The number of prisoners paroled in Louisiana has plummeted under Gov. Jeff Landry to its lowest point in 20 years, the most visible impact of the “tough on crime” policies he campaigned on.
The parole board freed 185 prisoners during Landry’s tenure compared with 858 in the two years before his January 2024 inauguration, a 78% drop, according to a Verite News and ProPublica analysis of data provided by the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole.
Hundreds of people who would have been paroled under previous administrations now remain in state prisons with little chance of earning an early release through good behavior or by showing they are fit to reenter society and are unlikely to reoffend.
Landry — a former state attorney general and sheriff’s deputy — and his fellow Republicans in the state Legislature overhauled Louisiana’s parole system through a 2024 law that banned parole altogether for anyone convicted after Aug. 1 of that year.
The overhaul also impacted the tens of thousands of people incarcerated before that date who must now meet tightened eligibility requirements to be considered for early release: Prisoners need to maintain a clean disciplinary record for three years instead of just one. And they must be deemed to pose a low risk of reoffending through a computerized scoring system, which does not take into account prisoners’ efforts to rehabilitate themselves and was not intended to be used to make individual parole decisions. Louisiana is the only state using such risk scores to automatically ban people from the parole process, according to a previous investigation by ProPublica and Verite News.
