Political spin reaches its full rotational velocity during election season, as comments about the overcrowded Caddo Correctional Center illustrate that distract from the fact this problem stems from prosecutorial choices, not from law enforcement.
No, it’s not so much that burgeoning Shreveport police arrests keep the CCC “bursting at the seams,” although obviously that volume is a significant contributor without which it wouldn’t have the opportunity to inflate. That statement comes from Wayne Smith, Shreveport Police Department chief, whose boss Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux this fall faces spirited competition to retain his job. The more Smith talks up SPD vigilance, the more it pats Arceneaux’s back as the election looms.
Yet Smith could ramp up arrests even more and it wouldn’t be a crowding problem, according to a 2023 report of the Caddo Parish Criminal Justice Task Force. It discovered a 40 percent growth in the pretrial population even as arrests declined from 2012 to 2022. It saw as the cause the median bail amount rising over 2.5 times, explained by an increase in felony arrests, from 2014 to 2022, and a 144 percent increase in days from a court case’s opening to its disposition, thought to be a result of staffing shortages which delay transmission of case materials.
Note how this becomes a vicious cycle as far as parish detainees. Democrat Sheriff Henry Whitehorn, as things become more overcrowded, has to assign more personnel to running the jail rather than help out in preparing cases. That increases the number of detainees, which demands more staff to operate.
But this should be just a minor inconvenience. The vast bulk of arrests come from Shreveport, as Smith intimated, where SPD prepares the cases. The report suggested more interagency cooperation, which would appear therefore to have a minor impact, and using more bail-avoidance strategies, which have proven not to be the answer in Louisiana.
No, the answer is Whitehorn ally Democrat First District Attorney James Stewart must prosecute more aggressively. Stewart, locked in a tight reelection battle with Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh, who has filed significantly fewer cases even as the violent crime rate has inched up during his tenure – which began as the study launched now featuring the swelling of detainees.
Speculation focuses on Stewart’s reluctance to prosecute as an artifact of “progressive” prosecution tendencies. According to this belief, prosecutors should concentrate only on serious crimes, as lesser ones disproportionately involve nonwhites who have suffered societal discrimination leading to a disadvantaged existence and thus aggressive prosecution becomes a tool of oppression by disproportionately convicting nonwhites.
Of course, the problems with this view are that leniency, whether by failure to prosecute or too eagerly pleading down, allows dangerous people back onto the streets. It also increases costs to taxpayers from more jailing, potential recidivism by failing to allow for rehabilitation efforts (a conviction if time served hasn’t been enough sends the guilty to the state system, which has such programs available lacking in local jails), and, worst of all, increases the number of potentially innocent people who languish.
While Smith’s pronouncement may aid candidate Arceneaux, it also aids candidate Stewart by deflecting attention from the fact that Stewart prosecutes fewer arrestees while violent crime escalates. And that the Caddo Parish taxpayer has to devote more resources to maintaining the jail whereas if Stewart would take a less-ideological view to his job the facility would not be as overcrowded, if not dip below capacity. Which is the argument candidate Seabaugh continues to make that voters will evaluate in the not-distant future.
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