(The Center Square) − Gov. Jeff Landry’s promises to tackle crime in Louisiana have included one special session, 22 signed bills and a judicial overhaul of what, at one point, was consensus and “fact based legislation.”
The Legislature’s reaction to his reforms have been predictably partisan.
Early in the most recent special legislative session, Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek, presented her bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which hosts only one Democrat.
The bill removes constitutional protections for juveniles under age 17, allowing lawmakers to specify which serious felonies can be tried in adult court, perhaps leading to more minors incarcerated in adult prisons.
The bill passed both Houses without any Democrat support.
On Tuesday, the Juvenile Justice Reform Act Implementation Commission met to discuss some of the reforms and the work still needed to be done to address juvenile crime.
The partisanship and its cause quickly reveals itself.
The overwhelming majority of violent crime in Baton Rouge is committed by African Americans, according to the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. In New Orleans, black men comprise 88% of the jail population.
So, a party and a committee dominated by African Americans would be apprehensive to the tough-on-crime, no-exceptions type of approach that would disproportionately target African Americans.
More importantly, the approach does nothing to address the root causes of crime, such as poor educational quality or single-parent households.
According to the Institute of Family Studies, “(f)amily structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of … urban violence across cities in the United States.” As of 2020, nearly 53% of New Orleans families had only a single parent.
“You don’t fix the behavior by criminalizing the behavior. You fix the behavior by changing the thinking of the person misbehaving by having someone who has done what they’ve done, and can be in front of them to intervene and say ‘I’ve been where you are’,” Hakim Kashif, a reformed convict from New Orleans, told The Center Square.
Kashif said that while incarcerated, he “turned his cell into a classroom” and that doing so helped him “change his thinking.”
“Decades of evidence show that charging youth as adult does not impact public safety, effecting futures which could otherwise be bright,” Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, said.
Indeed, even with the highest incarceration rate in the United States, New Orleans led in murder and other crime categories, according to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
“This idea that we can solve the crime problem in its entirety by mass incarceration has been proven wrong time and time again,” the office said in a press release.
Alfred Carter shares a story to illuminate a broader issue. He recounts a young juvenile who was suspended but told Carter he enjoyed the time off from school.
Carter is the confidential assistant to the Deputy Secretary & Legislative Liaison for the State of Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice.
“We’re not suspending you to hurt you,” Carter told the juvenile. “We’re suspending you to remove the disruption, so that we can teach.”
“We’re training you,” Carter told the kid. “We’re training this kid to be a lawyer, this one to be a nurse, this one to be an engineer. We’re training you to be an inmate.”
The committee heard from activists, social workers, and office-holders, all of whom relayed a similar narrative.
“One of the issues in LA is a problem in the breakdown in systems,” Carter said. “We must adjust the systems so the beginning of the pipeline is repaired and fixed.”
“Inside of every school setting in NOLA, something is missing: An intervention process,” Kashif told the committee. “Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports was not really employed. Once we see behaviors intensifying, there should be direct intervention, and there should be tiers. The 1% of the highest risk is tier 3 and these individuals are driving the violence.”
“We send them to the principal’s office. As it goes on, we catch them coming into school smelling like marijuana. As it goes on, officer comes to school to ask why he hasn’t been to school in two weeks,” Kashif said. “As it goes on, we find out he’s wanted by law enforcement, so they come looking for his house because they say he stole a car. As it goes on, he’s in jail for possession of a firearm or a violent crime. Well we saw the behavior intensifying, and we never intervened.”
