Louisiana’s habitual offender law has been
in place for 30 years. The result has been that “entences of several decades, or even life, for nonviolent crimes are
not unusual in Louisiana.” In other states, individuals convicted of similar crimes “would have received a much shorter sentence or no jail time at all.”
Grimes’ case is an example of how Louisiana became the “
world’s prison capital.” A 2012 expose by The Times-Picayune found that the state imprisons more of its citizens than any other states and its incarceration rate is “nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.”
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A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt,” The Times-Picayune reported.
