Political spin reaches its full rotational velocity during election season, as illustrated by comments about the overcrowded Caddo Correctional Center that distract from the fact that this problem stems from prosecutorial choices, not from law enforcement.

No, it’s not so much that burgeoning Shreveport police arrests keep the CCC “bursting at the seams,” although obviously that volume is a significant contributor without which it wouldn’t have the opportunity to inflate. That statement comes from Wayne Smith, Shreveport Police Department chief, whose boss, Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux, this fall faces spirited competition to retain his job. The more Smith talks up SPD vigilance, the more this pats Arceneaux on the back as the election looms. Smith remains Shreveport’s police chief under Arceneaux.

Yet Smith could ramp up arrests even more and it wouldn’t be a crowding problem, according to a 2023 report of the Caddo Parish Criminal Justice Task Force. It discovered a 42 percent increase in the pretrial population even as CCC admissions declined 40 percent from 2012 to 2022. It identified among the contributing factors a 259 percent increase in the median bail amount from 2012 to 2022 and a 144 percent increase in days from a court case’s opening to its disposition from 2014 to 2022, thought to be a result of staffing shortages that delayed transmission of case materials.

Note how this becomes a vicious cycle as far as parish detainees are concerned. Democrat Sheriff Henry Whitehorn, as things become more overcrowded, has to assign more personnel to running the jail rather than helping out in preparing cases. That increases the number of detainees, which demands more staff to operate the facility.

But this should be just a minor inconvenience. The vast bulk of arrests come from Shreveport, as Smith intimated, where SPD prepares the cases. The report suggested more interagency cooperation, which therefore would appear to have only a minor impact, and greater use of bail-avoidance strategies, which have proven not to be the answer in Louisiana.

No, the answer is that Whitehorn ally, Democrat First Judicial District Attorney James Stewart, must prosecute more aggressively. Stewart, locked in a tight reelection battle with Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh, has filed significantly fewer cases even as the violent crime rate has inched up during his tenure – which began as the study launched, now featuring the swelling of detainees. Stewart is the incumbent Caddo Parish district attorney and is on the Nov. 3 ballot with Seabaugh and two other candidates.

Speculation focuses on Stewart’s reluctance to prosecute as an artifact of “progressive” prosecution tendencies. According to this belief, prosecutors should concentrate only on serious crimes, as lesser ones disproportionately involve nonwhites who have suffered societal discrimination leading to a disadvantaged existence and thus aggressive prosecution becomes a tool of oppression by disproportionately convicting nonwhites.

Of course, the problems with this view are that leniency, whether by failure to prosecute or by pleading down too eagerly, allows dangerous people back onto the streets. It also increases costs to taxpayers from more jailing, the potential for recidivism by failing to allow for rehabilitation efforts (a conviction, if time served hasn’t been enough, sends the guilty to the state system, which has such programs available that are lacking in local jails), and, worst of all, increases the number of potentially innocent people who languish.

While Smith’s pronouncement may aid candidate Arceneaux, it also aids candidate Stewart by deflecting attention from the claim that Stewart prosecutes fewer arrestees while violent crime escalates. It also deflects attention from the argument that the Caddo Parish taxpayer has to devote more resources to maintaining the jail, whereas if Stewart took a less-ideological view of his job, the facility would not be as overcrowded, if not dip below capacity. That is the argument candidate Seabaugh continues to make that voters will evaluate in the near future.