The Detention Center
Not scored. The parish's and sheriff's own websites could not be reached or read in the session that produced this record, so their disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the parish.
- Operated byOrleans Parish Sheriff's Office
- Named by OPSOThe sheriff's Detainees page lists the "Travis Hill School operating within Orleans Justice Center"
- Detainee searchOPSO's Detainees page links a Detainee Search at inmatelookup.opso.us:9443, a different domain from opso.gov; it was not opened
- Detainee services pagesDetainee Information, Visitation (attorney and regular), Commissary, Mail Instructions, OPSO Book Program, Programs for Detainees and Chaplain's Office are listed on opso.gov
- Population dashboardOPSO publishes a Jail Population Dashboard page on opso.gov with an embedded Power BI report; its figures did not render for the fetch tool and are not recorded
- Transparency sectionOPSO's Transparency page lists Consent Judgement & Compliance, Weekly Incident Reports, and Monthly | Quarterly | Annual Reports; the report documents themselves did not render and were not read
- PREA pageOPSO has a PREA page on opso.gov; no audit report could be read from it
- Federal consent judgmentThe jail has operated since 2013 under a federal consent judgment, Jones v. Gusman, E.D. La. No. 12-cv-859 (entered June 6, 2013), with a court-appointed independent monitor (appointed September 9, 2013) who conducts periodic compliance inspections. This is court oversight, not funding. No monitor report was opened in this session, so no finding, date or compliance level is recorded.
- What was triedopso.gov: home (two URLs), About Us, Corrections, Direct Supervision, Detainees, Detainee Information (timed out once, then navigation only), Commissary, Court Services, Public Information Office, Transparency, Consent Judgement & Compliance, Jail Population Dashboard, PREA, Compliance and Accountability Bureau, Sitemap, and an old Joomla compliance URL (404). The site renders its body text by script; most pages returned only navigation. Several attempts were rate-limited (HTTP 429) and retried after waiting. Commercial inmate-lookup sites returned by the search were ignored.
Source: Orleans Parish Sheriff Office, LA — Detainees · checked 2026-09-18
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Michelle Woodfork
- Runs the jailYes — the elected Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office (OPSO) runs the jail, as in every Louisiana parish; New Orleans is a consolidated city-parish but the jail is not a city department
- How the office is filledElected parish sheriff
- Statutory basisLa. R.S. 15:704 makes the sheriff the keeper of the public jail of the parish; the parish governing authority maintains the building and provides the jail physician (R.S. 15:702, 15:703)
- Tax collectorUnlike other Louisiana sheriffs, the Orleans sheriff is not the ex officio tax collector (R.S. 13:5539(A))
- Source of the nameName from the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association directory, not a parish or sheriff's-office page; checked 18 September 2026
- Office phone (directory)504.493.2896
- Also checkedOrleans Parish Sheriff Office, LA — Official Website — https://www.opso.gov/ (did not print the sheriff's name)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Louisiana Sheriffs' Association — Sheriffs Directory (statewide directory, checked 18 September 2026) · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Louisiana district judges are elected in partisan elections to six-year terms. They are state judicial officers, not parish officials. Who sets bail at first appearance varies by parish — a district judge on rotation, a magistrate or commissioner, or in some parishes a justice of the peace — and Louisiana's bail statutes do not require that first appearance to happen in open court. The Louisiana State Bar Association's Criminal Justice Committee reports that in Orleans initial bonds are set by an elected magistrate or one of four appointed commissioners; no court or OPSO page opened in this session confirmed the current arrangement, and no judges are named.
- The parish's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-18
The Parish Governing Authority
They maintain the jail building. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe physical maintenance of the parish jail and the jail physician (La. R.S. 15:702, 15:703).
- What they don'tCustody of the jail. Under La. R.S. 15:704 the elected sheriff is “the keeper of the public jail of his parish.”
- The governing bodyNo governing-body page was found on the parish's own site
Notes on the record
- Not scored. OPSO publishes a Transparency section, a Consent Judgement & Compliance page, a Jail Population Dashboard and a PREA page on opso.gov, but the site renders its content by script and none of it could be read in this session. Scoring those as 'not published' would be false; this is a gap in the research, not a finding about the parish.
- Louisiana has no general parish-jail inspection law. The Department of Public Safety and Corrections monitors compliance with its Basic Jail Guidelines at least annually, but only for jails that house state inmates for the state per diem; no public repository of those compliance reports was located.
- For Orleans Parish the federal monitor's reports under Jones v. Gusman are the inspection record. OPSO has a Consent Judgement & Compliance page on opso.gov, but its content did not render for the fetch tool and no monitor report was read, so the inspections check is no and no compliance finding is stated. A court or monitor posting would not satisfy the check unless OPSO or the city posts it on its own domain.
- The roster check is no on a strict reading: the detainee search sits on inmatelookup.opso.us, not opso.gov, and could not be opened. The capacity check is no because the population dashboard on opso.gov embeds a Power BI report whose numbers could not be read, and no bed count was found on an OPSO page.
- A consent judgment is court oversight, not federal funding.
- State prisoners held in parish jails are paid for by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections at a per diem of $26.39 per day (R.S. 15:824(B)(1)(a), as stated in HB 143 of the 2026 Regular Session, whose proposed increase was not confirmed as enacted). That is state money; the sheriff's office is also funded by its own millages, sales-tax shares and tax-collector commissions.
- Deaths: R.S. 13:5713(A)(12) makes deaths in prison a category the parish coroner must investigate; no OPSO page read in this session published a death in custody. Third-party academic death data is not the parish publishing and is not cited.
- Parish seat from CCCarto's Louisiana parish-seat list (https://www.cccarto.com/countyseats/louisiana/), checked 18 September 2026.
- Orleans is a consolidated city-parish (New Orleans). No city page was opened in this session, so no council or mayor is recorded here. The parish governing authority's duty to maintain the jail building (R.S. 15:702) applies to the city-parish government.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Orleans Parish and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So is the parish governing body that pays for it.
Names verified 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered