Marlin Noel Gusman (born ) is an American attorney and Democratic politician who served as the first black sheriff of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, from 2004 to 2022. He was first elected Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff in a 2004 special election to succeed Charles Foti, and in 2010 he became the first sheriff of the consolidated Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office after the Louisiana Legislature merged the parish's separate civil and criminal sheriff offices. Before becoming sheriff he served as Chief Administrative Officer of New Orleans under Mayor Marc Morial from 1994 to 2000 and as a member of the New Orleans City Council for District D from 2000 to 2004.
Gusman took office as criminal sheriff about ten months before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, and much of his tenure was defined by the storm's aftermath: the flooding of Orleans Parish Prison and the emergency evacuation of thousands of inmates, human-rights findings that hundreds of prisoners had been abandoned, and a multi-year effort to rebuild the jail with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds. In 2009 the United States Department of Justice found conditions at the jail unconstitutional, and in 2013 U.S. District Judge Lance Africk approved a sweeping consent decree in the class action Jones v. Gusman. After federal monitors documented continuing violence, suicides and understaffing, Gusman agreed in 2016 to cede day-to-day control of the jail to an independent compliance director; he did not regain full authority until 2020.
Gusman also oversaw a reduction of the jail population from nearly 6,300 before Katrina to under 900, the opening of the Orleans Justice Center in 2015, and the expansion of inmate education and re-entry programs, developments that he and other officials credited to reforms undertaken with the city, courts and advocacy groups. He won re-election in 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2017, defeating his predecessor Foti in a 2014 runoff, but was defeated in the December 11, 2021, runoff by Susan Hutson, leaving office in May 2022. After the May 2025 escape of ten inmates from the Orleans Justice Center, Gusman publicly criticized his successor's management while defending the jail he had built.
Early life and education
Gusman was born in New Orleans around 1955 and grew up in Gretna on the West Bank of the Mississippi River, commuting to attend Jesuit High School in New Orleans, from which he graduated in the class of 1973. He later recalled that his family made sacrifices to enable his attendance and that "Jesuit always made me feel that I could do whatever I set my mind to."
In 1977 he received both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. He earned his Juris Doctor from Loyola University and was admitted to the Louisiana State Bar in 1984. He later completed the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Gusman worked in the insurance industry with the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company and the Laurance Eustis Insurance Company, practiced law in association with the firm of Ernest N. Morial, and served as a regional attorney for the Louisiana Department of Revenue and Taxation.
Early career
Morial administration
During the mayoralty of Ernest "Dutch" Morial, the city's first Black mayor, Gusman served as the city's first Minority Business Counselor and as Director of Property Management. In 1994 Mayor Marc Morial—Dutch Morial's son—appointed Gusman chief administrative officer, described in city records as the highest appointed city official and the city's chief financial officer. He held the position until July 2000, when he resigned to run for the City Council, and was succeeded by Deputy CAO Cedric Grant. Gusman also served on the Orleans Levee District board of commissioners and received the Mayor's Medal of Honor. When he later ran for sheriff, he sought to distance himself from the Morials amid federal investigations into contracts issued under Marc Morial's administration.
City Council
In his first bid for elective office, Gusman won the District D seat on the New Orleans City Council in 2000, filling the vacancy left by the death of Councilman Roy Glapion, and was re-elected in 2002. On the council he chaired the Budget, Audit and Board of Review Committee and the Governmental Affairs Committee and served as the council's representative to the Sewerage & Water Board.
Orleans Parish Sheriff
2004 special election and consolidation of the office
When Charles Foti—who had served as Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff for about thirty years—was elected Attorney General of Louisiana and took office in January 2004, a special election was called to fill the remainder of his term. Gusman won the 2004 special election and became Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff, taking over a jail complex that then held more than 6,000 people. The field included interim sheriff William Hunter, whom Gusman faced in the runoff, and Ira Thomas, who finished fourth and then supported Gusman. Gusman was re-elected to a full four-year term in 2006, when businessman Gerald DeSalvo also qualified for the criminal sheriff's race; the election was the first Orleans Parish cycle after Hurricane Katrina.
The parish's separate offices of civil sheriff and criminal sheriff were subsequently abolished and consolidated into a single Orleans Parish sheriff. Because of the timing of the change and its implementing legislation, the merger took effect with the election of a single sheriff at the February 6, 2010, municipal elections; Gusman won that election and became the first sheriff of the unified Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office.
Hurricane Katrina and the evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison
When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, Orleans Parish Prison was one of the largest jails in the United States, holding roughly 6,500 people across a complex of buildings; the sheriff's office rented many of its beds to the state and to federal authorities. As the city ordered its first mandatory evacuation, Gusman kept the inmates in place, publicly stating that "we're going to keep our prisoners where they belong," and the jail even accepted inmates from other facilities. After the storm, the jail's generators failed, the buildings lost power and water, toilets backed up, and inmates were left for days in flooded cells—some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests—while some deputies left their posts. Inmates were evacuated by boat to the Broad Street overpass before being bused to state facilities, among them the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, where the American Civil Liberties Union documented allegations of assaults and abuse.
In a statement dated September 21, 2005, Human Rights Watch concluded that "the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates" and reported that inmates in the Templeman III building, which "held more than 600 inmates," said there were no correctional officers present as of August 29 and that they were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, "four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level." Researcher Corinne Carey said, "Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling." Human Rights Watch reported that Gusman "did not call for help in evacuating the prison until midnight on Monday, August 29," that the evacuation was not completed until Friday, September 2, and that 517 inmates—including 130 from Templeman III—were missing from the state's list of evacuated prisoners. A spokeswoman for the sheriff's department told Human Rights Watch that "nobody drowned, nobody was left behind."
In August 2006, the ACLU National Prison Project released a report titled Abandoned and Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, based on more than 1,000 testimonials. An ACLU official said, "The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did more for its 263 stray pets than the sheriff did for the more than 6,500 men, women and children left in his care." Gusman disputed the report; he acknowledged the loss of electricity and non-functioning toilets but denied that inmates went unfed, saying they had food from the prison and military MREs. He repeatedly rejected inmate accounts, at one point telling a reporter, "Don't rely on crackheads, cowards and criminals to say what the story is." Gusman maintained that the evacuation of more than 6,000 inmates, deputies and their families was accomplished without loss of life or major injury, and a later Justice Department findings letter commended him for the Katrina evacuation.
Rebuilding the jail and FEMA funding
Rebuilding the flood-damaged jail with Federal Emergency Management Agency money became a central and contentious project of Gusman's tenure. The initial post-Katrina plan was to rebuild the complex at roughly its former size—about 5,832 beds—using FEMA funds; a set of plans Gusman sent to an architect in 2007 envisioned an 8,000-bed facility, and by 2010 he was pushing for a 4,300-bed jail. Facing opposition from the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition and other reformers, the New Orleans City Council voted on February 3, 2011, to cap the new jail at 1,438 beds.
Prison Legal News reported in September 2012 that FEMA had "committed approximately $114 million" to the new jail complex, comprising $50.4 million toward construction of the 1,438-bed jail and $63.6 million for a 163,000-square-foot kitchen and warehouse building. The kitchen and warehouse building opened first, followed by the Orleans Justice Center, a 1,438-bed "direct supervision" jail with an intake and processing center that opened in September 2015 at a cost of roughly $145 million. The office also operated a Temporary Detention Center.
Phase III and the FEMA money held up by the city
The most protracted dispute concerned a "Phase III" special-needs and mental-health facility. Gusman first proposed Phase III in 2014 as a roughly 160,000-square-foot building with a capacity variously described as 380 to 764 beds; critics viewed it as a backdoor expansion of the jail, while the other parties to the consent decree—the Justice Department and lawyers for the inmate class—supported a facility to house detainees with acute mental illness, which neither the 2011 zoning ordinance nor the design of the Orleans Justice Center had accommodated. The design was ultimately scaled down to an 89-bed mental-health annex with an infirmary, laundry and visitation area, to stand between the Orleans Justice Center and the kitchen–warehouse building.
The city, which funds and would build the facility, shifted position repeatedly. Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration agreed to build Phase III in 2017, but Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration came out against it, arguing that it was unnecessary and too expensive given a declining jail population and pandemic-era revenue shortfalls, and instead proposed retrofitting a floor of the existing jail; the City Planning Commission approved that retrofit alternative in November 2021. The other parties to the consent decree, along with U.S. District Judge Lance Africk and U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael North, rejected the city's arguments; Africk first ordered the city and sheriff to proceed with the facility in 2019, and the Fifth Circuit heard the city's appeal in March 2022, where Judge Carl Stewart questioned the city's cost claims.