In March 2024, Louisiana lawmakers convened a Special Legislative Session on violent crime, advancing sweeping criminal justice legislation that significantly altered — and in many cases reversed — elements of the state’s prior reform framework. While framed as a response to rising violent crime, the session’s measures extended well beyond repealing policies associated with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI).
Below, we provide analyses of Louisiana’s original 2017 justice reforms, examine the full range of evidence-based policy options available to Louisiana and other states to improve public safety, and assess the policy and system impacts of the 2024 Special Session outcomes.
Background: JRI Smart on Crime Reforms of 2017
In 2016, Louisiana faced a crisis: the state was the top incarcerator in the country and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a corrections system that failed to yield positive results. Then-Governor John Bell Edwards and a bipartisan legislature spearheaded a Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) to confront the rising cost and population of the corrections system and divert the money saved into state and local programming focused on rehabilitation and reentry.
Resources:
- Smart on Crime Explainer: Overview of the 2017 JRI process and legislation
- Impact of 2017 Legislation: Cost savings and prison population reductions
Key Insights:
- 26% decrease in the prison population and a 55% reduction in incarceration for nonviolent offenses over five years.
- 95% drop in technical violations of parole or probation, accompanied by a 35% decrease in average supervision caseloads.
- Nearly $107 million reinvested, including $71 million for reentry services, staffing, and programming.
Louisiana Facts and Figures
CJI has produced a series of Frequently Asked Questions based on publicly available data.
Special Session on Crime
At the beginning of 2024, Governor Landry announced a special legislative session to follow through on his campaign promise to undo the bipartisan policy work of 2017. The special session resulted in bills that went far beyond reversal of JRI legislation.
Resources:
Key Insights:
- HB9 – Ends parole eligibility for individuals who committed offenses on or after August 1, 2024, with limited exceptions for juveniles serving life or de facto life sentences
- HB10 – Cuts the amount of sentence time inmates can earn through good behavior or programming
- HB11 – Increases the penalty for technical probation violations to up to 90 days and allows full revocation to send technical violators back to prison
- HB9 and HB10 together – Create a sentencing system stricter than pre-2017 laws, requiring nonviolent offenders to serve 85% of their sentences, a move that departs from practices in nearly all other states
Cost of Special Session Legislation
The legislation passed during the Special Session stands to cost Louisiana an additional $600 million annually, much of which will fall onto parishes.*
Resources:
- Projected Costs of Doubling the Prison Population
- Statewide Costs of the Rollback Policies
- Local Costs of the Rollback Policies
- Budget Losses and Expected Costs
Key Insights:
- HB10 alone could:
- Double the size of Louisiana’s prison population
- Double the population of nonviolent offenders
- Triple the time spent in prison for the same offense
- Cost an estimated $2 billion for new prisons to accommodate the population
Alternative Public Policy Approaches
There are many ways to address the cost of the growing prison population while maintaining public safety. Increasing penalties is often the response to increases in crime, but research has found that many outside factors impact crime rates.
Resources:
- JRI Outcomes in Southern States
- Criminal Justice Trends & Current Policy Proposals in Louisiana.
- Factors Impacting Crime
Key Insights:
- States that expanded Medicaid experienced a 5.3% reduction in reported violent crime
- Higher unemployment rates are associated with increases in property crime
- Most individuals age out of criminal behavior, with offending declining significantly over time
- Higher high school graduation rates and additional years of education are strongly linked to lower crime rates
Explore CJI’s Evidence-Based Justice Efforts in Louisiana
CJI has been engaged in reform efforts across the Louisiana justice system for many years.
- Review the history of CJI’s and Louisiana’s JRI effort
- Read our reports from the Louisiana Women’s Incarceration Task Force: Original Task Force report in 2020 and follow-up report in 2022
- Explore our evidence-based skills trainings provided to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections (DPS&C) for probation officers and transition specialists statewide
*CJI’s numbers illustrate potential costs and may differ from the Fiscal Notes attached to specific bills based on access to different underlying data and analysis approaches.
Connect with CJI
- Sign up for CJI’s quarterly newsletter, The Crime & Justice Insider
- Reach out to us at cjiconnect@cjinstitute.org.