The jail population remains near historically low levels
From January 2016 to January 2017, the jail population decreased by nearly 17 percent, from 1,753 people to 1,461 people. However, during the first quarter of 2017, the number of people held in the New Orleans jail increased by more than 5 percent to 1,541 people in March 2017. Collaborative efforts to reduce the jail population through the John T. and Catherine D. Macarthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to change the way America thinks about and uses jails, aim to bring the population down to 1,277 by May 2019.8
