Decayed white ceilings speckled with black moldy circles. Jagged, rusty metal protruding from old air vents. A glue trap of live, wriggling mice stationed mere feet away from a tray of cornbread in the kitchen.
Such is the imagery inside the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, an old, decaying building that hasn’t seen any major expansion since the late 1980s.
Calls for a new jail took on new urgency last month after Sheriff Sid Gautreaux refused to house 17-year-olds there, saying conditions were so bad that doing so would violate federal law.
But a lack of political support has thwarted previous attempts to upgrade the facility over the past 20 years.
Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, a Democrat, announced plans Tuesday to ask the Baton Rouge Metro Council to approve a 90-day, $143,000 assessment and cost analysis for building a new parish jail and juvenile detention center. Architectural firm Grace Hebert Curtis Architects will provide the proposed cost, size and timeline for the new detention facilities.
Metro Council members have begun talks of creating a new public safety tax to support a new prison as well.
It is the latest development in a weekslong argument among city leaders since 17-year-old offenders had to move from juvenile facilities to adult ones under a new state law. While Broome says recent maintenance work has made the jail adequate to house those youth while a new facility is in the works, Gautreaux argues it is not up to par with federal laws requiring complete separation of minors and adults.
“The proposed maintenance will not solve the problems of the facility structure to enable it to comply with PREA (the Prison Rape Elimination Act),” Gautreaux wrote to Broome and council members in an April 23 letter. “This area of the prison has extensive mold, rust and has had portions of that wing covered in raw sewage."
Gautreaux opted to send the youths to Jackson Parish Correctional Center, located 200 miles away in Jonesboro, in the meantime — even as that facility faces its own allegations of abusing teens in a federal class action lawsuit.
Broome and Gautreaux do agree the parish is in dire need of a new facility.
“To be clear: It is not my desire for our 17-year-olds or our adult prisoners to remain in the current EBR Parish Prison facilities any longer than is necessary to design, fund and build new facilities,” Broome said in an April 26 statement.
The current jail
The parish jail was built in 1965, with the last major expansion taking place in 1987. While its typical capacity is 1,480 inmates, maintenance and surveillance issues have closed down seven of the jail's 13 wings, lowering the bed capacity to 1,000 as of April 25, according to the Sheriff's Office.
Another 384 inmates are housed at facilities in Tensas Parish and East Carroll Parish due to capacity issues, which costs the city-parish $26.63 per inmate per day — totaling over $10,000 each day, according to the Sheriff's Office.
The city-parish government plans to spend $9.5 million on the jail this year, a 22% increase compared to the amount spent on the facility in 2022. Another $810,000 is budgeted for prison maintenance this year.
The city-parish owns the parish jail, while the Sheriff’s Office operates it. The jail primarily houses those accused of crimes who are awaiting trial, not those who have been convicted.
‘I don’t think it’s suitable for my dog’
Complaints over the facility’s dilapidation are nothing new. Officials have long lamented that ceilings are too low to install security cameras (of which 79 are currently in operation) and that poor design makes it difficult for guards to properly monitor inmates.
Gautreaux told the Metro Council in 2018 he wished he “wasn’t even in the prison business” and that he feared that federal authorities would crack down on the jail if changes weren’t made soon, a concern he still shares today.
Last fall, Metro Councilman Darryl Hurst, a Democrat, formed the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison and Juvenile Detention Center Task Force, made up of elected officials, law enforcement leaders and local advocates to study statewide detention facilities and create a plan for new facilities here. Most meetings since its inception have been dedicated to touring parish prisons and juvenile detention centers in East Baton Rouge, Calcasieu and Lafourche parishes.
“I don’t think it's suitable for my dog,” Hurst said of the jail’s current condition. “It literally created trauma in my head.”
Broome said she plans to collaborate heavily with the task force on the new jail plan.
Construction of the new jail could be as far as four years away and will be a “major long-term investment by our community,” Broome said.
Previous attempts
Previous efforts to overhaul the prison facilities over the past 20 years have mostly failed. Voters haven’t approved new property taxes for the jail since 1993 after a 444-bed wing closed and more than 100 deputies were laid off. Voters renewed the tax in 2002.
An attempt in 2000 to impose three separate property taxes to provide for jail expansions failed.
“Probably one of the hardest parts of asking people to fund a new prison is reaching those East Baton Rouge Parish residents who may not have had a family member arrested and incarcerated and so have no personal connection to the conditions of a jail,” Broome said in a statement.
Former Mayor Kip Holden attempted to pass sweeping tax plans in 2008 and 2009, each costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, that would have built a new parish prison, new juvenile services facility and new headquarters for police and sheriff’s offices, as well as a $225 million riverfront tourist development that garnered intense public scrutiny.
Both measures failed in parishwide elections.
Holden attempted again in his final term to get approval on a public safety tax plan, this time for $335 million and specifically focused on the new jail, juvenile services facility and other law enforcement improvements. But in 2015 the Metro Council shot down the plan before it could go to the voters because council members said they weren’t given enough time to review the plan.
New public safety tax?
The current Metro Council may sing a different tune on a public safety tax. Members discussed a potential new tax at an April 24 meeting that would provide funding for the jail, the juvenile detention center, Baton Rouge police, EBRSO, the Baton Rouge Fire Department and Baton Rouge EMS.
The public safety tax is still in its conceptual stages and wouldn’t come to fruition until 2025 or 2026, Councilman Dwight Hudson said. This tax would be applied on top of the tax to raise firefighter pay slated for this fall’s ballot.
“There’s no magic bullet that solves the need for a new parish prison,” Hudson said after the meeting. “It’s going to take additional money. It’s badly needed. The facility has really got some issues, and that’s widely acknowledged throughout the city-parish.”
Hudson, a Republican, was a major opponent to Holden’s tax plans 15 years ago as the legislative action chairman of the Baton Rouge Tea Party at the time. His opposition centered on the riverfront tourist development component of the proposal.
John Couvillon, CEO of JMC Analytics and Polling, said Holden’s plans “tried to do too much,” and that depending on the timing and strategy, Baton Rouge voters could pass a new tax.
“There’s still some work that needs to be done if you want to pass a new tax, but we’re not as automatically anti-tax as you might see in neighboring suburban parishes,” Couvillon said.
Hurst said the task force is “looking for any way possible to limit the amount of money that will be put on the taxpayer.”
In the meantime, Hurst said he is working with the Sheriff’s Office to launch a beta touring program so people can understand how defunct the jail is.
“The most innocent of crimes could land you in jail for an extensive period of time, having to live in those conditions as a pretrial detainee,” Hurst said. “I will ask anybody that wants to go, they can contact me and we’ll schedule a tour and we’ll go together.”