Caddo's Jail Is Bursting Because Its Courts Move Too Slowly

Caddo Correctional Center was built with an original design capacity of 1,070 inmates. This week it is holding close to 1,700. That is a jail busting through its own operational ceiling of 1,500, and Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith stood in front of the city council Monday and owned his department's part in it, no hedging, no spin.

"SPD keeps CCC bursting at the seams," Smith told the council during its administrative conference. "Our people are making arrests. We're the ones who contribute to overcrowding. You bet. And we continue to do so." Caddo Parish Administrator Erica Bryant had already told parish commissioners last week the jail population was "close to 1,700." Do the math and that means Caddo's jail, with a population approaching 1,700, is running well above its 1,500-inmate operational capacity and far beyond the 1,070-inmate limit the building was originally engineered to hold.

Smith raised this while talking about felons caught carrying firearms, a subject that ought to concentrate the mind of anyone who has watched Shreveport's crime numbers over the past few years. His department has pulled at least 565 guns off the street so far this year, including 60 arrests of convicted felons illegally carrying weapons. Those are not jaywalking stops. Those are arrests that keep guns out of the hands of men who have already proven they cannot be trusted with them, and Chief Smith deserves credit, not a scolding, for running a department that treats gun crime like the emergency it is.

The temptation for the soft-on-crime crowd is to look at a number like 1,700 and conclude the answer is fewer arrests. That is backwards, and the parish's own research proves it. A 2023 examination by the Caddo Parish Criminal Justice Task Force, which Smith himself sat on alongside representatives from the sheriff's office, parish administration, the district attorney, the public defender and the First Judicial District Court, found that jail population rose 12% between 2012 and 2022 even as admissions dropped 40%. Fewer people were walking through the jail's front door. The jail got fuller anyway. The culprit was the pretrial population, which grew 42% over that decade while the average length of stay for pretrial inmates nearly doubled.

The task force's most damning number has nothing to do with police work at all. The median number of days it takes a criminal case in Caddo to go from filing to disposition increased 144% between 2014 and 2022, and that increase showed up across every offense type and every charge level the task force examined. The slowdown is in the court system. In 2022 the jail's average daily population sat at 1,406, already 31% above the facility's original design capacity of 1,070. Operational capacity was bumped to 1,500 after Hurricane Katrina without adding a single square foot of new space. The building has been running on a patch for twenty years.

None of this is free. Caddo Parish officials said in August that housing an inmate at the correctional center costs roughly $80 a day. Louisiana raised its reimbursement rate for eligible state inmates this year from $26.39 to $29.39 a day, an improvement worth acknowledging, but that still covers only about 37% of the parish's cost. Every day the jail sits at 1,700 inmates, Caddo taxpayers are eating a gap of roughly $50 per inmate, a bill that grows with every day a pretrial defendant sits waiting for a court date that keeps slipping.

The task force already told Caddo what it needs to do: expand pretrial release for defendants who aren't a danger to the public and speed up case processing, while cleaning up inefficiencies across the system. Nobody needs to go easy on felons carrying guns to fix this. The fix is plumbing, so the district attorney's office, the public defender and the First Judicial District Court move cases as fast as Shreveport police move on the street. Chief Smith's officers are doing their job. The question Caddo's elected leaders have to answer now is why the rest of the system still hasn't caught up nearly three years after the task force put the answer in writing.