City Council and Mayor's Office agree…for once, says JP Morrell

The New Orleans City Council is looking into programs that are supposed to offer rehabilitation and diversion techniques to intercept youth that have entered the justice system.

This comes after a third-party reviewer found that there wasn't much accountability in Orleans Parish for such programs. Councilman JP Morrell is in favor of a hard-nosed approach.

“We should just stop funding everything until we get some accountability.”

He says that the council and the mayor are on the same side of this issue wanting the court judges to come to the table willing to change the process if it's not working.

It seems the initial conversations saw the judges not willing to budge and, though he favors a stricter approach, Council President Helena Moreno would rather try to meet in the middle.

“The Council President wants to setup a taskforce and see if we can holistically bring everyone together.”

He says that the city of New Orleans could provide better services to justice involved youth and that, according to the report from the third-party study, there is one key difference in how Orleans Parish handles juvenile intervention programs.

“In other jurisdictions, there is a third party who will triage youth and pair them with a program. That program would have gone through an RFP and there will be data on outcomes. In New Orleans, the judges kind of arbitrarily assign the youth and there’s no data on if the programs are working.”

Councilman Morrell did say that at least a few of the programs that judges use in Orleans Parish seem to be managed well and have a built in component for data collection and reporting and those are the programs run by the city.
Ironically, at least one program in particular, the Evening Reporting Center, seems to be under utilized with “hundreds of seats available”, according to Morrell.