NEW ORLEANS — Feeling anxious and overwhelmed, 18-year-old Marvel Smith arrived at the Orleans Justice Center in June to await his trial date at the notorious prison. Staff carried him in an elevator up to the fourth floor and placed him in a room with more than 40 other men.
Almost immediately, Smith said, another detainee began stalking him for being gay and tried to intimidate him both physically and verbally.
Detainees say harassment has been rife at the prison for years, and since 2012 the facility has struggled to comply with a Department of Justice consent decree designed to monitor poor conditions, violence and abuse at the facility. But this time things were different: The man who was stalking Smith was quickly removed from the unit by the unit's leader, Lt. Michael Lewis. Nine other detainees told NBC News that if Lewis hadn't taken action, they would have asked the man to leave.
Smith's experience reflects a larger goal of a new mental-health-focused community in prison that aims to reverse years of violence and neglect and foster camaraderie instead. Smith said he was relieved that Lewis took action to kick out his harasser. “As the days go by, I'm realizing that we're all human beings and we're all men,” he said.
Marvel Smith (right) entered the unit and became the target of harassment, but she says other residents and unit leaders quickly stepped in to stop it. NBC News
Smith is one of the first inmates to experience the approach at the jail, which New Orleans officials are calling a “model mental health pod.” Spearheaded by Sheriff Susan Hutson, who ran for office in 2022 promising to reform the jail and fight further expansion, the program’s goal is simple: treat pretrial detainees as patients who have experienced severe trauma and deserve access to community and medical care.
The men in her experimental pods are free to set their own schedules and socialize, play basketball, cut each other's hair, watch movies or the evening news, and share books. In return, they must adhere to a zero-tolerance policy for harassment and violence, make their beds, manage their laundry, and participate in frequent group discussions on conflict resolution, stress, and trauma. Some members even receive individual mental health treatment.
“They really want to support each other,” said Zachary Terrell, the pod resident who first noticed Smith's anxiety. “It allows that person to be themselves and creates an environment where the next person can be themselves.”
Hutson, the only female sheriff in Louisiana, said the facility has become the largest mental health care provider in the city of New Orleans. Nineteen years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the area and all city services, the sheriff warned of a growing mental health crisis. Charity Hospital's mental health ward flooded during the historic storm. It has yet to reopen.
New Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson is spearheading new reforms at the Orleans Justice Center. NBC News
In the years that followed, New Orleans followed a pattern seen across the nation: large mental hospitals and psychiatric facilities were closed, many due to reports of mistreatment or abuse. Most American communities, rural and urban, failed to build enough modern clinics or hospitals to replace the old wards. As a result, jails in cities such as New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York became the nation's largest providers of mental health care.
More than half of the 1,400 people at Hutson Psychiatric Hospital are taking medication to treat diagnosed illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nearly everyone in the model pod told NBC News they had witnessed family members or friends killed by gun violence. Many had been permanently separated from their families by Hurricane Katrina, and many had been forced to grow up without parents.
“Prisons are a system,” Hutson told NBC News, “and it's the same across the state and across the country. In places where those (mental health) systems aren't in place, prisons are the de facto mental health system. That's just not true.”
Hutson said his brother developed PTSD after serving in the Navy and he dreams of seeing treatment and prevention programs instead of prisons.
“I don't want a mental hospital,” she said. “I want a mental hospital.”
But her state's lawmakers are moving in the opposite direction, forcing Hutson to push back. This year, Louisiana Republicans, who hold overwhelming majorities in the governor's office and the legislature, have passed a series of crime and sentencing bills, including Senate Bill 3, which would require authorities to treat 17-year-olds accused of crimes as adults and house them in adult-only prisons like Hutson's.
Members of a new model pod at the Orleans Parish Jail watch a television program together. NBC News Lt. Michael Lewis is collecting data on Orleans Justice Center residents to share with the city in order to expand the program. NBC News
NBC News requested interviews with state Sen. Heather Cloud and Assemblyman Raymond Cruz, who are spearheading the new bill that sheriffs say has affected the jail, but did not respond. In April, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry wrote to X, “Today marks the beginning of a new justice system here in Louisiana. From now on, 17-year-olds who commit burglaries, carjackings and robberies of our state's greatest men will not be treated like children in a court of law. They are criminals, and today they are finally being treated like criminals.”
The number of inmates at Hutson's facility has increased by 3 to 5 percent each month since March, according to department data reviewed by NBC News. Hutson also said he has been forced to create new units for minors. Because minors require complete visual and auditory isolation from all other adult residents, Hutson said, creating new units at an already overcrowded facility has created logistical and financial challenges.
According to the criminal justice think tank Prison Policy Initiative, Louisiana not only incarcerates a higher percentage of its residents than any other state, but also imprisons more than any other independent democracy. Andrea Armstrong, a legal scholar, MacArthur Fellow, and Loyola University professor, also emphasized that Louisiana has the highest per capita incarceration rate in most studies, as well as one of the highest rates of violent crime.
“The math is wrong, isn't it?” Armstrong said. “If putting people in prison made them safer, we'd be the safest state in the country.”
Instead, she said, solving the mental health and incarceration crisis requires leaders to think differently about safety and invest in building new mental health hospitals.
“And those resources shouldn't be tied to our criminal justice system. That's it,” she said. “People who are in crisis need to be evaluated by professionals. They need to have a treatment plan put in place. And only then can we begin to have conversations about the behaviors and actions that occurred when they weren't in treatment.”
Leonard Patty, who spent five years in pretrial detention, says the program helped him deal with past trauma. NBC News
Exemplary pod member Leonard Patty, a 42-year-old father who spent most of his childhood in New Orleans without parents, called Hutson and Lewis' efforts lifesaving: Before joining the pod community, he didn't realize that living with the prospect of dying every day was not normal.
“This program helped me,” he said. “If I had been killed in an encounter with the police, I would have been happy. That was my situation.”
He has been in pretrial detention for five years after pleading not guilty to second-degree murder. He said the program has helped him get past his anger and trauma and focus more on how he can help young people like Smith.
Lewis has spent the past few months surveying all the men in the new unit, collecting data on their New Orleans backgrounds and their mental-health treatment needs, and he hopes to present his findings to the city so that he can expand the program to other parts of the prison.
“Politicians don't understand,” he said. “If we as humans decided to treat other people like humans, things would change.”
