THE PRISON BOOM: How Louisiana Became One of America’s Most Incarcerated States

Written by Harold Taylor

During the late twentieth century, Louisiana experienced a dramatic expansion of incarceration. State prisons grew, parish jails expanded, and thousands of people began serving longer sentences. By the early twenty-first century, Louisiana had become nationally known for having one of the highest incarceration rates in the United States.

This transformation was not caused by crime rates alone. It developed over decades through laws, sentencing practices, enforcement priorities, and decisions about probation, parole, and prison construction. Together, these policies changed both the number of people entering Louisiana’s correctional system and the length of time many remained there.

Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating during the 1980s and 1990s, Louisiana participated in a broader national movement toward tougher criminal penalties. The War on Drugs intensified drug enforcement, while mandatory sentencing provisions and habitual-offender laws increased penalties for certain crimes and repeat convictions. Restrictions on parole could also keep people incarcerated for longer periods.

Habitual-offender laws became particularly important because previous convictions could result in substantially longer sentences. At the same time, Louisiana maintained an extensive probation and parole system. Violations of supervision conditions could sometimes return people to jail or prison, adding another pathway into incarceration.

Louisiana also developed an unusual dependence on parish jails to house people serving state sentences. As the prison population increased, local facilities expanded their capacity. This allowed Louisiana to incarcerate large numbers of people without placing everyone in traditional state prisons. Private correctional facilities also became part of the expanding system.

The effects of the prison boom were not evenly distributed. Black Louisianians were incarcerated at disproportionately high rates, while the number of women held in prisons and jails also increased significantly. Juvenile justice raised additional questions about whether young offenders should be treated primarily through punishment, rehabilitation, education, or some combination of those approaches.

By 2014, Louisiana’s imprisonment rate stood at approximately 816 prisoners per 100,000 residents, nearly twice the national average at the time. Maintaining such a large correctional system also carried substantial financial costs for the state and significant consequences for families and communities.

Eventually, concerns about cost, lengthy sentences, repeat incarceration, and the effectiveness of existing policies contributed to reform efforts. Louisiana began changing some sentencing and supervision practices, followed by a broader criminal justice reform package in 2017.

The history of Louisiana’s prison boom therefore raises an important question: Why did the prison population grow so dramatically?

There was no single cause. Crime influenced the system, but so did decisions about sentencing, drug enforcement, habitual-offender laws, parole, probation, prison capacity, and the use of local jails.

Mass incarceration was not created by one law or one moment. It developed through thousands of individual decisions made over decades.

Louisiana’s prison boom was built law by law, sentence by sentence, jail by jail, and decade by decade.

Understanding how that system was created is essential to understanding Louisiana’s prison system today—and the continuing debate over what punishment, justice, rehabilitation, and public safety should look like in the future.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. 10th anniversary ed., The New Press, 2020.

Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force. Report and Recommendations. Louisiana Supreme Court, 16 Mar. 2017.

The Pew Charitable Trusts. Reducing Incarceration for Technical Violations in Louisiana. Nov. 2014.

Vera Institute of Justice. Louisiana Locked Up: The State’s Prison Population and How It Got There. Vera Institute of Justice.

Vera Institute of Justice. Louisiana: State Incarceration Trends. Vera Institute of Justice.

Western, Bruce. Punishment and Inequality in America. Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.