I enjoy ragging on the local rag, The Times-Picayune. Its editorials can be annoying BUT it’s actually a pretty darn good newspaper. They’ve been running an excellent multi-part, multi-departmental, multi-reporter series on the state of imprisonment in Louisiana. We not only have the highest incarceration rate in the country but in the world. That’s right: higher than either China’s or Iran’s. Why? Money.
Louisiana has several private pokeys and there are rural parishes that depend on jail income to stay afloat. Now that the state budget is out of whack, the lege is revisiting the Gret Stet’s sentencing laws. I wish I could say it was out of compassion or intelligence butit’s money that matters.