'We can't manage that many people:' Will this Shreveport PD reform help jail overcrowding? (2024)

When Caddo Parish Sheriff-elect Henry Whitehorn takes office next month, he will take over management of one of the nation’s most overcrowded local jails.

Opened in 1989, the Caddo Correctional Center was built to house a maximum of 1070 inmates at any given time. This month, the facility has been housing well over 1,500 inmates, which is the "emergency" capacity established for the jail when it was used to house south Louisiana inmates during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Whitehorn said that he plans to organize a focus group of community leaders early on in his term as sheriff to help shape a plan for dealing with the chronic overcrowding.

"I don't want to make a decision in a vacuum," Whitehorn said."It's a tough problem but we're going to get it solved"

Solving the CCC’s overcrowding crisis was among the most important issues for voters on the campaign trail, as well as for local criminal justice system stakeholders.

Whitehorn’s focus group will build on the work done by the Caddo Parish Criminal Justice Task Force, a partnership of local agencies that commissioned a long-term study of CCC overcrowding by the Criminal Justice Institute. The CJI’s study ended in a 35-page report that identified several issues in the local criminal justice system that have fed into the jail’s overcrowding problem, which has gotten more severe even as area law enforcement agencies make less arrests.

Yearly jail admissions went down by more than 1,000 from 2012 to 2022, while the CCC’s average daily population grew by 12% during that span, according to the CJI’s report. The report said that longer pretrial stays have been driven by average bail costs skyrocketing and trials taking longer to reach a disposition.

In 2022, 45% of Caddo Parish criminal proceedings lasted longer than 270 days from a defendants first court date to their final disposition, compared to just 5% of cases in 2015.

Nearly 150 of the people currently incarcerated in the CCC have been locked up in the jail awaiting trial for more than 18 months, according to jail records.

Interim-Sheriff Jay Long said that since taking over leadership of the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office, he’s been frustrated with how long inmates are staying in the jail awaiting trial.

"It's frustrating, because I can't let people out of jail, and I don't want to let people out of jail if they need to be there for public safety," Long said. "It's a stalemate that's costing this parish a lot."

Steve Prator, Caddo Parish's six-term sheriff who Long succeeded last March, had long spoken out about the jail's overcrowding crisis.

“All I can do is scream, holler, bitch, gripe and moan and try and bring the attention of the entire criminal justice system to the fact that something must be done,” Prator told the Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate in August. “I’m not saying that anyone is lazy, or corrupt or not working or anything else. What I’m saying is that there needs to be a sense of urgency throughout the entire criminal justice system because this affects all of us.”

Long said that when the CCC’s population gets this high, inmates receive a fraction of their usual recreation time. That inflames tensions within the jail, and makes his already short-staffed deputies’ jobs more difficult, he said.

‘"When we have a manageable population and sufficient staff, we're able to offer more recreation, more programs, more benefits and improvements to the people that are there," Long said. "When we get this crowded, when this short staffed we have to cut back on something because we can't manage that many people. I would say that the stress level goes up when you have more people in there than there should be being supervised by less people than there should be. It's a more challenging and dangerous environment for the deputy to work in."

In an interview last August, local prison reform advocate Terrance Winn said that CCC inmates he worked with told him that they didn't get recreation time every day and that there often weren't enough corrections staff available to help peacefully resolve conflicts.

"(Staff) won’t do anything until someone becomes a victim," Winn said "They never get (recreation) the time that they’re supposed to be given by law. They said they’ll get out like every other day, but when they do get out, they might supposed to be let out for an hour and they only get 15 or 20 minutes."

While pretrial inmates make up the vast majority of the CCC’s population, the jail is required to house some state inmates as result of a lawsuit between the parish commission and the sheriff’s office, Long said. According to Long,pre-trial inmates can't work at the facility, so without post-conviction inmate labor the Parish would need to hire civilian staff to do custodian, maintenance and cafeteria work, which was the basis for the commission’s lawsuit, Long said.

The lawsuit’s disposition required that 20% of the CCC’s population be post-conviction inmates who can be put to work. With pretrial inmate numbers as they are, that quota can’t be filled responsibly because of how many pretrial inmates are incarcerated at the CCC.

"The parish has an interest in keeping 20% of the jail's population DOC because legally you can't work anyone unless their convicted of a felony," Long said. "We are unable to fill that."

Currently, around 14% of the CCC's population are post-conviction state inmates, Long said.

One potential solution to shorten pretrial jail terms in Caddo Parish Long sees is reforming the way that video evidence is collected for trials, as Caddo courts have required that video evidence be turned in using physical media like a DVD, rather than with a secure cloud-based streaming platform that could speed along the discovery process.

Long’s office recently polled sheriff’s offices around the state on how local courts accept video evidence, which found that many district attorney’s offices around the state have pivoted to secure cloud-based streaming platforms to collect evidence for discovery, including Bossier, Ouachita and Lafayette parishes.

The process of reforming that process in Caddo Parish is well underway, according to Shreveport Police Department Captain Janice Dailey, who oversees how the SPD manages video evidence. Dailey said that the SPD is switching to cloud-based platforms to share video evidence for discovery.

As you can just imagine, it's clicking a button and attaching a file versus burning a DVD, so it's going to be quicker," said Dailey. "It's efficiency. It's easier for us and the courts are going to have what they need instantaneously."

Dailey did not give an exact date for when the SPD will make the final switch, but that the long-coming change is in its final stages.

Dailey said that the SPD hired a second civilian video evidence technician last month, meaning that this is the first time in Dailey’s tenure with the SPD that multiple full-time staffers will be working to fill public records and evidence discovery requests for video materials.

Ivy Woodard, a spokesperson from the Caddo Parish District Attorney’s office, said that long wait times for getting video from the SPD has been an issue in the past, and that these reforms should help.

"That should help speed that part of the process up," Woodard said.

Streamlining the discovery process was among the 16 recommendations for solving the CCC’s overcrowding crisis highlighted in the CJI’s report.