Editorial by Kevin Speakman, Bogalusa Daily News
“Even if they are guilty, the punishment is supposed to be the restriction of movement, not living in inhumane conditions.”—Sheriff Jason Smith
Inhumane is a polite way of describing the conditions at the Washington Parish Jail, located in Franklinton, Louisiana. The 41-year-old jail was constructed to house 144 temporary inmates, awaiting trials and sentencing to terms of incarceration to be served at one of Louisiana’s many correctional facilities.
To be clear, this facility is officially designated as a pre-trial detention center. Most of the inmates there have been charged with a crime, but have not yet been convicted. Under the United States Constitution, they are innocent until proven guilty, and have the right to a speedy and fair trial. One of the inmates, recently convicted of murder, has been in this facility for over four years, and must continue to wait until his sentencing is finalized. In Louisiana, sentences are calculated by hand, and can sometimes take months due to a backlog of those requiring it.
The facility consists of four long blocks and two short blocks. Men are housed in long blocks and females in short blocks. By its original design, one of the short blocks is supposed to serve as a disciplinary chamber where inmates can be separated when the threat of violence either to or by them becomes high. Currently, the jail has nowhere to move high-risk inmates as that block is being used to house females.
In these blocks, there are currently no doors to separate the cells from the common area, and bunk beds have been moved into the open floors to accommodate overcrowding. Even so, there aren’t enough beds, and many of the inmates take to sleeping on the concrete floors. There are no assigned sleeping quarters, and I was told that who gets to sleep where is determined by the inmates. Without doors, inmates are exposed to one another 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The corrections Chief informed me that when the lights go out, everyone comes alive.
The Jail’s enforcement rotation typically consists of four deputies. One is stationed in a control room where cameras are watched, covering almost every square inch of the facility. When I viewed this control room, about a quarter of the cameras were very blurry, making it nearly impossible to discern what was going on in their viewing area. The other three are responsible for moving inmates throughout the facility and enforcing peace among them. During my visit, the jail had a total of 212 inmates, for a ratio of about 70 inmates to every corrections deputy on the floor. Each block houses 40-50 inmates at any given time, who are free to roam the area.
Sherriff Jason Smith said that the doors were removed over a decade ago because they had started to malfunction and inmates were jamming the locks, making it difficult for deputies to get into the cells. The doors were stored for a while and then disappeared, and Smith said he is unsure of how, or why, this was done.
The jail has a small outdoor area where inmates once received frequent yard time, but I was told that this practice was stopped during the COVID-19 lockdowns and that the facility has lacked the manpower to control the inmates in the yard ever since. This means that inmates spend almost 100% of their time on lockdown in one of the blocks, unless they are entrusted with a job inside the jail such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry duty.
During recent renovations, four of six visitation area windows were converted to office space, leaving only two for the inmates to use. The administrative facilities within the building recently completed a large-scale renovation of their offices and working area, initiated over a year ago under the previous Sherriff.
This situation wouldn’t be too unfamiliar to inmates at one of our nation’s supermax prisons, where the most hardened criminals are housed, although most supermax prisons afford their inmates a cell with a lockable door, and a bed. Often these cells contain televisions and restricted computers, and inmates have access to a variety of training and rehabilitation programs, church services, libraries, athletic activities, therapy, educational programs, etc.
The men and women at Washington Parish Jail have been charged with a variety of infractions, from heinous capital crimes to simple possession of drugs and paraphernalia. Most of them have yet to be convicted of these crimes. Some of them may have never committed a crime, and often spend months in the jail under these conditions before being found innocent and released. “It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Smith said.
“It severely limits our ability to discipline inmates, and it’s a serious safety concern for our deputies. Our only recourse is to charge them with another crime if we catch it on camera, but some of these guys don’t care about that,” Smith said.
“We’ve been cited by the Fire Marshall 22 times since 2020, and we’ve had 20 complaints since July 1 of this year,” he added.
The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution protects inmates from cruel and unusual punishment. A facility that more or less leaves discipline to the inmates themselves would certainly qualify as a violation of that amendment. Stories of violent attacks, rape, and brutality inside the jail are commonplace.
The 6th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a fair and speedy trial to those accused of a crime. Spending years in a pre-trial detention center would certainly qualify as a violation of that amendment, and an easy argument could be made that inmates living in these conditions would rather plead guilty to a crime they did not commit than stay there, just for an opportunity to be moved to a safer and more humane facility.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to due process, and the notion of pleading guilty for your own safety and well-being is at ghastly odds with the idea of a fair shake by the justice system.
How then can a government body that is sworn to uphold the Constitution condemn presumably innocent men and women to such clear violations of that same document? The men and women who are currently incarcerated in Washington Parish jail have had these rights trampled, and the deputies charged with their discipline and protection are being exposed to undue and preventable risks.
Smith has his eyes set on a new facility, where he hopes 50 acres in the middle of the Parish, next to the emergency center already operated by the Sherriff’s Office, could be donated to the Department of Corrections and a safer, more humane jail could be built. He has had a rough plan for this facility drawn up by an engineering firm and estimates the cost of construction to be around 20 million dollars.
This, in conjunction with properly staffing the facility, would allow Smith and his deputies to enforce the law without violating the basic human and constitutional rights of the citizens they are tasked with providing peace for. The difficult part will be securing funding from a citizenry and government that would rather build new offices, buy new patrol cars, and hire more patrol deputies than deal with the obvious problems in the correctional facilities where criminals end up.
This begs the question of the intentions of these enforcing bodies. Are they interested in rehabilitating criminals into functioning, productive citizens, or are they driven by the for-profit prison system that makes Louisiana one of the most incarcerated places on earth?
This, combined with the general apathy of citizens towards criminals, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to secure the large amounts of money that would be required to get these facilities up to code and provide basic human rights to the incarcerated. I would argue that in the absence of the capacity to care for the incarcerated, the authority to do so would also be questionable, at best.
If a parent let their child live in these conditions, they would sent to prison. If a pet owner had so many pets that they were fighting over sleeping space and never let outside, a strong case could made for animal cruelty charges. Why then do we allow those responsible for placing humans in these conditions to continue to do so, and turn a blind eye to a situation that is only ever one bad decision away for any of us?
For the sake of brevity, this editorial doesn't touch on the fact that the only people who spend time in this facility are those who cannot afford bail, or are considered a flight risk. Throughout my studies of the Constitution, including swearing an oath to it many years ago, I do not remember the amendments mentioned above stating, "Only if you have a few thousand dollars."
A Mississippi woman, 23 year-old Amari Williams, was arrested Monday (August 26, 2024) and
