The state of Louisiana is on something of a law and order binge these days. Governor Jeff Landry is hot to kill more people. And the state also seems to be bound and determined to keep prisoners in prison by any means necessary, including faceless algorithms. From Pro Publica:
Calvin Alexander thought he had done everything the Louisiana parole board asked of him to earn an early release from prison. He had taken anger management classes, learned a trade and enrolled in drug treatment. And as his September hearing before the board approached, his disciplinary record was clean. Alexander, more than midway through a 20-year prison sentence on drug charges, was making preparations for what he hoped would be his new life. His daughter, with whom he had only recently become acquainted, had even made up a room for him in her New Orleans home. Then, two months before the hearing date, prison officials sent Alexander a letter informing him he was no longer eligible for parole.
Well, what idiot bureaucrat thought that keeping a nearly blind 70-year old in prison was a good use of taxpayers dollars? Fire that man immediately. Except that there's no actual human being to fire.
A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people—nearly half the state’s prison population—have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.
An algorithm is now the state of Louisiana's turnkey.
The law that changed Alexander’s prospects is part of a series of legislation passed by Louisiana Republicans last year reflecting Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime agenda to make it more difficult for prisoners to be released. While campaigning for governor, Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, championed a crackdown on rewarding well-behaved prisoners with parole. Landry said early release, which until now has been typically assumed when judges hand down sentences, is a slap in the face to crime victims.
“The revolving door is insulting,” Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the state’s high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and “misguided post-conviction programs” that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisiana’s recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.)
But Landry and his pet legislature weren't done yet.
The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole. That decision makes Louisiana the only state to use risk scores to automatically rule out large portions of a prison population from being considered for parole, according to seven national criminal justice experts.
I'm sorry to say this, because I love so much about the state, but the voters of Louisiana are a bunch of suckers. Take them all in all, these policies are going to cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, and that's not even including the cost of defending against the inevitable blizzard of lawsuits that inevitably will follow the adoption of this draconian regime. And, it turns out, the parole-denying algorithm was designed to do the exact opposite of what it's being used for by the state.
That was not how the tool, known as TIGER, an acronym for Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry, was intended to be used. Developed as a rehabilitative measure about a decade ago, it was supposed to help prison officials determine what types of classes or counseling someone might need to prevent them from landing back behind bars—not be used as a punitive tool to keep them there, said one of its creators...Louisiana’s TIGER scoring system was born out of a 2014 federal initiative to help states reduce their prison populations.
The risk assessment tool, developed by the state department of corrections and Louisiana State University researchers using a $1.75 million federal grant, was meant to “treat criminal thinking,” said Keith Nordyke, one of the creators of TIGER. For populations with the highest risk of reoffending, he said, the prison would flood them with services—addiction counseling, therapy, job training—to help keep them out of trouble once they were freed. “The whole purpose of this was to slow down the revolving door,” Nordyke said. Louisiana corrections officials started using the TIGER scores as part of the parole determination process in 2018, but it was only in 2024 that they became the sole measure of parole eligibility.
Remember when "criminal justice reform" was going to be the issue that renewed bipartisan comity and provide a way forward for progressive politics? Yeah, that was cool.
