The day after a shooting last month killed a teenager and injured five people at the Mall of Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry blasted what he referred to as “hug-a-thug” policies — reforms put in place prior to his tenure when the state was trying to shed its reputation as the nation’s incarceration capital. He also demanded harsher penalties for violent minors.

“I’m done with them. It doesn’t matter how old they are,” Landry, a Republican, said during a news conference in Baton Rouge. “We’ve got 18,000 acres at Angola — if it was up to me, I would send them all there for the rest of their lives.”’

Landry’s push for harsher punishments that would keep people in prison longer came as little surprise. Soon after his 2024 inauguration, he won a package of tough-on-crime bills that drastically changed the state’s sentencing laws. A Landry spokesperson at the time brushed off concerns from civil rights groups and incarceration experts that it would swell the prison population and plunge the state into financial disaster, insisting that “less crime means greater economic opportunity for everyone.”

Two years later, the governor wants to add hundreds more beds in Louisiana’s largest prison and spend more on medical costs as prisoners stay longer behind bars. His proposed $798 million corrections budget, which the Republican-controlled legislature is expected to pass by June 1, represents a 9% increase from the inflation-adjusted total spent in fiscal year 2024, the last budget passed before his tenure. The increased budget is the first indication that the rising inmate population resulting from Landry’s policies is costing Louisiana taxpayers.

ProPublica and Verite News have spent more than two years investigating how Landry’s policies have impacted Louisiana’s criminal justice system. The number of prisoners paroled under Landry has plummeted to its lowest point in 20 years, due in part to a law he signed that cedes much of the power of the parole board to a computerized algorithm. And the prison population as a whole is expected to become older and sicker since Landry and the legislature eliminated medical parole.

Landry also ushered in a law that lowered the age at which the justice system must treat defendants as adults from 18 to 17 years old to combat what he characterized as an epidemic of violent crime committed by minors. But an investigation by ProPublica and Verite News found that 69% of 17-year olds in three of the state’s largest parishes were arrested for offenses that Louisiana law does not consider violent crimes.

Many experts say the full impact of these changes won’t be felt for at least another decade. The Crime and Justice Institute, a Boston-based nonpartisan public-safety research organization, predicts that by 2034, Landry’s rollback of inmates’ ability to shave time off their sentences through good behavior will double the size of the state’s prison population, double the number of nonviolent offenders being held and cost an estimated $2 billion for new prisons to accommodate the population.

Here is how Landry’s policies have already begun to impact Louisiana’s prisons and budget.

Prison Population Change

In the two years after Landry took office, the number of state prisoners has increased by about 8%, and Landry’s budget indicates that number will continue to rise. The governor is asking for an additional 688 beds at the state’s largest prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which will........

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