(Louisiana Illuminator) — Two years ago, my grandmother’s warning started ringing in my ears again.
As a child, she would tell me, “Baby, if you start off wrong, you gon’ end up wrong every time. You got to start right to end right. Watchu self.”
She was so right.
Two years ago, Gov. Jeff Landry and the Louisiana Legislature overhauled the state’s parole system. New laws eliminated parole for almost everyone whose offense was committed after Aug. 1, 2024 and now require most people to serve at least 85% of their sentences. Parole eligibility has been tightened for those sentenced earlier through an algorithmic risk score, and new rules demand unanimous votes from the parole board.
They called it “truth in sentencing.” They said it was public safety. They ran the play.
The results are in. The number of people receiving parole in Louisiana has dropped 78% to its lowest level in roughly 20 years.
The state now requires an $82 million year-over-year increase in corrections spending, an 11% hike. At least $17.5 million is earmarked for the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where there are plans to add hundreds of new beds on its 18,000‑acre campus.
The Crime and Justice Institute projects these laws could nearly double Louisiana’s prison population by 2034, from about 28,000 to roughly 55,800 people.
State leaders continue to run the same play and expect a different result. Our head coach’s playbook reeks of insanity. If this were a sports team, we would fire the coach and their whole staff. But we’re not playing football, basketball or baseball. This is people’s lives we are talking about.
Georgia State University criminologist Robert Agnew’s general strain theory says eliminating hope — not merely blocking goals, but removing the institutional possibility of return — produces moral disengagement and increased harm, not rehabilitation.
Harvard sociologists Robert Sampson and John Laub spent decades documenting what turns a criminal career around: jobs, family, institutional pathways — turning points. Parole is one of the few structured turning points the carceral system offers. Louisiana just legislated it out of existence for an entire generation.
The bill is coming due, literally. That $82 million doesn’t appear from nowhere. University of California Berkeley geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this organized abandonment: the state withdrawing from communities through disinvestment while saturating them with prison infrastructure.
Louisiana already spends several times more per person to incarcerate people than it does per public school student, according to recent corrections and K‑12 budget data. Those numbers are not a budget. They are a verdict.
Now, as those costs explode, the Legislature is moving to consolidate Orleans Parish courts.
Yale legal scholar Tom Tyler’s procedural justice framework contends that when communities lose faith that institutions treat them fairly, civic trust collapses and cooperation evaporates. In New Orleans — already navigating the long aftermath of Katrina, two decades of police violence and ongoing displacement — trust is not a renewable resource.
These are not three separate stories. It is one story told three times.
University of Birmingham cultural theorist Stuart Hall spent his career mapping how moral panics about crime are constructed and deployed to expand state control, particularly over Black communities. He would recognize every frame in Landry’s playbook: the crime special session speeches, the “truth-in-sentencing” branding, the rhetoric about radical activists and soft courts. Hall showed us the panic is produced first. The policy follows. The community pays.
Louisiana did not arrive here by accident. The line from slavery to Black Codes to convict leasing to Angola, built on tens of thousands of acres of former slave plantation land, is not metaphor. It is the starting line.
And as my grandmother promised, when you start off wrong, you gon’ end up wrong every time.
Louisiana keeps running the same play. The scoreboard says it isn’t working. The people paying for every loss aren’t sitting in the skybox. They are in the cells, in the communities, absorbing every consequence of a game they never agreed to play.
That is not law and order. That is the pattern.
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Andrea Hagan is a criminology instructor at Loyola University New Orleans and the founder of Pattern Hunters LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement and accountability.
