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 bySt. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office (by statute, R.S. 15:704)
- Parish prison wardenKevin Sensebe, per the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association directory (sheriff's staff; not confirmed on a sheriff page)
- What was triedOne search for the parish's sheriff, jail and roster returned no sheriff or parish government domain. Results were commercial inmate-lookup and arrest-record sites (not opened, not used), a VINE victim-notification page (stbernard.lavns.org, not first-party), and a Department of Public Safety and Corrections location page (state, not the parish publishing). The spare search (Sheriffs' Association directory) listed the sheriff's site as sbso.org; it was refused (PROVENANCE_REQUIRED) and not retried.
Source: · 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 James Pohlmann
- How the office is filledElected parish sheriff
- Statutory basisLa. R.S. 15:704 makes the sheriff keeper of the public jail of the parish; under R.S. 15:702 and 15:703 the parish governing authority maintains the jail building and provides the jail physician
- Assumed office2012, per the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association directory
- Office#2 Courthouse Square, Chalmette, LA 70043 (P.O. Box 168, Chalmette, LA 70044)
- Office line504.278.7755
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Louisiana Sheriffs' Association — parish directory entry · 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 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
- 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.
- The sheriff's name comes from the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association directory, not from a parish or sheriff page; the association is not the parish publishing and counts toward no check.
- Neither the sheriff's nor the parish government's own site was reached, so no transparency check could be judged; checks is left empty rather than recorded as ten no entries.
- Parish seat from CCCarto's Louisiana parish-seat list (https://www.cccarto.com/countyseats/louisiana/), checked 18 September 2026.
- Not found. No St. Bernard Parish government page was returned by search or opened, so the form of government and its members are not recorded.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in St. Bernard 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