Out of Balance: Lack of diversity taints Louisiana criminal justice system
Southern Poverty Law Center, February 3, 2023: Out of Balance: Lack of diversity taints Louisiana criminal justice system
“In a new report titled Out of Balance, the SPLC Action Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s lobbying arm, looks at parish (county) criminal justice system leadership in Louisiana. The report finds a huge disparity between the state’s racial demographics and the ethnicity of its sheriffs and district attorneys – the officials at the forefront of criminal investigations and prosecutions.
“‘Although people of color are grossly overrepresented at every point of the criminal justice system in Louisiana, white individuals hold the power to influence Black citizens’ interactions with racial profiling, criminalization, and incarceration,’ the report states.
“The numbers are startling.
“Of the 64 sheriffs across the state, only four (6%) are Black. Only 12% of the 42 district attorneys are Black. This is in a state where almost a third of the population is Black.
“According to state-level sentencing data compiled by the nonprofit Sentencing Project, 581 of every 100,000 people in Louisiana are incarcerated. That is the second-highest rate of incarceration in the U.S. Louisiana only recently dropped slightly behind Mississippi, where the incarceration rate is 584 per 100,000.
“As in other states across the Deep South, the system is in many ways a legacy of 150 years of slavery and nearly a century of Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation, under which states enacted laws designed specifically to criminalize Black people.
“The people being sentenced in Louisiana are 3.8 times as likely to be Black as white – even though 31.2% of the population is Black and 57.9% white. As of 2022, 65% of Louisiana’s prison population is Black.”
Additional reading:
SPLC, February 2, 2023: Out of Balance: Racial Disparity Among Louisiana’s Sheriffs and Prosecutors
The New York Times, January 25, 2023: Louisiana ‘Deliberately Indifferent’ to Keeping Inmates Past Release Date, Justice Dept. Says
Vox, February 2, 2023: It’s now legal for domestic abusers to own a gun in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi
The Marshall Project, January 7, 2023: How Two States Differ on the Injustice of Non-Unanimous Juries
