The day after last month’s shooting at the Mall of Louisiana, which left a teenager dead and five others wounded, Gov. Jeff Landry criticized the “hug-a-thug” policies — reforms implemented before he took office, when the state was attempting to shed its image as the country’s incarceration capital. He also called for tougher punishments for violent juveniles. “I’m finished with them.” “It doesn’t matter what their age is,” Landry, a Republican, said at a news conference in Baton Rouge. We have 20,253,000 acres at Angola — if it were up to me, I’d send every last one of them there for the rest of their lives. Landry’s call for stricter penalties that would result in longer prison sentences was hardly unexpected. Shortly after his inauguration in 2024, he secured a set of tough-on-crime bills that dramatically overhauled the state’s sentencing laws. A Landry spokesperson at the time dismissed warnings from civil rights organizations and incarceration experts that the plan would inflate the prison population and drive the state into financial ruin, claiming that “less crime means greater economic opportunity for everyone.”
