The East Florida Parishes Region Regional Criminal Justice meeting was held at Rayburn Correctional Center on June 22.  Besides staff from RCC, participants included staff of the Washington and St. Tammany Parish Jails, Slidell Police Department, Washington/St. Tammany District Attorney’s Office, DPS&C Headquarters, St. Tammany and Northshore Work Release Centers, Bogalusa Community Medical Center, and Orleans and Covington Districts of Probation and Parole. The meeting was hosted by RCC Warden Robert Tanner.  Warden Tanner is also the East Florida Parishes Regional Warden. 

Tanner began the meeting with a welcome to all the guests and a brief discussion of the purpose of the conference. Department of Corrections Secretary James M. LeBlanc asked all regional wardens to meet with their local criminal justice officials to share and discuss current and relevant topics and to begin conversations about developing continued meetings in an effort to develop regional criminal justice commissions or alliances. 

The topics of the meeting were decentralization and regionalization, basic jail guideline issues, pre-class issues (including time computation), regional disciplinary court, reentry initiatives, video conferencing for court, release processing by local facilities, allowable personal property at reception, relevant department regulations and LSU-HSC medical appointment process.

RCC Warden Robert Tanner, standing, who is also the East Florida Parishes Regional Warden, delivers a brief discussion of the purpose of the conference. COURTESY PHOTO Advertisement

Over half of the 50,000 offenders assigned to the Department of Corrections are housed in local jails and prisons. In the East Florida Parishes Region, as in all other regions of the state, more DOC offenders are released from the local jails than from RCC each year.

In March 1994, the Department of Public Safety and Corrections entered into a partnership with the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association to develop the Basic Jail Guidelines (BJG) to govern the housing of DOC offenders in local jail facilities. 

As a result of work involving thousands of people working in Louisiana's correctional system at the state and local level, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana approved a settlement agreement ending over 20 years of court supervision and consent decrees in almost all of our jails and prisons effective April 1,1997.  

The DOC has recently begun to develop a reentry plan that will ensure offenders receive at least basic reentry services prior to their release. The goal is to ensure that those state offenders who are releasing from local facilities (almost 11,000 of the 15,000 RCC releases annually) receive the same reentry services as those releasing from state facilities.