Topic: New Sheriff in Town
Marlin Gusman: Nice Guy in a Nasty Business
The criminal sheriff is making his mark at the parish prison
By J.B. Borders
Marlin Gusman is definitely not your stereotypical Southern sheriff.
He’s not blustery, pot-bellied, sadistic or trigger-happy. He doesn’t even carry a gun. He’s soft-spoken, appears reasonably fit, and believes inmates should be treated humanely, not brutalized or degraded at every possible opportunity.
His guiding principle, he says, is to strive to “make negatives into positives.”
Gusman’s manner and ideas are not simply atypical and nontraditional, however. They are emblematic of a long-overdue transformation of the penal system in New Orleans, a system that has been extremely – and, some might argue, unjustifiably – harsh on people who look like Gusman, men of African descent.
Marlin Gusman, 52, won a special election for Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff in November 2004, nine months before flood waters devastated New Orleans and forced the evacuation of 6,000 OPCSO inmates and deputies from the city. Gusman was re-elected to a full term in 2006 after his office demonstrated its capacity to function effectively in difficult circumstances.
Prior to becoming criminal sheriff, Gusman had been a member of the New Orleans City Council from 2000-2004 and Chief Administrative Officer for the City during the Marc Morial administration from 1994-2000.
He is, by all accounts, a bright, thoughtful highly skilled executive and a genuinely nice person. The son of a postman, Gusman earned bachelor’s degrees from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. He received his Juris Doctor from Loyola University and was admitted to the Louisiana State Bar in 1984. Additionally, he is a graduate of the New Orleans Chamber Regional Leadership Institute and the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government.
Gusman is one of the few local leaders who hasn’t yet been branded an IBM (Incompetent Black Male) or a CPO (Corrupt Public Official) by the usual opponents of African-American progress, though the Sheriff’s Office has endured its share of criticism during his brief tenure.
Gusman’s personality and management style may have a great deal to do with the public’s response to him. He is accessible, forthright and tech savvy, but doesn’t come across as someone stuck on himself. In fact, he’s more likely to make self-effacing comments than boastful ones. “I always have to remind people that I’m not as old as I look,” he frequently deadpans.
All jokes aside, however, Gusman finds himself in the middle of a deadly serious business. The Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office operates the Orleans Parish jail facilities, providing for the care, custody and control of incarcerated subjects. The Sheriff’s Office executes all writs, orders, and processes of the Traffic, Municipal and Criminal courts. Sheriff’s Deputies are peace officers with the full authority to conduct criminal investigations and make arrests within Orleans Parish.
The OPCSO also operates within the constructs of a broader national and regional criminal justice system. And as Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Blackmon points out in his new book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, southern jails and prisons historically have been an integral component of a system of neo-slavery that ensnared and exploited more than 100,000 African American men for profit and politically-motivated social control for several decades after Emancipation.
“The original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks – changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity – or loud talk – with white women,” Blackmon writes. “Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South – operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations.”
Blackmon goes on to observe that by the dawn of the 20th century, “Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace – often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina.”
Blackmon claims this abusive penal system was dismantled during World War II because it constituted a public relations embarrassment for the nation in its War for Democracy and, later, in the cold war against Communism. What Blackmon’s book doesn’t cover, however, is the return of this massive effort to criminalize and incarcerate black men in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviet Empire weakened and eventually collapsed.
With no global propaganda battle to wage, forces within the U.S. were free to import drugs, for example, distribute them in black communities, then turn around and arrest and imprison the drug users and petty dealers with no major national or international outcry against these scurrilous policies.
This modern-day drive to rebuild a major industry on the imprisonment of black and poor folk has had a dramatic impact in New Orleans.
According to a report by Safe Streets/Strong Communities – a local activist organization founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina – the Criminal Sheriff’s Office grew exponentially during the 30-year reign of Gusman’s predecessor, Charles Foti.
When Foti was elected in 1974, Orleans Parish Prison “had a population of only about 800, despite the fact that the population of Orleans Parish was more than 100,000 higher then than just prior to Katrina. By the time Foti left after being elected state attorney general, he had expanded OPP's total capacity over tenfold to approximately 8,500,” Safe Streets/Strong Communities researchers Barry Gerharz and Seung Hong report.
Safe Streets also reports that in 2004, Orleans Parish Prison was one of the top five prisons in the nation with substantiated reports of sexual violence.
County and parish jails like the OPCSO typically house pretrial detainees and those serving short sentences for misdemeanors. Unlike most county jails, however, the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office also has contracts to house state and federal prisoners, serving as a de facto overflow prison for the Louisiana Department of Corrections and the federal prison system. The OPCSO is responsible, therefore, for people convicted of violent felonies as well as those merely awaiting trial on trivial misdemeanors.
On his first day at work back in 2004, Marlin Gusman assumed responsibility for what was then the eighth largest population of inmates in the nation – a daily average of 5,800 individuals. Back then, the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office (OPCSO) also merited the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any large city in America.
At 1,480 inmates per 100,000 citizens, the Orleans Parish incarceration rate was double the U.S. average, which is the highest of any nation on the planet. (A “civilized” incarceration rate is less than 100 inmates per 100,000 citizens. In present day New Orleans, that would translate into an inmate population of approximately 275-300 people.)
Moreover, New Orleans had become the epicenter of a crisis in which one in seven African-American men in Louisiana end up in the prison system, while only 1 in 35 end up in college.
The inmate population at Orleans Parish Prison was and is overwhelmingly poor, poorly educated, black and male. So it is fitting, perhaps, that the task now falls to a black man to help reform a system that has had such a devastating impact on the lives and fortunes of black men.
Today, the OPSCO houses approximately 2,500 inmates in five facilities and plans to expand its capacity to be able to accommodate up to 3,500 beds. The Criminal Sheriff’s Office currently employs approximately 670 people, including deputies and administrative staff members. That’s nearly half the 1,200 people once on the staff. However, Gusman is quick to note that compensation packages for OPCSO employees are now 57 percent higher than when he took office four years ago.
His team seems to be earning its pay. In 2007, the Sheriff’s Office handled nearly 62,000 arrested individuals, which resulted in approximately 200,000 charges. In addition, the office released more than 62,000 individuals. Roughly 45% of those arrested were booked on state charges;35% were booked with municipal charges; 13% were booked with traffic charges; 6% were booked on federal charges; and 1% were booked with charges stemming from Civil Court, typically neglect of family or child support.
If Gusman has his way, however, the OPCSO will be as effective at rehabilitating inmates as it is at locking them up. His master plan for the Sheriff’s Office calls for four phases of new construction that will total nearly $52 million over the next six years. When combined with another $140 million in improvements to other elements of the local Criminal Justice System, which will include expanded police, laboratory, medical and court facilities – along with new offices to house the District Attorney – New Orleans will have one of the most cohesive and state-of-the-art systems in the nation.
Like many other public agencies, the Criminal Sheriff’s Office has been operating out of a combination of out-dated and temporary facilities the past three years while continuing to serve the housing, feeding, medical, education and skills-training needs of its inmates. The OPCSO master plan includes phased construction to build new beds on an as-needed basis, replacing buildings that were destroyed by Katrina or had outlived their usefulness.
Gusman’s vision for the new OPCSO has already begun to unfold. Last month, his organization opened a new $4.5 million temporary Intake and Processing Center. It nearly triples the capacity of the old processing facility and is more efficient to operate. The building also makes architectural statements that the sheriff wholeheartedly endorses.
“This is the type of facility the Sheriff's Office is headed toward,” Gusman told reporters during a recent tour of the building. “Clean, airy, respectful, yet secure.”
Those same qualities are prominent in the photos and artist renderings of the new incarceration facilities Gusman plans to build. They are all designed with lots of natural light, high-tech security systems that require a minimum of manpower to operate, and include several spaces that can be utilized for educational programs.
The education of OPCSO inmates is a major priority for Gusman and a major point of pride. “We gave the first GED exams in the city after the storm,” he points out, “and we gave the second! Going forward, we have to do more if we are going to break the cycle of people coming back here repeatedly because they don’t have the knowledge or skills to make an honest living on the outside.”
The OPCSO already operates a highly regarded Rehabilitative Work Release Program. On average, Gusman says, 77 inmates participate in the work release program. Roughly 30 local businesses agree to employ them. These enterprises include some of the city’s leading hospitality destinations. Another 40 businesses are on a waiting list.
Work release inmates are housed separately from the general population and pay the prison a daily fee of $26.50 for room and board, which amounts to roughly $800 a month. They are allowed to work day or night, seven days a week for as many hours as the employer needs them. Inmates are reportedly paid no less than minimum wage and acquire workplace skills. The money they earn goes into an account controlled by the Sheriff's Office and is given to them upon their release from jail. The inmates' jobs are reportedly guaranteed when their sentences end.
Though the program smacks of the convict lease system of old, it’s actually quite beneficial in today’s economy not just to employers and the Sheriff’s Office, but also to habitually unemployed and underemployed inmates, especially if the alternative is sitting in a cell all day doing nothing.
The OPCSO also operates a highly visible Community Service Program and Neighborhood Response Team that sends out squads of volunteer inmates to assist non-profit organizations, schools and governmental agencies with such tasks as removal of storm debris, classroom painting and house gutting.
“We have to help our community recover,” Gusman says. “We all have to do whatever we can to help the city rebuild. Our inmates, deputies and other staff members all want to help. They’re all eager to volunteer anytime we’re called on.”
The sheriff is also proud of a new Crime Victims Reparations Program that recently opened an office on the West Bank. The program helps victims and family members of victims access state funds to compensate them for crime-related expenses such as lost work, counseling, medical care, even funeral costs.
While the program may be slightly beyond the purview of the average county jail, for Gusman it is part and parcel of his larger, personal mission.
“I didn’t start out with a goal of becoming sheriff,” he is says of the path that led to his current position, “but I was always interested in law and wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to help ensure that there was justice for everyone.”
Justice is not cheap, however. While it has received extra funding from FEMA and other federal agencies since the 2005 storm, the bread-and-butter component of the OPCSO’s current $70 million in annual revenue is the daily fee it charges the city, state and federal government for housing their inmates.
In December, Gusman advised the City Council to increase the $22.39 per diem it pays his office – if the City is serious making public safety and crime-prevention top priorities.
“You get what you pay for,” Gusman explained. "If you want to pay for warehousing, that's what you're going to get. But if you want (inmates) to come in and go out better, we're going to have to pay more."
The sheriff envisions the OPCSO as one big, intensive educational and training complex that provides literacy, numeracy, parenting skills, substance abuse treatment and workplace skills to every appropriate inmate. The department already has an aquaculture division that trains individuals to raise fish for internal consumption and commercial sales.
The investment in human development is critical, he points out, to solving the city’s problems long-term.
Gusman is a unique law enforcement official, not because he’s smart and visionary, but because Orleans Parish is the only place in the nation that has separate Criminal and Civil Divisions of its judicial system. That bifurcation will end in 2010 and there will be only one elected sheriff of Orleans Parish.
Gusman expects to be that sheriff. He’s the proverbial man on a mission. He knows what has to be done and he knows how to do it. He’s just getting started, just hitting his stride.
It’s a nasty business, locking people up. It’s imperfect and not especially effective. But somebody’s bound to clean it up sooner or later. Now is as good a time as any.
Who says nice guys always finish last?
