When Susan Hutson took the oath on May 2, 2022, New Orleans marked a milestone of electing the city’s first woman and first Black woman as sheriff in Louisiana. Hutson has prided herself as being a reformer whose career in oversight (from the LAPD to New Orleans’ independent police monitor) promised a clean break with the jail’s abusive past. Reform money noticed too, with a Zuckerberg-backed group helping to fund a PAC that worked to unseat the incumbent. Hutson cast herself as the sheriff who could finally make the Orleans Justice Center constitutional in practice, not just in consent-decree paperwork.
Two years later, the promise of competence is colliding with headlines.
In May 2025, ten inmates escaped the jail by crawling through a hole behind a toilet and scaling an exterior barrier causing an overnight breach that wasn’t discovered until a morning headcount, more than seven hours later. The details are jaw-dropping, uncontested; and they are also searing. It’s details that include the hole, the unguarded pod, the delayed discovery, the accounting bungles and mishaps, and an array of other questionable mistakes. Days later, the drumbeat got worse with a maintenance worker being arrested for allegedly assisting the breakout. Hutson told the City Council the escape flowed from decrepit infrastructure and “intentional wrongdoing,” a point covered in detail by Verite News.
July brought a new crisis. Deputies wrongfully released 30-year-old Khalil Bryan, who faced violent charges, after confusing him with another man who shared a surname. The public wasn’t alerted for roughly 14 hours, according to a documented timeline by FOX 8. Within days, Democrat state legislator, Mandie Landry, said Hutson’s office may have violated a new law requiring immediate notification when someone leaves custody without authorization. Hutson fired two deputies and suspended five, promising tighter verification.
By mid-summer, the political fallout was measurable. A JMC Analytics survey found 63% unfavorable toward Hutson. Recently, the latest campaign finance filings posted, and the numbers were brutal for Hutson, who had $715 cash on hand as of the mid-July report, while rivals, most notably Michelle Woodfork, were flush.
If this were only a story about two high-profile blunders, perhaps the narrative would be kinder. However, the financial and management turbulence didn’t start this summer. In November 2024, the New Orleans Office of Inspector General released a formal audit concluding OPSO overpaid deputies roughly $259,758 for 2023 Mardi Gras security because of payroll and controls failures. That’s in the OIG’s own publications. In 2023, Hutson’s CFO said he was fired after questioning Carnival hotel spending; that claim, and ensuing subpoenas and scrutiny, has been reported repeatedly by WWL-TV and FOX 8. This spring, amid broader transparency concerns, the City Council advanced a proposal to require OPSO to use the city’s accounting system aimed squarely at Hutson’s refusal to adopt it.
Hutson’s administration has continued to perpetuate the same defense that the jail is a generational problem, which is understaffed, crumbling, and riddled with consent-decree obligations that no one has fully met. While this is all true, Hutson ran on the competence to manage precisely that mess. Two years in, the public is not judging a theory of reform; it’s judging outcomes. The outcomes include a mass escape, a wrongful release with a 14-hour communication gap, and internal controls that still draw audits, subpoenas, and ordinances to force transparency.
Hutson began as a symbol of what New Orleans might become with a different kind of sheriff. Today, the question remains whether she will be able to regain enough trust, from voters, the council, and from crime-weary residents, to finish what she promised to start. The cash-on-hand, the polling, and the pattern of avoidable crises say the clock is running out. The Orleans Justice Center needs a leader who can stop the bleeding and prove, day by day, that reform and competence can live in the same office.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
