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Friend,
When Rosalind Bobb’s son Jamon “Monty” Rogers was murdered in 2006, she had to find out details from the local newspaper – not from law enforcement.
“All they said, and I read it in the paper, was that it was drug-related,” Bobb said. “But they didn’t find any drugs anywhere. And I asked them, ‘Did you find any drugs?’ and they said, ‘No.’ Well, why are y’all saying that?
“Many times I went to ask them questions and they could not answer me,” Bobb said. “So I knew I had to do what I had to do to get justice for my murdered child.”
The assumptions made by law enforcement in New Iberia, Louisiana, and the lack of responsiveness to Bobb’s inquiries are nothing new. For decades, Black residents have voiced their outrage over the lack of attention to crime within and against their communities. They have also protested the abuse of young Black men in a criminal justice system that does not represent them fairly.
In a new report titled Out of Balance, the SPLC Action Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s lobbying arm, looks at parish (county) criminal justice system leadership in Louisiana. The report finds a huge disparity between the state’s racial demographics and the ethnicity of its sheriffs and district attorneys – the officials at the forefront of criminal investigations and prosecutions.
“Although people of color are grossly overrepresented at every point of the criminal justice system in Louisiana, white individuals hold the power to influence Black citizens’ interactions with racial profiling, criminalization, and incarceration,” the report states.
The numbers are startling.
Of the 64 sheriffs across the state, only four (6%) are Black. Only 12% of the 42 district attorneys are Black. This is in a state where almost a third of the population is Black.
According to state-level sentencing data compiled by the nonprofit Sentencing Project, 581 of every 100,000 people in Louisiana are incarcerated. That is the second-highest rate of incarceration in the U.S. Louisiana only recently dropped slightly behind Mississippi, where the incarceration rate is 584 per 100,000.
As in other states across the Deep South, the system is in many ways a legacy of 150 years of slavery and nearly a century of Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation, under which states enacted laws designed specifically to criminalize Black people.
The people being sentenced in Louisiana are 3.8 times as likely to be Black as white – even though 31.2% of the population is Black and 57.9% white. As of 2022, 65% of Louisiana’s prison population is Black.
“Clearly, the people with chief roles in Louisiana’s criminal justice system do not reflect the state’s demographic diversity, despite research that shows that diversity in these ranks increases public safety,” the SPLC Action Fund report says. “Out of Balance aims to expose the lack of diversity in Louisiana’s law enforcement – particularly its sheriffs and DAs – to begin to chart a path toward a system truly representative of the communities it serves, and a culture that produces different outcomes for people of color.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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