Will Criminal Justice Reform Survive Under New Orleans' New Mayor?

On November 18, New Orleans voters decided to elect city council member LaToya Cantrell over former municipal judge Desiree Charbonnet to succeed Mitch Landrieu as mayor. The two candidates were the last standing from a crowded October 14 primary, assuring New Orleans that its next mayor would be a woman for the first time in the city’s history.

Cantrell inherits the city as it enters its tricentennial celebration next year, and hence she will help shape what the beginning of New Orleans’ next 300 years will look like. One of the main questions in that shaping: Will New Orleans remain a city where correctional facilities rule everything around it, or can the new mayor transform it into a model for addressing public safety without a reliance on jails and prisons?

This is a perennial issue come election time in New Orleans, given the high levels of crime plaguing the city and the legacy of overactive policing that bred the city’s notorious incarceration rate. The criminal justice question was of particular importance in this election, however, because of the wide range of criminal justice reforms installed in New Orleans during the last few years. The city finally began taking seriously the city’s dire lack of resources for providing indigent defendants lawyers by allotting more funding for the public defender’s office in 2017. Independent and civilian police monitoring have gotten stronger (perhaps too strong for police appetites) and the city’s police department and jail are still under federal oversight for their histories of abuse and corruption. The next mayor will determine whether these reforms and the federal monitoring are continued, strengthened, or left to die.