The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections is launching a new program aimed at reducing the state’s prison population during the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said Tuesday.
The move comes as advocacy groups nationwide raise alarms about the personal and public health impact of incarcerating people in facilities where close contact cannot be avoided. Those concerns carry particular weight in Louisiana, which imprisons more people per capita than anywhere else in the world.
Louisiana’s COVID-19 Furlough Review Panel will focus on inmates who have not been convicted of violent or sexual crimes and have chronic health conditions and/or are within six months of their scheduled release. They would be subject to supervised home confinement, which means they must have a residence available to them.
“Public safety obviously is paramount to everything we do,” corrections department Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc said.
Five members of a six-person review panel would have to sign off on an early release, he said. The panel will include LeBlanc or his designee; representatives of the probation and parole department, the pardon and parole board, sheriffs and district attorneys, and an advocate for crime victims designated by Gov. John Bel Edwards.
About 1,200 state prison and local jail inmates are eligible, LeBlanc said. The first review panel meeting is planned for Friday. LeBlanc expects the panel to review the cases of about 40 inmates at the first meeting and meet two or three times a week.
“This is a step forward – but it’s a vanishingly small step that would reduce our prison population by only a tiny fraction of what’s needed to protect public health,” said Alanah Odoms Hebert, executive director for the Louisiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Subjecting people who are already within six months of their release date to a cumbersome, one-sided review process does not go nearly far enough to avert a prison pandemic that would disproportionately impact people of color and further strain our healthcare system.”
The ACLU recently sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons, seeking the release of inmates at high risk of COVID-19 complications from Oakdale Federal Detention Centers in Oakdale, La., where several prisoners already have died from the illness. At least three Republican members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation have joined the ACLU in raising concerns about the Oakdale facility.
Louisiana’s corrections department also is facing a lawsuit over quarantining prisoners who have tested positive for COVID-19 to “Camp J,” normally a punishment camp for prisoners serving life sentences at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola.
“Moving sick people from around the state to a facility with no ventilators, no doctors, and a long way from adequate hospitals is wrong and will result in a public health disaster,” said Mercedes Montagnes, executive director of The Promise of Justice Initiative, which is representing prisoners facing transfer.
LeBlanc, while not wanting to say too much about a pending lawsuit, defended the move. He said only Angola prisoners and those who otherwise would be housed in parish jails are at Camp J, while other state prisons are quarantining their own COVID-positive inmates.
“I think it was the right move on our part,” he said. “It’s a safe haven for those who are there.”
Advocates also are petitioning for the release of 16 medically vulnerable people being held in six Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in Louisiana, citing “their severe risk of contracting coronavirus and developing life-threatening COVID-19 symptoms.” They were part of a petition filed last week on behalf of people in ICE detention in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana that was dismissed on technical jurisdictional grounds, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the groups pressing their cases.
