BATON ROUGE, La. — Just days before 10 men broke out of a New Orleans jail, officials with the sheriff’s office asked for money to fix faulty locks and cell doors deemed a key factor in the escape.
As the manhunt for the remaining seven fugitives stretches into a new week, officials continue to investigate who or what was to blame in a jailbreak that even the escapees labeled as “easy” — in a message scrawled on a wall above the narrow hole they squeezed through.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said she has long raised concerns about the jail’s ongoing “deficiencies,” adding that the breakout has “once again highlighted the critical need for repairs and upgrades” to the ailing infrastructure.
The men yanked open a cell door, slipped through a hole behind a toilet, scaled a barbed wire fence and fled from the jail early Friday, recorded surveillance video showed.
While Hutson said the locks played a key role in the escape, there are other crucial security lapses that officials have outlined; Indications that the escape may have been an inside job, with three sheriff’s employees now on suspension; the hole that officials said may have been formed using power tools; a lack of monitoring of the cell pod, as the employee tasked with the job had stepped out to grab food; and law enforcement not being aware of the escape until a morning headcount seven hours after the men fled.
Attorney General Liz Murrill said on Monday that state and local officials, courts and law enforcement are working together to hastily address issues at the ailing jail.
Murrill said it’s “not a secret” that the jail had been experiencing staffing shortages and maintenance defects for years.
The sheriff’s office says it has long raised concerns about issues at the jail. As recently as four days before the escape, Jeworski “Jay” Mallet — the Chief of Corrections for the Orleans Justice Center — presented a need for a new lock system during the city’s Capital Improvement Plan hearing.
Mallet said the current system at the jail, which houses around 1,400 people, was built for a “minimum custody type of inmate.”
But he classified many at the jail as “high security” inmates who are awaiting trials for violent offenses, including charges such as murder, assault and rape. He said many require a “restrictive housing environment that did not exist” at the jail and, as a result, the sheriff’s office has transferred dozens in custody to more secure locations.
In the aftermath of the escape, Murrill said officials are looking at ways to “harden physical aspects of this prison so that we can be realistic about the population that is being held there.”
Mallet said some cell unit doors and locks have been “manipulated” to the point that they can’t even be closed properly.
Since becoming sheriff in 2022, Hutson said she has complained about the locks at every turn and advocated for additional funding to make the facility more secure.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said during a news conference on Sunday that funding for the jail has been “a priority” and that funding has been allocated to the sheriff’s office for operating expenses and capital improvements. Bianka Brown, the chief financial officer for the sheriff’s office, said the current budget “doesn’t support what we need” to ensure critical fixes and upgrades.
“Things are being deprived,” Brown said of the jail, which for more than a decade has been subject to federal monitoring and a consent decree intended to improve conditions. The jail, which opened in 2015, replaced another facility that had its own history of escapes and violence.
Other’s have pointed to Hutson being at fault. State Rep. Aimee Adatto Freeman, who represents much of uptown New Orleans, called for sheriff to step down on Monday.
“Rather than take accountability, she’s pointed fingers elsewhere,” Freeman wrote in a statement. “Blaming funding is a deflection–not an excuse.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry recently announced the state is launching an investigation into who is responsible in the escape. He also directed the state’s Department of Corrections to conduct an audit of the jail’s compliance with basic correctional standards.
The governor also requested an inventory of pre-trial detainees or those awaiting sentencing in violent cases at the facility, to consider moving them into state custody.
Three of the seven inmates still at large late Monday were convicted of or are facing second-degree murder charges, authorities said.