The day after a shooting last month killed a teenager and injured five people at the Mall of Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry blasted what he referred to as “hug-a-thug” policies — reforms put in place prior to his tenure when the state was trying to shed its reputation as the nation’s incarceration capital. He also demanded harsher penalties for violent minors.
“I’m done with them. It doesn’t matter how old they are,” Landry, a Republican, said during a news conference in Baton Rouge. “We’ve got 18,000 acres at Angola — if it was up to me, I would send them all there for the rest of their lives.”’
Landry’s push for harsher punishments that would keep people in prison longer came as little surprise. Soon after his 2024 inauguration, he won a package of tough-on-crime bills that drastically changed the state’s sentencing laws. A Landry spokesperson at the time brushed off concerns from civil rights groups and incarceration experts that it would swell the prison population and plunge the state into financial disaster, insisting that “less crime means greater economic opportunity for everyone.”
Two years later, the governor wants to add hundreds more beds in Louisiana’s largest prison and spend more on medical costs as prisoners stay longer behind bars. His proposed $798 million corrections budget, which the Republican-controlled legislature is expected to pass by June 1, represents a 9% increase from the inflation-adjusted total spent in fiscal year 2024, the last budget passed before his tenure. The increased budget is the first indication that the rising inmate population resulting from Landry’s policies is costing Louisiana taxpayers.
