Louisiana Is Keeping People Locked Up After the Law Says They're Free

Louisiana's Department of Public Safety and Corrections (LDOC) keeps people in custody after their legal release date. This is not a fringe accusation. LDOC found it in its own internal review in 2012. Over 2,000 people overdetained per year. Average length, nearly 72 days. The U.S. Department of Justice found it again in 2023, covering a later period. For part of 2022, more than one in four people released had been held too long. The Justice Department sued the state over it in December 2024, citing the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. Four separate lawsuits are now moving through federal court in Baton Rouge. The newest was filed August 28, 2026.

One of the two named plaintiffs in that newest suit, Lisa Andres, was booked back into custody on December 30, 2024. She was eligible for immediate release on July 7, 2025. She was not released until October 16, 2025. That is a claimed 101 days held past the date the law said she should walk free. The other plaintiff, Jaren Brignac, claims nine days. He was held in a facility where he had previously been stabbed.

Louisiana taxpayers are funding this. The state pays parish jails to hold these people. DOJ put the figure at more than $2.5 million a year. The plaintiffs' new complaint cites $850,000 over a four-month stretch, which annualizes to roughly the same number. PJI, the nonprofit litigating three of the four cases, cites $2.8 million a year in housing costs alone, from LDOC's own estimates. The state is billing its own citizens to violate their citizens' rights.

Why This Exists

LDOC has known about this since 2012. That is the load-bearing fact. This is not a system that discovered a problem and is racing to fix it. This is a system that audited itself fourteen years ago, produced a number, over 2,000 people a year, and kept operating the same way.

The mechanical cause, per LDOC's own 2012 study: it took the department an average of 79 days just to calculate a release date, even after all necessary sentencing documents were in hand. A release date is arithmetic. Sentence length, minus credit for time served, minus good-time credit, applied against a known start date. Taking 79 days to do that arithmetic is not a capacity failure. It is a priorities failure. Nobody inside LDOC has been made to feel the cost of getting it wrong. So the incentive to fix it never outweighed the incentive to do anything else.

The current administration has offered a different explanation, and it has done so twice. In December 2024, Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill attributed the problem to "failed criminal justice reforms pushed by the past administration" that "complicated the criminal justice system." Responding directly to the new August 2026 suit, Murrill went further, calling the lawsuits "nothing more than an attempt at a money grab." Her statement: "The activists behind these suits do not want progress and actively obstruct it. That's a shame because LDOC continually works at improving its systems. Calculating time is a complex task due to the plainly evident fact that detainees do not come into state custody legally or physically until after they are sentenced."

This is a live dispute between the state and the plaintiffs over causation. Not a settled fact. Track it as contested.

Note what the state's statement does not dispute. It does not contest the 2012 finding. It does not contest the 71-to-72-day average. It does not contest that the practice has continued. It disputes blame, and it disputes the litigation's motives. It does not dispute the numbers.

Who Gains

Parish jails get paid to house state prisoners past their release dates. The state pays them per diem. Every day of overdetention is revenue to whichever local jail is holding that body. This creates a financial actor with zero incentive to expedite anyone's paperwork, and a mild incentive to let it sit.

LDOC leadership, historically, has faced no personal consequence for the practice. Secretary James LeBlanc oversaw the department through the original 2012 finding and years of subsequent litigation without the practice ending. The costs of overdetention, human and financial, are diffuse. They fall on people with the least institutional power to force change: incarcerated people, and the taxpayers funding both sides of the arrangement.

Who Pays

The people held past their release dates pay first, and pay most directly. Time in custody after the state's legal authority to hold you has expired is, under Louisiana's own false imprisonment law, exactly what the word says. A person overdetained 101 days loses 101 days of wages, of parenting, of housing stability, of whatever reentry plan they had lined up for their actual release date. None of that is recoverable. There is no version of "we're sorry, here are your days back."

Taxpayers pay second. Every dollar spent housing someone who is legally entitled to be free is a dollar not spent on anything else, spent specifically to violate that person's rights.

The state pays third, in litigation costs and, if plaintiffs prevail, damages. That bill is also taxpayer-funded. Louisiana taxpayers are now funding lawyers to defend the same practice the state's own 2012 audit flagged. They are funding both the harm and the legal defense of the harm.

What People Are Missing

Calling this "overdetention" undersells what is alleged. Detaining someone after the legal authority to hold them has ended is not a paperwork delay with a regrettable side effect. Louisiana's own law treats confining a person without legal authority as false imprisonment. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that some processing time is permissible, but not imprisonment beyond 48 hours past legal entitlement to release. Louisiana's documented average overdetention, 71 to 72 days by LDOC's own count, does not brush against that 48-hour buffer. It blows past it by a factor of roughly 35.

A second thing people miss: this has already been in federal court, repeatedly, for over a decade, without resolution. Humphrey v. LeBlanc, 3:20-cv-00233 (M.D. La.), was filed April 15, 2020. Giroir v. LeBlanc, 3:21-cv-00108-JWD-SDJ (M.D. La.), followed in 2021, later joined by co-plaintiff Bryant White. Both were certified as class actions on September 22, 2025, five years and four years after filing. The state is now appealing those certifications to the Fifth Circuit instead of resolving the underlying practice. The certified Humphrey class covers all state prisoners released 48 hours or more after their sentences ended since April 16, 2019. Giroir's class covers prisoners who were, or will be, overdetained going forward. No source located in this research discloses the current headcount of either certified class.

The DOJ's own federal case against Louisiana, filed December 2024, is currently stalled. The parties have been filing consent motions every 90 days to hold it in abeyance instead of litigating it. The federal government's lawsuit against a state for constitutional violations is sitting dormant, by mutual agreement, while the underlying practice continues.

LDOC audited itself in 2012, produced a number, over 2,000 people a year, and kept operating the same way.

What Game Is Actually Being Played

The stated goal of a corrections department is straightforward. Hold people for exactly as long as the law says, no longer. The actual operating incentive structure rewards something else: minimizing administrative friction and cost to the department, with the cost of getting release timing wrong falling almost entirely on the person overdetained, not on the department or the parish jails being paid to hold them.

Litigation has not closed that gap. Four lawsuits spanning six years have produced class certifications now under appeal, a federal CRIPA suit in procedural limbo, and a fresh complaint filed one day before a statute of limitations expired. The department points to "recent improvements" in its release-date calculation process, per its own outside counsel's account at a May 2026 public meeting. Plaintiffs' counsel says there is no evidence the rate or duration of overdetention has actually declined. Until a court order carries a cost the department cannot absorb or defer, through damages large enough to change the calculus, or an injunction with real enforcement teeth, the incentive structure that produced the 2012 finding has no functional reason to change.

Leverage Points

For someone directly affected: the overdetention itself, if it happened after April 16, 2019, may fall within the Humphrey class period. Contact the Promise of Justice Initiative directly. Do not wait for a settlement to be announced generally. Class membership and claims processes have specific deadlines.

For public attention: the gap between LDOC's own 2012 admission and 2026 status quo is the single fact that should anchor any coverage or advocacy. It forecloses the "we didn't know" defense entirely. Lead with that timeline, not with the current administration's disputed causation narrative, which distracts from the fourteen-year duration of the underlying practice.

What to Watch

Fifth Circuit ruling on the Humphrey/Giroir class certification appeal. The state is actively trying to undo the September 2025 class certifications. If the Fifth Circuit reverses, the largest vehicle for damages claims narrows or disappears.

Whether the DOJ case, United States v. Louisiana, M.D. La., 3:24-cv-01041, comes out of abeyance. As of the most recent reporting, the parties are still filing 90-day consent motions to hold it dormant. A change in that pattern, either side declining to renew, signals a shift.

The new Andres/Brignac complaint's statute-of-limitations framing. Plaintiffs' counsel says it was filed one day before a two-year statute of limitations expired, targeting Secretary Westcott's tenure specifically. Watch for whether this becomes the template for annual refiling as each year's limitations period approaches.

Any independent, current-year audit of the overdetention rate. Every rate and duration figure in circulation as of this writing traces back to LDOC's 2012 internal study or DOJ's 2023 report covering 2022. No source found in this research independently verifies the current rate. If LDOC's claimed technology upgrades have actually reduced it, that would be the disconfirming evidence for the thesis that nothing has changed.

What Happens Next

If current incentives hold, expect the pattern that has repeated since 2012. Audits and reports confirming the practice. Litigation that takes years to reach certification. Appeals that extend the timeline further. No structural change to how LDOC calculates release dates until a court order forces one, with a cost the state cannot defer. The disconfirming event would be specific: a published, current-year audit showing the overdetention rate has materially dropped from the roughly 25 percent baseline, or the DOJ case coming out of abeyance and proceeding to a consent decree with enforcement mechanisms. Absent either, the base rate says this keeps happening.

What You Should Do

If you or someone you know was held in Louisiana state custody past a legal release date since April 2019, contact the Promise of Justice Initiative, promiseofjustice.org, about class membership. Track the sourced numbers above, not the rounder figures that circulate in social retellings. The $2.5 to $2.8 million annual cost, the 71-day average, and the 25 percent rate are each institutionally sourced, but they describe different years and different datasets. Conflating them weakens the case. It doesn't strengthen it.

Glossary

Overdetention. Holding a person in custody after the date on which a court or the law has authorized their release.

CRIPA. Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. Federal law letting the Justice Department sue a state over a pattern of constitutional violations inside its institutions.

Class action, class certification. A lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of people with the same claim. Certification is a court's ruling that the group can proceed together as one case.

Due Process Clause (Fourteenth Amendment). The constitutional provision requiring that the government not deprive a person of liberty without following lawful procedure. Holding someone past their legal release date is the alleged violation here.

Abeyance. A case put on hold by agreement of both parties, with no active litigation happening, but not dismissed.

False imprisonment. Under Louisiana law, confining a person without legal authority to do so.