The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Louisiana and its corrections agency, alleging that the state has systematically violated inmates’ 14th Amendment rights by keeping many of them behind bars beyond their release dates.
The lawsuit, which doesn’t ask for monetary damages, was filed Dec. 20 in the Middle District of Louisiana. In the wake of a federal investigation into the practices of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (LDOC), federal prosecutors said thousands of incarcerated people have been kept in custody beyond their release dates and that the LDOC has been deliberately indifferent to the problem.
“A prison system has several basic functions: booking new prisoners into the system, taking care of them when they are in custody and releasing them when their sentence is complete,” the complaint states. “Louisiana falls short on the third function.”
The lawsuit also points out that Gov. Jeff Landry, while serving as the state attorney general, criticized the LDOC for an apparent inability to carry out its tasks.
“Indeed, while serving as Louisiana attorney general in 2018, Gov. Jeff Landry complained in an op-ed that there is ‘a layer of incompetence so deep that the Corrections Department doesn't know where a prisoner is on any given day of the week or when he should actually be released from prison.’”
A joint statement from Landry and the current state attorney general, Liz Murrill, blamed the Biden administration for filing “frivolous” claims.
“This is Grinch Joe Biden’s parting Christmas present to the state and the people of Louisiana,” the statement, which was emailed to the Louisiana Record, says. “The Trump administration would likely have not allowed this case to be filed. As we saw this week in Concordia Parish, Joe Biden and (U.S. Attorney General) Merrick Garland’s orders seem clear – jam through as many frivolous cases as possible before the clock runs out.”
Earlier this month, the Justice Department said it is seeking changes to the school system in Concordia Parish in response to past desegregation issues.
The statement from Landry and Murrill also blames the “over-detention” of inmates on past criminal justice reforms carried out by the administration of John Bel Edwards. Those reforms gave criminals “a get-out-of-jail-free card,” according to the statement, which didn’t explain how the reforms also led to holding criminals beyond their release dates.
The statement offers no position on how the over-detention problem could be solved and ignores the fact that the federal investigation of the LDOC’s practices began during the previous Trump administration. On Dec. 3, 2020, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and several U.S. Attorneys’ offices informed Edwards that a federal probe had begun into failures to release inmates on time, according to this month’s federal lawsuit.
“This past year, we have taken significant action to keep Louisianans safe and ensure those who commit the crime also do the time,” the Landry-Murrill statement says. “The state of Louisiana is committed to preserving the constitutional rights of Louisiana citizens.”
This month’s Justice Department lawsuit alleges that for more than a decade – well before Edwards took office – more than 25% of those inmates released from LDOC’s custody were held beyond their release dates.
“(The Dec. 20) lawsuit seeks injunctive relief to remedy deficient conditions identified by the department’s investigation,” the Justice Department said in a statement. “... While the state has made marginal efforts to address the systemic deficiencies leading to over-detention, these steps are inadequate to address the deficiencies. …”