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NEW ORLEANS — More than half of Louisiana prisoners in state custody are serving their time in local jails rather than state facilities, recently released federal data show.
As of 2022, more than 14,000, or 53% of prisoners under the jurisdiction of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, were in local jails — the highest rate in the country, according to a report released late last year by the Bureau of Justice Statistics .
The only states that came close to Louisiana, according to the data, were Kentucky, where 47.3% of state prisoners were held in local jails, and Mississippi, at 33%. In the vast majority of other states, less than 10% of prisoners are serving sentences in local jails.
Louisiana has for decades relied on parish sheriffs to supplement state prisons with local jail capacity in order to avoid overcrowding at state prisons. Sheriffs have a financial incentive to agree. The state pays them a per-diem, which generates millions of dollars per year in revenue for some local agencies. Smaller parishes have built out their jails far beyond their local detention needs and, in some cases, handed operations over to private prison companies.