New Orleans — The sheriff who oversees a New Orleans jail that was the site of a brash escape of 10 inmates earlier this year told CBS News in an exclusive interview Thursday that prison staffing and design flaws played a major role in the breakout.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said the Orleans Parish Justice Center jail, built 10 years ago, was poorly constructed from the start.
“There are major design flaws in it that make it unsafe for those who are housed here and make it unsafe for those who work here,” Hutson told CBS News. “And I included the locks and other mechanisms that I don’t want to talk about on camera that are safety issues. But we talked about this, and we alerted everybody in the system.”
The May 16 escape prompted an extensive manhunt involving hundreds of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers. It underscored serious security failures at the facility that prompted significant criticism for Hutson even though she had spoken about the problems in a public tour of the jail just a few weeks prior. She even posted on Instagram about broken locks just three days earlier, on May 13. And in the days after the escape, Hutson told reporters that the city had ignored repeated requests from her over the past several years to fund necessary renovations and security upgrades to the jail.
She told CBS News Thursday that the timeline of the jailbreak dates back to the facility’s construction. The jail is currently undergoing an audit with the National Institute of Corrections, which is reviewing its finances and security systems.
She also says the jail is currently only 60% staffed, up from a 45% staffing level when she was first elected to the post in the fall of 2021.
“We need more people in this jail to secure it, and that didn’t happen,” Hutson said. “So, for the last three years, I’ve been saying this every year during budget cycle, every chance I get that I have a chance to speak to the city government, and it’s not been rectified. So here we come to May. Now it comes full circle. The perfect storm is there. We had people in our organization who assisted here.”
During the escape, part of which was captured on surveillance video, the inmates removed a jail cell door off its track and ripped a toilet from an empty jail cell wall. The inmates crawled through a hole in the wall behind the toilet, made their way through a narrow plumbing room full of pipes, and broke out of a maintenance door onto an outdoor loading dock. The inmates then climbed a fence that separated the Orleans Parish Justice Center from the construction site of another jail facility, and eventually sprinted across a freeway.
All but one of the ten inmates has since been captured.
Hutson has previously described the breakout as an “inside job.” More than a dozen people have been arrested on accusations of aiding in the escape, but only one of those arrestees was a jail employee, a maintenance worker identified as 33-year-old Sterling Williams. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
CBS News also previously learned that several jail guards were placed on paid administrative leave amid a state investigation into their potential involvement in the jailbreak.
Hutson still believes the escape was an inside job, but says there is still a tedious investigation ahead into who else should be held responsible.
“There are about 900 cameras in the Orleans Justice Center,” Hutson said. “It takes a long time to go through those and look and see who did what. But I can absolutely guarantee you that we know there were more actors involved in this.”
Last month, the sheriff’s office received $15 million in emergency funding from the state to make critical security upgrades to the jail. Hutson blames the delay in receiving those funds on “some actors in the system” who “do not want to see me succeed.”
“This is political office, and there are challenges to that,” Hutson said. “And in this election cycle — and there are members of government supporting those challengers, no doubt. But I know this, the timing is very curious.”
She says that her team is “doing everything we can” to capture the last outstanding inmate, Derrick Groves, who was convicted of murder in 2024 for the shooting deaths of two men.
“But we know he’s getting help also out there in the community, which is a little shocking, that given what his history is, and his history of violence is, that he’s getting that help,” Hutson said. “…I do believe we will find him. It’s just a matter of time.”
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