The state of Louisiana is the world capital of incarceration. It locks up more of its citizens than anywhere else on the globe – some 1,341 out of every 100,000 people.

That’s twice the US national average (716), nearly three times the per capita rate in Russia (475) and nine times that of the UK (148). It’s even substantially higher than North Korea’s (thought to be around 800).

Now the Pelican state is in the throes of a crisis that is certain to propel its already astronomical incarceration rate to new heights. Its public defender service, a network of state-funded lawyers that provides legal representation to poor Louisianans, is in meltdown, with most of its district offices set to cancel all new cases or close down entirely by next summer.

An assessment by the Louisiana public defender board obtained by the Guardian warns that by July of 2017, as many as 33 of the state’s 42 districts are likely to be so short of cash they will be forced to stop representing clients. Eleven of those districts may be forced to shut down by this October.

“The system is on course to collapse by next summer – we will have no public defense system in any sense of the word. We are talking about the wholesale destruction of a public function,” said Brandon Buskey, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

If the state continues on its current course, experts warn that tens of thousands more people are likely to languish in jails as a result of lack of legal representation. The pattern has already been witnessed in major cities such as New Orleans, where the public defender service stopped taking on new cases in January.

“In Orleans, we already have dozens of people held in jail for weeks on end without conviction and with no way of getting themselves out. We are literally trapping people in jail with no way out,” Buskey said.

The crisis is part of the wider financial malaise of Louisiana that sees the state struggling under a $1.6bn budget shortfall. In the 2017 annual budget proposed by the state’s new governor John Bel Edwards and approved last month by the legislature, the public defender service is dealt a crushing blow – 62% cuts that will slash state funding from $33m to under $13m.

Such a reduction will have a devastating affect, the state public defender James Dixon told the Guardian. All of the big urban centers – New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Shreveport – have already or soon will have to turn away all new cases other than those of individuals charged with felonies and awaiting trial in jail that have to be dealt with by law.



Dixon said that those who will feel the cuts most severely are children. On 1 July, most public defenders’ offices across Louisiana will stop handling new cases of juvenile delinquency and other matters relating to under-18s.

“We will no longer be able adequately to represent the kids in this state. If a child is charged with burglary or theft, they are going to go unrepresented, and that scares me,” Dixon said.

He added that research has showed that even short spells of incarceration exponentially increase the chances of juveniles coming back into the criminal justice system through repeat offending.

The funding meltdown also threatens to aggravate the existing inequalities in Louisiana’s criminal justice system, by creating a two-tier service in which wealthier citizens can employ private lawyers while poor Louisianans are left to their own devices. “This is an absolute injustice – that the poor will sit in jail without any representation just because they have no money,” Dixon said.

The ACLU has filed a class action lawsuit in Orleans parish that argues that such a dual system based on wealth is unlawful under the US constitution’s safeguarding of equal protection under the law. The suit says that many people will be forced to languish indefinitely in jail with no way to push their cases along or investigate the charges against them, which could eliminate any hope of proving their innocence.

Should the crisis become prolonged, there is a further possible consequence that could prove toxic for the state’s Democratic governor and Republican-controlled legislature. Judges are expected eventually to order the release of jailed defendants on grounds that they cannot be held forever without legal representation.

“This ain’t Guantánamo – at some point we are going to have people on serious criminal charges who have to be let out,” Dixon said.



Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, agreed that “you cannot keep people in jail indefinitely without access to a lawyer. Judges will start to release people after a while, and once that happens Louisianans are going to go crazy.”