ThinkProgress

A 15-year-old boy found dead in his cell, asphyxiated by his mattress cover. A suicidal 63-year-old man hanging from a showerhead. A 24-year-old who wrapped a telephone cord around his neck.

Awaiting trial at New Orleans’ jail has been likened to a “death sentence.” Now, the “most incarcerated city in the most incarcerated state in the most incarcerated country in the world” is considering spending millions of dollars to expand the troubled facility.

A federal judge set a deadline of Tuesday for the city to come up with a plan to house mentally ill inmates. Sheriff Marlin Gusman is pushing a proposal to construct a new building, with hundreds of new jail beds. The expansion would cost an estimated $97 million to build.

The city, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, has steadily reduced the number of people in jail over the past six years. But if the new beds get built, community organizers warn, they won’t stay empty for long.

“As the incoming Trump administration takes power with its promises to be ‘tough on crime,’ we know that if those beds are built, they will be filled with our community members,” Alfred Marshall, an organizer who delivered a petition to city officials against the expansion, said in a press release.

Empty spaces

The current jail, which opened in 2015, has a curious layout. One building houses the intake processing center and jail cells. The second building houses the kitchen and warehouse. Between them is an empty plot of land. Stretching out to the empty space in the middle are two long gangways — the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC), which is leading the anti-expansion campaign, calls them “bridges to nowhere.”

That empty lot makes clear that the sheriff always intended to expand the jail and build a third building later, OPPRC organizer Adina Marx-Arpadi said.

We know that if those beds are built, they will be filled with our community members.

The history of that empty space is fraught. Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005, the decrepit Orleans Parish Prison housed 6,500 inmates on an average day, making New Orleans the most incarcerated city per capita. Federal funds after the storm presented an opportunity to shake that title and rebuild with a new vision.

The storm had decimated New Orleans’ population, so constructing a smaller jail made sense. Gusman originally proposed more than 5,000 beds in the new jail. But that plan would have given the city the capacity to incarcerate one out of every 60 residents remaining in the city.

The city council unanimously decided in 2011 to cap the jail at 1,438 beds, which still allows for an incarceration rate close to double the national average.

The sheriff, who was paid per prisoner until 2015, said that number was far too low to accommodate all the people who needed to be locked up. But he agreed to construct the new jail according to the city’s parameters — leaving open the possibility “to determine appropriate future facilities, if any are needed.”

Gusman opened the $150 million facility in September 2015, calling it “the beginning of a new day” that would shed the old jail’s reputation for violence and abuse.

But almost immediately after that rosy prediction, the horror stories started pouring in. Less than two months later, a man awaiting trial died after his chronic sickle cell disease went apparently ignored and untreated in jail. Soon after that, an inmate on suicide watch hanged himself in the shower. And last summer, a teenager allegedly killed himself after spending months awaiting trial. [MORE]