had been naive--to think that a mere federal court order could overturn a century of prison neglect and bring about quick improvements.
At the end of the crisis year 1975, Angola's population had declined to about 3,500 (causing a backlog to begin building in parish jails). The violence toll for the year: 18 men murdered, 173 verified stabbings with injury. Was the prison any different after the order? One inmate said, "The food got a little better for awhile and nothing really got worse."
As it turned out, 1976 would be the year the prison reform ball really got going. There has never been another year quite like it in the history of Louisiana corrections. The year got off to a bad start when Mrs. Hunt died of pancreatic cancer in early February. The assistant director, Paul Phelps, was appointed to succeed her in March. He continued to move the DOC in the same direction it had been headed under Mrs. Hunt, toward decentralization.
In July 1976 Governor Edwards announced his ten year plan for Louisiana corrections. He called it a decentralization plan, but the original idea had been modified by now, as he found little political support for locating prisons anywhere near urban areas, so a better description would be to call the plan a hybrid--part concentration, part decentralization.
Angola was to house long-term offenders, including violent and sex offenders. Three new outcamps would be built there, to bring the population back up to 4,000 or so. "Only the bad guys would be left," one inmate said.
The "not-so-bad guys" would presumably be dispersed among other facilities, mostly in rural areas: the reformatory at DeQuincy, a medium security prison already under construction at Jackson, a new prison at St. Gabriel to house 500 permanent inmates and another 500 for in-and-out processing, a 500-man prison in Bossier Parish in north Louisiana, and a 250-man work release center at Camp Beauregard in central Louisiana. This was an ambitious plan, made necessary by the DOC's projection that the state prison population would increase by 700 to 800 inmates each year for the foreseeable future.
The state legislature, meeting in regular session in 1976, ignored the governor's plans, the judge's orders and virtually everything else having to do with prison reform. What everyone was talking about was an incident--almost trivial in itself--that illustrated how totally opposed to putting prisoners in the cities the public and the legislature were.
A nursing home in New Orleans, the Ponchartrain Lodge, was sold to the state which announced plans to begin housing a number of elderly prisoners there, as one of the schemes to reduce Angola's population. The uproar was so great--the viciousness of the response likened to a hurricane's fury--that the state backed off and promised to lease the facility to a church group instead. And the businessman who had sold the property to the state soon came under indictment for allegedly selling and reselling the home to inflate its value. "Don't call us about decentralization," the public seemed to be saying, "we'll call you."
Meanwhile, back on the farm, a new prison warden had brought a new style to Angola. Ross Maggio, who had been in the DOC's agri-business office, had been brought in, it was said, because he had the right attitude to whip the prison into shape--tough, disciplined, no nonsense. An April newspaper article, titled "Prison Warden Forges Ahead, Then Slips Back," pointed out that Maggio was about to get the population down to the court-ordered 2,641. That was some accomplishment, even with 1,200 inmates waiting in the parish prisons. He had hired 200 more guards and was just 150 shy of what the court had ordered. But the turnover rate among guards was 50%, and there were few prospective employees left in the remote rural area around Angola. It was truly a "three step forward, two steps back" approach to prison reform.
Problems with prison personnel would continue through the summer as Warden Maggio moved to end corruption and tighten security. The number of guards actually began to decline, and prison officials recognized they could not hire more guards from the surrounding area. Part of Governor Edwards' plan was to eventually increase the population of Angola to 4,000. Warden Maggio, estimating that 2,000 staff members would be needed by then, said that the state would need to spend ten million dollars to build housing for these new employees on the grounds.
Prison critics observed that Maggio was beginning to take control of the giant institution. Only two men were murdered in the first half of 1976. Very few knives were being found in the periodic shakedown searches, down from the "two bushel baskets a day" of a few months earlier.
Inmate Ken Plaisance, who had been at Angola fifteen years, agreed that the level of violence had been drastically reduced. "It is working," he said, "thanks to Judge West's order." The prison was being cleaned up, better medical care provided and safety hazards--human and physical--reduced.
It all made good sense, the warden said. "There was nothing in the court order . . . nothing we are now doing to comply with the court order, that wasn't just common sense in running a prison," Maggio said. He conceded it took the order to bring "common sense" into play as an institutional policy.
The state legislature, urged on by the governor and the federal judge, was finally ready to do its part. Meeting in special session beginning on August 15, 1976, in two days it approved $90.6 million in prison bonds: $30.8 million for expansion of Angola, $24 million for the prison and reception center to be built at St. Gabriel, $19.8 million for new highways around Angola, and smaller amounts for improvements at other prisons. The dam had finally been broken; the trickle of prison funds had suddenly become a torrent.
By the latter part of 1976, then, Louisiana had yielded to the irresistible force and begun to modernize its antiquated prison system. The state's initial approach to prison reform could not have been more conventionally simple; as outlined in Governor Edwards' plan, it would add enough new prison beds to relieve overcrowding and keep up with expected population increases.
Over the next seven years, from 1976 to 1983, Louisiana would open four medium security prisons and greatly expand two minimum security work training facilities, increasing the capacity of the system by about 4,500 inmates. The first of the new prisons, the Margaret Dixon Correctional Institute, opened on April 1, 1976, at Jackson, halfway between Baton Rouge and the Mississippi line. The prison grounds had once been part of a mental hospital, the East Louisiana State Hospital, and had been quickly renovated after the court order was imposed.
The prison opened with a maximum intended population of 750, men moved over from Angola. Most of them were quite happy to be moving from the "big farm" to the "funny farm" and so was Warden Hayden Dees, also out of Angola, who said this was the kind of prison that could be used all around the state for 90% of the prisoners in Louisiana. Warden Dees even managed to keep the big oaks that provided shade for the yard within Dixon's fences--something that would never have been allowed at Angola.
The next medium security prison to open was the Hunt prison at St. Gabriel, built on land adjoining the women's prison that had opened in 1973. Named for the recently deceased corrections director, the Hunt prison was always identified as a model facility and often contrasted with Angola. Hunt was designed by former Angola Warden Ross Maggio, who had moved over to build the new prison and open it on January 31, 1979. Its anticipated population was about a thousand men made up of permanent residents and those new inmates just entering the system for classification.
The third new prison, Wade Correctional Institute, located near Haynesville in Claiborne Parish, opened a year-and-a-half later, on December 15, 1980. It was the first prison in north Louisiana. The fourth, called the Washington Parish Prison, was dedicated at Varnado, near the Pearl River in east Louisiana, on May 28, 1983. Its 1600 acre complex was expected to house 1,120 inmates by the end of that year.
The two work training centers, at Camp Beauregard near Alexandria and at Jackson Barracks in New Orleans, were already in use as small work release facilities (along with the State Police Barracks in Baton Rouge and a small section of LCIS at DeQuincy) before 1975. Both were on state-owned property used by the National Guard. The expansion of Camp Beauregard aroused no controversy, but the Jackson Barracks location was bitterly contested: it was the first state prison (to be called a prison, anyway) in an urban area since before the Civil War. New Orleans legislators fought it tooth and nail when the conversion from military to prison use was proposed late in 1976. Three years later, the same legislators were still arguing that it should be shut down and prisoners transferred to the new Hunt Prison.
But prisons, once opened, tend to be impossible to close. Just look at Angola. The old farm, which in 1974 and 1975 everyone wanted to shut down as a blighted anachronism, was suddenly more popular than ever. It was cleaned up, had a new warden, Frank Blackburn replacing Ross Maggio in 1978, new dormitories under construction, hundreds of new employees and a new reputation for safety and security: in 1977 not a single inmate was murdered.
The transformation had come about with almost miraculous speed, and corrections officials had every right to be pleased with their successes. In an interview at the end of 1978, Paul Phelps was optimistic about changes within the system. The state might be released from the federal court orders by 1980, he said, and theoretically should be able to house all state prisoners in local jails by then. The state was even planning to begin the American Correctional Association's accreditation process.
In a speech a few months later, Phelps said of the changes, "I'm of the opinion that we're doing as good a job as anyone in the country. We've come out of the dark past and into the modern-day world in one great big three-year leap."
Change of this magnitude, occurring this quickly, did not come cheap. The Louisiana legislature, once it decided to go along with the program, spent money hand over fist. By 1980, over $300 million had been spent on capital improvements alone--three new outcamps, new dormitories and other renovations at Angola, highway improvements, two new medium security prisons open by that time and another underway, the work training centers--a prison boom unlike anything the state had ever seen.
The DOC's operating budget had skyrocketed, too. In 1971 the state spent seven million dollars to confine 4,000 inmates. By 1975 the budget had increased to $25 million for close to 5,000 inmates, and by 1981 over $100 million for 8,000 inmates. In that one decade, prison expenditures had increased more than tenfold, and corrections officials were coming to be thought of as panhandlers--always going around, hands out, asking for still more money.
Small wonder that the public and the legislature were beginning to protest the high cost of prison operations. If they had been listening carefully, they would have known the day was coming. Paul Phelps had predicted as early as 1976, his first year on the job, that the state would go bankrupt in ten years if it didn't reevaluate its approach to corrections. He suggested the corrections department was in a "futile foot race with the judicial system," which was sentencing 50 more people a month to prison than the state released.
In 1979, speaking before committees in the legislature, Phelps said, "If the state of Louisiana does not change its policies, we are firmly dedicated to building a new prison every other year. Our policy right now is to put everybody in prison."
Legislators were displeased with the huge budget increases Phelps asked for. "Something's got to be done," said Sen. Foster Campbell Jr. of Bossier City. "Pretty soon prisons will be more expensive than schools in this state."
"That's a distinct possibility," Phelps agreed. He argued for more probation officers--three times the 168 then employed--to increase the strictness of probation supervision. But Sen. Campbell said he did not believe the voters were ready to broaden probation programs. "I don't think the people of Louisiana are willing to lessen penalties," he said.
Overuse of imprisonment and underuse of probation were themes Phelps would come back to with increasing frequency. "We have to change the concept that the only way you can punish someone is by putting them in jail," he said in 1981. The state had to ask "how much money the public is willing to spend to guarantee that people will be locked up and remain unproductive." He cited figures of $60,000 a bed to build new prisons and $20 a day (which would be up to $30 a day by 1984) to keep men in them once they opened. The public, he said, needs to change its "mental concept of punishment. For a lot of people the worst thing you could do them is to make them get up every morning and go to work."
Although he clearly believed that alternatives to prison were being ignored, Phelps was firmly committed to taking good care of all inmates in state custody. He insisted that the state continue to build and adequately staff the new prisons needed to house the hundreds of new inmates coming in each year.
His position would cause him serious problems as he tried to work in the administration of Dave Treen, the Republican governor who replaced Edwin Edwards in March 1980. Phelps hung on as head of the DOC for eighteen months, then was replaced on September 17, 1981. Was he fired or did he resign, and for what reasons? Phelps would say only that he had been removed, and Treen would never give specific reasons why, speaking only of a "difference in philosophy," mainly over the issue of putting more inmates into existing facilities.
The nature of those differences became more apparent the next month, October 1981, when Phelps' successor, John King, announced a two-year halt in prison construction. The state would hire more guards, reduce the ratio of guards to inmates--from one guard per 3.1 inmates to one per 3.5 in maximum security and 1 to 5.5 in medium security--and use existing facilities more intensively. By reducing the living space allowed dormitory inmates--"double bunking"--King proposed to add more than 4,000 new prison beds.
This was rather an abrupt reversal, for the public to be told after years of publicity about prison overcrowding that Louisiana's prisons weren't really overcrowded after all: it was just that space had not been managed properly.
Louisiana's prisons not overcrowded? That was surely news to the federal courts. Middle District Judge Frank Polozola, the former magistrate who had taken over the court order on his elevation to the bench after Judge West's retirement, took a dim view of the Treen administration's proposal. He asked for more information on how double-bunking would be carried out, reports shuttled back and forth from the DOC to his office for several months, and finally, on December 3, 1982, the judge lowered the boom.
Polozola gave Louisiana officials a four-hour dressing down about failing to come to grips with overcrowding. He wanted concrete data on prison plans; what officials had submitted to him was "garbage." Officials were beginning to get the idea that Polozola was not enthusiastic about double-bunking. Having an alternative plan ready, he told them. And furthermore, they should stop blaming him for the state's prison problems, when it was their own lethargy that was at fault. Warning them that "the credibility of the DOC is at an all-time low with me," Polozola sent the officials away to get down to work.
The announcement that state prisons were not overcrowded had been received with skepticism by another of the DOC's critical audiences, the parish sheriffs, who must have ranked the statement's credibility somewhere up there with Richard Nixon's "peace with honor" Vietnam proclamation. The sheriffs were in the midst of serious jail overcrowding problems of their own, most of them caused by a backlog of state prisoners being held in local jails there since 1975. The state's excuses had been first, no room, and second, not enough guards, to move the prisoners into state custody.
The larger jails had it the worst. Sheriff Charles Foti of Orleans Parish was having lawsuit problems even before Angola was closed to new admissions late in 1975, and those problems would get much worse in the next few years. They would spread across the state as well, as Angola pursued its population-control target by releasing inmates and simply refusing to accept transfers in from local jails. By May 1977, there were 1,867 state prisoners in local jails. State corrections officials were hopeful, however, that nearly all of them would be in state custody by later that summer (when the new dormitory beds at Angola came open).
It never happened. New prison construction would dent the backlog but never completely eliminate it. Sheriffs became accustomed to the cycle: a new prison would open, most of the state prisoners would be taken from the jails and then, inexorably, like flood waters rising toward the top of the levee, the numbers, would begin to inch upward again, each time reaching higher than the time before. The new prisons were like emergency spillways, temporarily relieving the pressure, but the flood of inmates rushing into the system was like the massive deluge engineers say will one day reroute the Mississippi down the center of the state--beyond the means of the system to contain.
Local jail overcrowding would worsen during the Treen administration, which only completed building the prisons begun under Edwards and added no new facilities of its own. Sheriff Foti dramatized the plight of the local authorities in April 1980 by taking 147 state inmates to St. Gabriel and abandoning them in the Hunt Prison parking lot. A grand gesture it was, though Paul Phelps criticized Foti for "blaming the state" instead of trying to solve his problems locally. Phelps pointed out that even though the state might have a few empty bed spaces, it did not have the manpower to guard the prisoners that would fill those spaces.
Several propositions were forthcoming. A New Orleans area legislator proposed that a regional prison be built in the city (or somewhere around it) to hold just those convicted felons on appeal, who by Louisiana law are still the local sheriff's responsibility. Governor Treen, by his count down to 495 state prisoners in local jails by May 14, 1981, promised that all state inmates would be in state facilities by September 1. Had his double-bunking proposal been accepted, sheriffs would have been granted immediate, lasting relief from the problem.
But none of these things happened, and finally, on September 21, 1982, the sheriffs' turn in federal court came: Louisiana became the first state in the nation in which every sheriff was under court order specifying how many prisoners he could house in his jails. Judge Polozola, under authority granted by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, signed the last of the consent decrees stipulating to the number of prisoners to be confined and the number of guards to be employed in every parish prison in Louisiana.
By the end of the next year, Polozola would reach consent decrees with the rest of the DOC's adult prisons, the 105 city jails and the five juvenile training schools. As of December 7, 1983, one federal judge had supervisory authority over the state's entire correctional apparatus, with the exception of local juvenile detention homes.
It should be noted that while the DOC was arousing the ire of some sheriffs by keeping inmates in their jails, it was also contributing to their enrichment by paying them a daily maintenance fee. This fee, which began at $4.50 a day per inmate in the mid-1970s and would eventually increase to $18.25, was a source of considerable income to some sheriffs who had space available. Some of them even enlarged their jails or juggled bed arrangements to house more state prisoners, though any steps causing overcrowding had to cease after the consent decrees were signed.
It was in February 1983, at the beginning of the last year of the Treen Administration, that Judge Polozola approved the comprehensive plan state officials had reworked to submit to him. The plan, as approved on February 11, called for the state to spend $34.1 million to provide pre-fab modular housing additions at several prisons. In return Polozola was to allow limited use of double-bunking at three smaller prisons. The effect of these changes, coupled with the opening of the new Washington Parish Prison, would be to increase the state's prison population from 9,500 to 12,000 by the end of 1983. Governor Treen in announcing the plan said, "At the end of this calendar year, it should give us total relief from our problem." Corrections Secretary King predicted that only 600 to 700 state prisoners would be left in local jails at year's end (of the 1,600 waiting there in February).
It was a good plan; the only thing wrong with it was that the Treen administration forgot to carry it out. Early in 1984, as Dave Treen was preparing to leave office and Edwin Edwards preparing to return as governor, the legislative fiscal office issued a report highly critical of the corrections department as managed by Treen's appointee John King. "The department has not managed its prison construction program in an efficient manner and has failed to adequately plan for future growth." The pre-fab cells authorized in 1983 were never built. The backlog of state inmates in local jails was greater than ever; the jails were very near their stipulated capacity of 9,215.
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, some of it state funds, needed for parish jail expansion.
Running for governor in 1979, Dave Treen had promised to be tough on criminals, and where convicts were concerned he had kept his word: he ignored the problems of prisons, especially after the departure of Paul Phelps, took no action to increase the capacity of the system (other than the double-bunking scheme the federal courts found ludicrous) and then walked away, leaving the chaos to his successor. State Representative Kevin Reilly summed up the mess the DOC created under Treen: "It shows what happens when you have a bunch of amateurs running a department that needs professionals."
When Edwin Edwards was inaugurated to start his third term as governor of Louisiana in March 1984, he reappointed Paul Phelps secretary of corrections. Phelps' mission--sounding like an assignment from the old "Mission: Impossible" television series--was to bring rampaging prison population and cost figures under control.
Phelps hit the trail, sounding in his public statements even more certain than he had been three years before that Louisiana could not continue to send more and more people to prison. It was a straight-forward, repetitious message: the state's oil money was gone, they would have to borrow money, mortgaging their children's future to build new prisons, prison construction and operating costs were continuing to rise, there were 2,500 state inmates in local jails. "How long can we afford it?" Phelps asked. "My concern is that if we don't get away from this lock 'em up business, we're going to go bankrupt."
Hawking intensive probation on the Georgia model, Phelps toured the state. Doomsday headlines--"Corrections Could Bankrupt State," "Louisiana Facing Key Penal Crisis," "Jail Terms Too Costly, Says Phelps"--marked his trail as he tried to sober up a public drunk on locking people up.
This time around Phelps had more help from the governor's mansion. Edwin Edwards himself was more personally involved in publicizing the need for change. Early in his term Edwards said, "You can look forward to an emphasis on prison alternatives, bearing in mind an emphasis on protecting society. 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."
The governor appointed two executive committees to consider different aspects of imprisonment. The 80-member Forgotten Man Committee held its first meeting on April 25, 1984. This committee, the reincarnation of a similar committee appointed by Governor Earl Long in the 1950s, was to look into the plight of the "practical lifer," the inmate sentenced to an exceptionally long period of confinement. Angola had 2,500 to 3,000 of these inmates, men ineligible for parole and serving either life sentences or terms so long they could expect to be geriatric cases before they got out.
In the late summer of 1984 Edwards appointed the Governor's Prison Overcrowding Policy Task Force. This group's purpose was pretty much self-explanatory--to investigate possible measures to reduce prison population and make policy recommendations to the governor) and undoubtedly through its hearings to help focus public attention on the crisis). It began meeting in the fall.
Between the start-up dates of these two committees, the 1984 legislative session had come and gone. It had rejected Phelps' package of probation and parole reform bills, reflecting the view that people would prefer to spend money building new jails rather than putting criminals back on the street.
The Overcrowding Task Force encountered similar opinions as it held public meetings around the state in the fall. "We have to develop a rationale to convince the people of this state that there are better, cheaper ways to punish people than to put them in jail," Paul Phelps said.
Persistence at putting people in jail had created an unprecedented prison overcrowding problem in Louisiana. The state prison system was operating at 99.9% of capacity (11,118 beds) and there was a backlog of state prisoners (3,161) that consumed one-third of parish jail space--the largest backlog in the U.S. Louisiana's overall incarceration rate--counting all state and local prisoners--was 502 per 100,000, the highest in the nation and nearly twice the national average of 286 (The same year the state ranked only 19th in population and 19th in reported crime).
But Phelps and other members of the task force acknowledged that popular opinion was opposed to alternatives to prison. "In South Louisiana, whenever a crime is committed, the people want to see them in jail," said Minos Hardy, chief of police in Abbeville. "Our legislature is doing what they think the public wants them to do" when lawmakers take a tough line on mandatory sentences, added Frank Serpas, an assistant to the mayor of New Orleans.
In early 1985, as the two committees were preparing interim reports and the legislature was gearing up for another session, Phelps continued emphasizing the economic impact of the continuing high rate of imprisonment. The get-tough on crime policy was all right, he said, long as the oil money was rolling in. But that money was dwindling and there were still 115 more admissions to prison than releases each month. More money needed to be spent on halfway houses, probation and parole. The trouble was, Phelps said, "People think probation and parole is soft on crime." The state legislators have only "reflected the attitudes of their constituencies . . . that the only way to punish people is to lock them up."
It was to the point, he said, that corrections would be taking money from education, highways and other functions of state government. He issued a clear warning: "In 1986, the financial crisis will be so great that the legislature will not have many alternatives."
In their interim reports, submitted in March 1985 before the legislature began meeting on April 15, the two committees said basically the same thing. "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 cost too great," the Forgotten Man Committee wrote in its report. Among this committee's recommendations, and sure to excite controversy, was the proposal to make all prison inmates, including murderers, eligible for release after 20 years in prison.
The Overcrowding Task Force, a group more dominated by professionals in criminal justice, recommended a more conventional approach: more prison and jail construction to alleviate overcrowding until other measures could be developed to correct the problem. The 1985 legislature accepted this recommendation and created a Louisiana Corrections Facility Corporation to sell bonds to finance five more new prisons. The legislature also began a five-year plan of increasing probation and parole supervision by adding the first installment of 100 new field agents. Other major reform measures were either defeated outright or postponed until the 1986 session.
As 1985 came to a close, the Corrections Facility Corporation exercised its bond-selling authority. On December 27 it sold prison bonds in the amount of $156 million, sufficient to build three new prisons and plan two more. These five prisons, all medium security facilities holding 500 beds each, were planned for Avoyelles, Allen, Winn, East Carroll and Union-Ouachita Parishes, all rural parishes where jobs were badly needed.
Thus Louisiana closed out ten years of prison reform preparing for still another round of prison-building. From the date of Judge West's initial court order on Angola, June 10, 1975, through the end of the 1985 fiscal year on June 30, the corrections department's prisoner population had grown by 150 percent, from 5,300 to 13,300. The department's operating budget had grown by nearly 600 percent (from $29 million to $200 million)--a growth rate three times faster than state government overall.
The economists had been mistaken: it wasn't oil that was the state's growth industry, it was prisons. If prison stock had been for sale to the public in 1970, and you had been smart enough to buy, a thousand dollar investment would have been worth $25,000 fifteen years later.
Louisiana remains bullish on prisons. Jim Morris, the head of adult services for the DOC, said late in 1985 that he expected the prison population to continue to increase for the next several years as children of the baby boomers reach young adulthood. Paul Phelps had estimated that the state would need space for 5,300 more prisoners by 1990, when its budget would approach $400 million a year.
How had this ruinous situation come about? How had the state run itself into this predicament? The specific actions are easy to identify: the simplest explanation is to say the state legislature changed the laws to get tougher on criminals. Between 1975 and 1985 it passed at least 47 statutes increasing criminal penalties. Most violent felonies now carry mandatory prison terms. Stricter laws were enacted punishing DWI offenders. The 1977 legislature passed a law reducing goodtime credit from 25 days a month to 15, obviously an important determinant of how long people remain in prison.
The criminal justice system has made its contribution to the problem. Prosecutors, especially in the New Orleans area, stand on their hard-line approach, judges impose longer sentences, repeat felons are legally forbidden from being placed on probation, even one arm of the DOC helps out. The Parole Board in 1985 was paroling inmates at less than half the rate it had ten years earlier (2,400 parolees to 5,300 inmates in 1975; 2,600 parolees to 13,300 inmates in 1985). Part of the parole situation is due, of course, to legal changes that make an increasing number of inmates ineligible for parole. For many of Louisiana's practical lifers, the only hope of getting out of prison before they are old men lies in executive clemency, the power to commute sentences, which, following Dave Treen's parsimonious example, is also being used much less frequently today than it was in the past.
Is it fair to pin the responsibility on state legislators and criminal justice officials, then? Not really. Officials could act, by changing laws and policies, to reduce the prison population, but they are unlikely to do so in the face of strong public opposition to deinstitutionalization. Public opinion in Louisiana is not apathetic to prison reform (apathy at least allows public officials to do what they think best without interference), it is downright hostile.
In early 1985, after Louisiana's citizens had been exposed to prison problems for a full decade, a public opinion poll commissioned by the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate showed that almost 69% of the voters preferred increasing taxes to lock up more prisoners. Only 4.2% said more prisoners should be let out on parole to alleviate crowding in state prisons. The other 27% gave other responses, including "neither," "other," "depends," and "don't know."
A critic of the poll's structure might argue that the question could be reworded to include probation, supervised half-way houses and other options that sound less threatening than parole, but the fact remains that in every section of Louisiana, among male or female, young or old, rich or poor--the ratio is at least 10 to 1 favoring higher taxes over turning prisoners loose on parole. The only exception to this ratio was among blacks, with 61% favoring more taxes and 8% more parole.
Those seeking to promote prison reforms are well aware of the public's hard-headedness. John Vodicka, who was the director of the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons during the turbulent period of the late 1970s, said the public's fear, anger and misconceptions about prisons and inmates were blocking meaningful progress in corrections. In Vodicka's view, society needs maturity and self-confidence to develop a rational corrections program. The present prison system, he said, is irrational, an answer to fear and an expression of society's fear and anger.
In a later interview, commenting on the changes Judge West's order had brought about in the DOC, Vodicka said, "It's nice to see the department operating prisons which aren't as brutal as they were in the past. But when you make nice prisons, you just make more of them." Vodicka argued that Judge West's order had trapped the state into spending more and more money only to incarcerate more and more prisoners.
What Louisiana was left with, then, ten years after, was a nicer, safer prison system, one that Paul Phelps could call the best in the South at providing secure custody of inmates, but a system still emphasizing long-term confinement as the appropriate response to crime. Attempts to win acceptance for non-custodial alternatives continue to encounter a stone wall of public opposition which only the most persistent efforts will eventually demolish.
Ask Paul Phelps. He's been trying to knock some holes in the wall for ten years without a whole lot of visible success. A 1985 New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial called him "a voice crying in the wilderness." If Phelps has put himself in the position of a prophet trying to prepare the way for real change in Louisiana's approach to corrections, he has yet to receive much of a response from the people he has been preaching to. As he said on the occasion of his removal from office by Governor Treen in 1981, "My basic failure was that I was unable to convince people that locking people up was not the best way to deal with the problem."
Mr. Phelps should not feel so bad: so far no one else has been able to convince the citizens of Louisiana of that, either. His remark stands as the epigraph to a decade of prison building.