GOP duo takes low road often

Republican U.S. Sen. John Kennedy and GOP state Attorney General Jeff Landry are a two-man wrecking crew. Anything linked to Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, in their minds, has to be demolished before it even gets off the ground.

Both officials are mentioned often as potential challengers to Edwards in 2019, and he has been their target since he took office in 2016. Criminal justice reforms that were enacted in 2017 and revised this year have been in the Kennedy-Landry crosshairs from the beginning.

The Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force that came up with criminal justice reform recommendations was actually instituted by then-Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. However, Edwards endorsed the idea and worked hard to see the reforms enacted, and that tainted him in the eyes of Kennedy and Landry.

The Economist, a weekly magazine-format newspaper, in an April story said Louisiana’s criminal justice reforms were badly needed. The magazine said the state “has longtried to jail its way to public safety” and “all that locking up and throwing away the key has not made Louisiana safer.”

Widespread bipartisan support of the reform effort has been highly publicized since the reforms hit the news. Unlike critics of Edwards, who love to call him a left-leaning liberal, the Economist accurately calls him a “centrist Democrat.” The Louisiana Family Forum and Charles and David Koch, who finance conservative causes, endorsed the state’s criminal justice reforms.

The Economist said Kennedy and Landry in a joint op-ed article mockingly renamed last year’s reforms the “Louisiana Prisoner Release and Public Safety Be Damned Act.”

State Rep. Julie Emerson, RCarencro, and a conservative lawmaker who represents Lafayette and St. Landry parishes, and David Safavian of Alexandria, Va., general counsel for the American Conservative Union, took the opposite view in their op-ed article that appeared in The Advocate.

An overreliance on incarceration, they said, has failed to make the state safer. Before the reforms were enacted, the state was spending $625 million annually on the prison system. Only education and health care cost more.

Kennedy and Landry were among those whom Emerson and Safavian said were calling the criminal justice reform effort a failure before the reforms were even implemented. They correctly said the critics’ attacks were nothing more than a cynical attempt to roll back the reforms without offering anything constructive or innovative.

Some of those who were released from prison early have been rearrested, but the state Department of Corrections (DOC) said a number of them only got out days before they were already scheduled to be set free.

The DOC responded this week to Kennedy and Landry and some district attorneys in the state who also oppose the reform effort. The department said some of the released prisoners got out under a goodtime release program and they are required to let them go. In its news release, the DOC said the real issue is a front-end problem.

“The D.A.s should not plead people down to lesser nonviolent offenses in order to get a high conviction rate,” the release said. “And if they do choose this method, they cannot complain when the law governing the conviction imposes a shorter sentence than that of the original charge.”

The department also addressed the complaint that two inmates who were released early have since been charged with murder. It said the two men have extensive prior arrest records that include several prior suspended sentences where neither did any prison time for the specific offenses.

“The D.A.s could have at least prosecuted these individuals at a point in time that could have possibly prevented further crimes,” the DOC said. “Once actually convicted, both of these offenders spent all of their prison time in local level facilities and never went through a state reception center…”

DOC said that problem would be corrected by placing community resource officers in the five parishes that send about 50 percent of the state’s offenders to prison. The officers will help offenders successfully transition from prison back to the community. Those parishes are Jefferson, East Baton Rouge, St. Tammany, Caddo and Orleans.

Given time, criminal justice reform will succeed in Louisiana as it has in other states like Texas, Georgia and Mississippi. They have reduced spending on corrections, lowered their incarceration rates, seen a decline in offenders returning to prison and lowered their crime rates.

Edwards and a handful of governors will be meeting with President Trump today to take part in a bipartisan policy discussion on federal criminal justice reform efforts.

Meanwhile, Kennedy and Landry will continue their unfounded political attacks aimed at the governor because that is what feeds their egos and political ambitions. However, many others in the state who support the effort see the positive results and prefer to take the high road.

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Jim Beam, the retired editor of the American Press, has covered people and politics for more than five decades. Contact him at 337-515 8871