BATON ROUGE (LSU Manship News Service) – In 2016, Louisiana faced a $2 billion budget gap, and lawmakers decided they could no longer afford to lock so many people up.

But in 2024, after a nationwide crime spike during the COVID pandemic, Gov. Jeff Landry reversed many of the changes, pushing through laws to keep offenders in jail longer, sending more juveniles to adult prisons and limiting the possibility of parole.

Now costs are rising again, fueled by an increase in the state’s prison population and the price of housing offenders in local facilities.

Landry has proposed a new state budget and penciled in an $82 million increase to cover local offender housing, administrative costs to oversee parole and probation and prisons, and housing for immigrant detainees.

Louisiana’s juvenile justice system has asked for $28 million for the construction of a new juvenile detention center.

The proposed increases seem to be a significant issue when the Legislature convenes for its regular session from March 9 to June 1, with some Democrats and advocacy groups already expressing concerns.

“That's a bad use of our dollars,” said state Sen. Royce Duplessis (D-New Orleans). “Think about if we put that into quality early childcare, quality early learning. You want to reduce crime? We could start by investing in babies at their youngest ages.”

Cree Matlock, the director of government affairs and policy at the Power Coalition, a nonprofit group focused on building civic engagement in minority communities, added: “To be quite honest with you, the greater community needs to understand that our current administration is prioritizing incarceration or putting individuals in prison instead of any type of preventative measures.”

Major budgetary initiatives include increasing cell space for state offenders at the Louisiana State Penitentiary and raising the per-diem paid to sheriffs to house some state offenders in parish jails.

"For the fiscal year starting July 1, the per-diem paid to sheriffs would increase $3, from $26.39 to $29.29," State Rep. John R. Illg, R-Harahan, said, "smaller jails cannot afford to do it now. For $25 a day, you want to house and clothe and feed somebody. It's very hard to do.”

He detailed the ongoing compromises made between the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association and local government for jail funding. Final per-diem increases often reflect inflation and are lower amounts than initially hoped for.

State spending for Angola would also increase by $17.5 million to expand capacity.

When state officials were dealing with the huge budget gap in 2016, Louisiana was widely seen as the nation’s incarceration capital, with more residents locked up as a percentage of the total population than any other state.

Democrats opposed locking up nonviolent offenders, given the impacts on them and their families, and moderate Republicans viewed the prison costs as unsustainable.

After then-Gov. John Bel Edwards proposed a $92 million decrease in corrections funding, a bipartisan majority of the Legislature voted to reduce sentencing for those convicted of nonviolent offenses, treat juveniles in juvenile facilities rather than prisons and save prison space for violent offenders.

These changes contributed to a 24% decrease in prison population due to reductions in time spent incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. In 2023, the Department of Public Safety & Corrections reported there was a 15% reduction in the recidivism rate between 2016 and 2019.

The state also reinvested $107 million of the savings into rehabilitative programming and victims’ services.

Yet the pandemic fallout and spike in crime increased incarceration levels again and reinvigorated support for a tougher approach.

Shortly after he took office in 2024, Landry convened a special crime session. He said he wanted to end frustrations with “the leniency of sentencing and our misguided post-conviction programs that feed recidivism by constantly returning unreformed, unrepentant, and violent criminals to our neighborhoods.”

But as corrections costs rise again, Duplessis, the New Orleans Democrat, foresees several “clean-up” bills debated during the upcoming session.

“I think you'll probably see some legislation to dial back the drastic 2024 laws that were passed,” Duplessis said. “I think that there were some unintended consequences.”

Now, there seems to be a renewed focus on reentry services and prison programming.

In a Jan. 14 meeting of the House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice meeting, Rep. Debbie Villio, R-Kenner, the panel chairman, addressed ongoing criticism of the 2024 legislation.

“If everybody looks back to the crime session, when I did all the ‘tough-on-crime’ bills, there was always a lot of chatter about ‘we’re just trying to ramp up prison populations,’” Villio said. “I said then and I will say now again that that was absolutely not the truth.”

Villio explained that by increasing prison time, those who are incarcerated can partake in meaningful prison programming.

In a Senate hearing Monday, the Corrections Department focused on rehabilitative services, including vocational and license training programs, for juveniles who are incarcerated.

Department data presented showed that in 2025, 536 juveniles were awaiting placement in juvenile
detention centers.

Compared to 2019, the budget for local juvenile housing in 2027 would increase by 87% to $226.6 million.

“One of those things that does impact us budgetarily is the number of youth that come into the system, which is why you see some of those significant increases,” Jason Starnes, undersecretary at the Corrections Department, said.

He said the budget increases “are for the addition of these facilities, because we simply don’t have the
capacity at the current time.”

In response, state Sen. Gerald Boudreaux, D-Lafayette, told Starnes, “We need to know what you need. We still have some more work to do, and we are in it with you.”