Fourteen Thirty-Eight: The Stakes of Jail Size in New Orleans, Louisiana

• In Event: The Big House Next Door: Exploring the Overuse of Pretrial Detention in Jails

Abstract

In 2005 Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) was a sprawling complex of 12 buildings with a total bed count of 7,520. Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed destroyed portions of the complex and made visible the unsafe and violent conditions within the buildings that remained; prompting litigation, community-based advocacy, and policy changes all aimed at decreasing the scale and brutality of pretrial incarceration in New Orleans. On September 14, 2015 doors opened at New Orleans' new 1,438-bed direct supervision jail facility built to replace the former OPP complex. Based approximately 24 months of ethnographic research conducted in New Orleans between 2011 and 2015, this paper will explore the process by which those 1,438 beds came to be understood as appropriate to the city's needs. The paper will trace the question of jail size across multiple institutions and communities, asking at each site what is at stake in the question of how many beds a new jail building requires.

Author

• Kaya Williams, University of Chicago