27 May 2025
By Katie Jane Fernelius
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — Speaking before the New Orleans City Council on Tuesday (May 20), Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson blamed structural problems and the “intentional wrongdoing” of at least one employee for a recent jailbreak at the Orleans Justice Center, which saw 10 people escape from the city’s jail on Friday, May 16.
By the May 20 council meeting, which grew contentious at times, just four had been apprehended and re-arrested, leaving six men still at large.
“What happened last week was a crisis, but the conditions that made it possible are not new,” Hutson told councilmembers. “The jail is the same today as it was on Friday… The conditions have not changed but now the consequences are undeniable. We are operating under tight staffing conditions with outdated surveillance systems.”
Though councilmembers acknowledged shortcomings in the jail’s physical condition, they were also critical of Hutson’s leadership.
“I think what’s concerning and what I’m hearing here is that the basics were not there,” Council Vice President Helena Moreno said. “And that, to me, is what’s really alarming.”
According to authorities, the escapees appeared to enter a cell and squeeze through a hole in the wall behind a toilet.
They then scaled the jail’s walls and sprinted across I-10 before dispersing into nearby neighborhoods. One man was quickly apprehended in the French Quarter and taken back into custody the same day. (Facial recognition technology provided by a local nonprofit aided in the arrest.) Three more of the escapees were found and arrested over the following days.
The incident, which has garnered national and international headlines, has raised questions over how ten men, some of whom were accused of violent crimes, were able to escape what should have been a secure facility – and not only escape, but also have enough time to brag about the ease of their jailbreak. (Graffiti on the wall near the hole read, “To [sic] easy LOL.”)
The council pressed Hutson, who oversees the jail and its staff, not just on the failure of her oversight of the facility, but also on what they perceived to be a delay in notification of the jailbreak to relevant local agencies on the morning of May 16.
But Hutson and her Chief of Corrections, Jeworski “Jay” Mallett, said that although there were procedural and structural failures, it was important to take time to confirm how many men were missing during the morning count, whether they had left the facility and, crucially, who those ten men were, before notifying other agencies.
“It was not immediately clear that an external breach had occurred,” Hutson said. “So we have to search a facility with 1400 people in it, 24 pods, 24 pipe chases, which is the area behind the pods. That takes a minute to be able to do. You also can’t give out false information about who is missing.”
‘The sheriff runs it, the council pays’
The most heated exchange of the meeting came over the question of the jail’s funding – and whether the council was at fault for not appropriating more money to Hutson and the jail.
Though it is not a city agency, the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office is funded almost entirely through direct appropriation from City Hall. This year, the council approved about $65 million in spending to fund the jail. But Hutson said it’s not enough to run one of the state’s busiest jails, which has been well over its legal population cap for more than a year.
“The law is clear: the sheriff runs it, the council pays,” Hutson said. “The current situation shows that patchwork fixes are not enough.”
Hutson claimed that she had brought her concerns over the jail’s deteriorating conditions to the council on multiple occasions, including during her annual budget presentation. The court-appointed monitors overseeing the jail as part of a long-running federal consent decree have noted its deteriorating physical conditions in past reports but were just as concerned about poor jail staffing and infrequent cell checks.
Hutson has also pushed in the past for more money from the city for hiring and higher pay at the jail. The Sheriff’s Office has long dealt with deputy malfeasance – typically in the form of smuggling contraband into the jail – and many have identified low wages as a likely factor.
Soon after the jailbreak, Hutson told media that a myriad of factors were at fault, including faulty locks and cell doors. She also said that the jailbreak may have been an inside job, with some employees involved in the incident.
Shortly before Tuesday’s meeting, her office announced that they had arrested one employee, a maintenance worker, in connection with the escape.
But Council President JP Morrell pushed back, noting that Hutson has not aligned her agency with the city’s financial practices. The Sheriff’s Office, for example, has refused to adopt the software the city uses for contract approval and payment, which would provide the council a better look into the line-item expenditures of the jail – and help the council better understand, and potentially fund, their needs.
“Your position is, you run your jail; so you tell us you need money, we give you money,” Morrell said. “And the reality is you don’t get to tell us it’s this amount without us kicking the tires and doing our own investigation as to whether that’s the amount.”
“If you want us to trust your numbers and budget accordingly, put your numbers in the same system that every other department is in and we’ll trust your numbers,” he added.
Hutson has also been criticized by state and local officials, from District Attorney Jason Williams to Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who called the escape “beyond unacceptable.” Governor Jeff Landry used the escape as an occasion to take digs at New Orleans for its “progressive criminal justice system.”
Hutson, who was first elected sheriff in 2021 and is up for re-election this fall, has already drawn challengers to her reelection bid, including Michelle Woodfork, who most recently served as the interim superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department.
What happened afterthe count
One of the biggest questions during the meeting is when Sheriff’s Office employees knew that there had been a breach – and who they chose to immediately notify of the breach.
According to Mallet, sheriff’s deputies first became aware of the escape around 8:45am during a morning headcount. Within ten minutes, they locked down the facility and did a sweep of attics, hallways and common areas to see if they could find the missing people. After that, they had to search the entire facility, which jails approximately 1,400 people, to see who exactly was missing. They also wanted to ensure that the count discrepancy wasn’t due to someone being taken to a medical appointment or court hearing, especially since the majority of the population is pre-trial.
It was about two hours before the city’s largest law enforcement agency – the New Orleans Police Department – became aware of the jailbreak.
According to Hutson and Mallett, the Sheriff’s Office notified U.S. Marshals, who are the primary agency when it comes to apprehension of fugitives, around 9:30 a.m. But the message wasn’t relayed to the NOPD until nearly 11 a.m.
“Did I overly rely on our partner task force system?” Hutson said. “I did.”
“The delay between when your count happened versus when public notification came out is anywhere from two to three hours,” Morrell said. “That’s a tremendous amount of time that expands the radius of where these people could be.”
This article originally published in the May 26, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.