NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) – Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman announced today that he is reorganizing top officials in his administration, adding a chief corrections officer, a chief financial officer and a chief of investigations.
The announcement, made during a press conference at the recently opened Orleans Parish Jail, comes about a week after the U.S. Justice Department and a group of inmates filed a motion in federal court requesting that Gusman be removed as head of the jail and replaced by a third-party administrator.
The MacArthur Justice Center and the U.S. Justice Department maintain in court documents that Gusman has failed to deliver on the conditions of a 2013 consent agreement mandating improvements at the jail – including security, medical care, mental health care, sanitation and other issues.
Gusman admitted today that his office is non-compliant in 61 categories of the consent decree, but he defended his office and said city leaders are setting him up to fail.
He said the Justice Department is not giving him enough time to make vast changes to a system that was broken for 30 years before he took office.