If you’re Sheriff Steve Prator, your concerns about the release of prisoners differ a bit from other folks.

In the midst of the Louisiana’s incarceration reform, one local sheriff is unhappy that the “good prisoners” who wash officers’ cars will get their freedom early due to a new state law.

“In addition to the bad ones, they are releasing some good ones that we use everyday to wash cars, change the oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchen, to do all that, where we save money,” Sheriff Steve Prator of Caddo Parish said in a press conference this week.

What are they, slaves? Sit down. I have something to tell you and it’s going to make you sad.

Amendment XIII

Section 1.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Yes, the Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery in the United States, with one exception. Prisoners.

There are people who hold strong, if misguided, beliefs that it’s in the interest of general deterrence to keep people who commit crimes in prison for life plus cancer, but the issue raised by Prator’s beef is that he’s come to rely on their labor. Their slave labor.

Prator later explained the term “good” inmates referred to state prisoners who are eligible to work but have lesser felony charges compared to others facing release who have criminal histories including murder, domestic violence, and battery. State inmates serving a hard-labor sentence can be required to work as part of their court-ordered sentence.

This attempt to backpedal is curious in that the slaves Prator seems most concerned about are the “good” inmates. So he claims he didn’t mean the ones who are useful to him as slaves, but the ones who aren’t the baddest dudes, but have “lesser felonies” and are eligible for work. So the slaves are the good dudes? Somehow, that doesn’t make it seem better.

But Prator is OK with the high rate of incarceration if that means keeping repeat offenders off the streets.

“Lets face it. Somebody (has) to be number one and we got some bad dudes around here,” he said. “We got some folks that need to be in jail.”

But these aren’t the good inmates who wash your cars, save you money, because they’re your slaves.

Prator explained the state needed to focus on rehabilitation before they “open the gates and flood the streets” by releasing 192 felons in Caddo Parish.

Was there something stopping Prator from worrying about rehabilitating inmates before reforms were enacted? Or does he consider using them as slaves, washing his cars, to be rehabilitation?

“This isn’t Mayberry,” he said, referencing Andy Griffith’s fictitious idyllic TV community. “These are people who are carrying ARs and breaking into houses and stealing our cars.”

“I’m not for keeping people down that have stolen something and maybe made a mistake,” he continued. “But if they’re out there dealing dope and shooting one another and shooting us and possibly shooting our kids. . .these people need to be locked up until we’re sure they’re not going to reoffend.”

No, Caddo Parish isn’t Mayberry, but then Sheriff Prator isn’t Sheriff Andy, who never forced Otis to wash his car before he was released when he sobered up.