Recent editorials from Louisiana newspapers:
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March 22
The Daily Courier of Houma on State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson’s retirement:
State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson has announced that he will retire in the midst of several high-profile scandals involving the agency.
Gov. John Bel Edwards will not have to go far to find his replacement. In fact, the governor cannot even search outside of the State Police’s own ranks.
A state law from the early 1980s requires that the State Police superintendent come “from the ranks of sworn, commissioned State Police officers who have graduated from the State Police Training academy.”
Perhaps Edwards and the state will be lucky enough to find the most qualified candidate among current State Police officers. But if that happens, it will be mere happenstance.
Limiting the search to current officers within the agency needlessly focuses the search only on this one agency in this one state.
There are state police forces in every state and countless local or federal law enforcement agencies, and one of which could have the perfect candidate in its ranks.
Thinking a bit differently, even someone from outside the world of law enforcement might make a competent leader for this state agency.
But our state makes it impossible to perform a true search for the perfect candidate.
Instead, the law requires that the next superintendent move up within the State Police.
This is not to say that the next superintendent will be lacking in experience, knowledge or ability. But the chances of finding the perfect person for a job are extremely limited when an agency looks in only one place.
One critic blamed politics for the law, and it is difficult to place the blame on anything else.
“The objective for any law enforcement agency is to hire the best available person, not just the best available person that works for that organization,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the nonprofit Metropolitan Crime Coalition in New Orleans. “I’ve never heard of that type of obstacle. I think it shows how political the State Police have become.”
Particularly in an agency like the State Police, which is dealing with some internal investigations, it would be nice to be able to look elsewhere for new blood, a person who could bring an outside perspective to an important statewide post.
The State Police superintendent performs a wide variety of important jobs, most significantly serving as the public face of the agency.
No forward-thinking company or organization would purposely limit the pool of available workers only to those already employed there.
Why is the State Police required to do so?
It is time for this backward law to be repealed.
Online:
https://www.houmatoday.com/
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March 20
The Advocate on littering in Louisiana:
Since January, we’ve tried to advance a sustained public discussion about litter in Louisiana, offering a few comments here periodically in hopes of moving the ball on a problem that’s plagued the state for generations.
Are there bigger challenges facing the state? Maybe. But if there’s a common obstacle to progress in Louisiana, whether it’s education or economic development, it’s that we don’t ask enough of each other. To raise those expectations, we should start with simple self-respect. That means demanding streets, roads and neighborhoods as clean as any in America. There’s no reason it can’t be done.
Our previous editorials have described the dilemma, which is obvious to anyone who’s driven around our communities. Here’s how we broached the subject earlier this year:
“Put simply, this place so many of us claim to love and cherish is choked with litter. If a line of dump trucks rolled into Louisiana tomorrow and emptied loads of trash onto our streets and highways, we’d consider such profane disrespect an act of war. But oddly, each and every day, we do more or less the same thing to ourselves, fouling a land we like to laud as a Sportsman’s Paradise with broken beer bottles, dirty napkins, plastic bags, beverage cans, and any other nasty garbage that, in a normal world, would rest only at the landfill.”
We hope that image is a call to action. But today, we’d like to focus on what’s already being done. This month, in conjunction with Keep Louisiana Beautiful, Lt. Gov. Bill Nungesser spearheaded Leaders Against Litter, a statewide campaign in which more than 2,000 civic, business and political leaders across Louisiana participated in cleanup events in their communities.
There’s a history of the lieutenant governor’s office getting involved in anti-litter efforts. Nungesser’s predecessor, Jay Dardenne, embraced the issue, too - standing on the state’s roadsides, bag in hand, to collect what the careless had pitched from their passing cars.
Maybe there’s a feeling that anti-litter campaigns are a natural mission for lieutenant governors, who have few constitutional duties. Perhaps the underlying assumption is that litter is a second-tier issue, not really central to the civic health of Louisiana.
We hope not. But if such a feeling forms our thinking, we need to change our attitude. Nothing much is going to change without the broader body politic getting involved.
That’s why the involvement of other people of stature in Leaders Against Litter is encouraging. It can be the basis for a deeper commitment to real policy changes, which should include tougher anti-littering laws and heightened enforcement of the laws already on the books.
We teach children not to make messes, and to pick up after themselves. It’s high time that grown-ups in Louisiana did the same thing.
Online:
https://www.theadvocate.com/
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March 19
NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune on the state’s high incarceration rate:
Louisiana held 40,000 inmates in state prisons and parish jails in 2012, which is more per capita than any other state and double the national average. That represents a tremendous loss in human potential and a huge cost for the state and for families.
The number of inmates has edged downward, falling 9 percent by 2015 because of legislative and corrections policy reforms.
But the state must do much more to lose its dubious title as the world’s leader in incarceration.
Gov. John Bel Edwards is committed to doing that, and a task force created by the Legislature has given him and lawmakers a sensible blueprint.
Louisiana’s Justice Reinvestment Task Force - which included a sheriff, a district attorney, several judges and lawmakers and the head of the conservative Family Forum - sent its recommendations to Gov. Edwards Thursday (March 16). The task force’s work is expected to be reflected in a package of reform bills the governor will submit to lawmakers in April.
The task force looked at “data-driven” policy changes in Texas, Georgia, Alabama and other states to come up with its recommendations. “The reforms would ensure consistency in sentencing, focus prison beds on those who pose a serious threat to public safety, strengthen community supervision, clear away barriers to successful reentry …,” the task force report says.
Louisiana locks up more people for nonviolent crimes than other states do, which is a key reason our incarceration rate is so high. Prison sentences for nonviolent offenses also have gotten longer. And a significant number of people are sent to prison because of failure to meet the terms of their parole.
“The Task Force found that the state sent people to prison for drug, property, and other nonviolent offenses at twice the rate of South Carolina and three times the rate of Florida, even though the states had nearly identical crime rates,” the report says. Alternatives like probation and drug courts in Louisiana are limited by a lack of funding and by state law.
That isn’t sensible. With proper supervision and intervention, those inmates could stay out of jail and be productive. That could help stabilize families and ultimately make communities safer.
The task force’s recommendations range from simplifying felony classifications to expanding alternative sentencing options to focusing parole on the period when offenders are at highest risk of repeating a crime. The task force recommends raising the felony threshold for property crimes, making juveniles previously sentenced to life eligible for parole and tailoring fines more to an inmates’ ability to pay.
As a whole, the changes would lead to fewer people being sent to prison - an estimated 4,800 fewer by 2027. Those who are imprisoned also should have a better chance of rehabilitation and success when they are released.
In total, the changes recommended by the task force would save the state an estimated $305 million over 10 years. The idea is to reinvest roughly half of that - $154 million - back into programs to reduce recidivism and provide assistance to victims.
The state is spending more than $625 million on corrections this fiscal year, which ends June 30. That robs other programs of resources. Louisiana also is constantly fighting a budget deficit, and a reduction in prison spending could help plug that gap.
“If we can’t afford it and it’s not working, let’s do something better,” Gov. Edwards said Thursday. “It is not true that being tough on crime is always being smart on crime.”
The governor, who comes from a long line of sheriffs, may be uniquely suited to changing Louisiana’s approach to incarceration. He has the support of the business community, the Family Forum and a growing number of lawmakers. The task force plan is smart and sensible.
Still, it won’t be easy. Nothing of this magnitude ever is.
But Louisiana must change its approach. Our state won’t flourish if it keeps putting so many of its people behind bars who don’t belong there.
Online:
https://www.nola.com/
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