[Post updated, 9/2/10]

A group of like-minded criminal justice reform advocates is soliciting donations to buy a full-page ad in the Times Picayune next week to protest Sheriff Marlin Gusman’s plan to expand the Orleans Parish jail.

Gusman is proposing a new jail that ultimately will housing about 5,800 people, says the group — up from its existing 3,552 beds. The advocates hope to start a citywide conversation about the proposal by soliciting donations of $22.39 — the daily cost the city pays the sheriff for each inmate. The group also is asking donors to consider what else the city could spend the $22.39 on.

“We’re hearing everything from mental health programs, after school programs, to better street lights and fixing the potholes in the French Quarter,” says Dana Kaplan, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which is headquartering the effort. “I think it really highlights the fiscal tradeoff the city is making when [it decides] to focus on expanding the jail instead of other services.”

The ad will cost $12,000 and is expected to run next week, Kaplan says.

“In just a few days we have had about 250 contributions, and we’ve raised over $5,000 in grass-roots donations,” she says. “I think what we’re seeing is definitely a groundswell of support for reform of Orleans Parish Prison. This is just through email solicitation and word of mouth.

“The donations are coming from all kinds of likely and unlikely allies. We’re seeing contributions from former judges, former city council members, local musicians, average citizens.”

Some private donors have agreed to match the funds raised by the effort. You can make a donate online through  Paypal until the end of today. There’s an anonymous donation button, if you don’t want your name to appear in the ad.

“A jail comfortable for our community needs to be no more than 857 beds,” says Norris Henderson, executive director of Voice of The Ex-Offender (VOTE), which supports the effort. “We’ve been locking people up for convenience.”

According to the group: Currently 3,500 inmates are in the Orleans Parish Prison, 2,700 of whom are “city prisoners.” That represents the highest rate of detention of any urban jail in the country and is three times the national average. There have also been a series of documented civil rights issues with conditions at the jail.

If you are interested in more details, Karen Gadbois at The Lens has been chronicling the city’s efforts to convene a private advisory committee around the jail expansion process.

Sheriff Gusman responded with an emailed statement through his public relations firm, the  Ehrhardt Group. He questioned the statistics cited by  the group, saying “all of the projections from the Juvenile Justice Project and percentages relative to our population are wrong.”

The sheriff wants a smaller, more efficient jail complex, he wrote, pointing out that the pre-Katrina jail complex housed over 7,500 inmates. Although 4,200 beds is still more than the current 3,552 beds.

The statement also focused on the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, writing: “This special interest group’s willingness to allow the current inmate housing situation to continue, while pursuing its own agenda, is short-sighted and a threat to public safety.”

“Demanding an artificially small facility just to satisfy a quest for national comparisons, in other words to wish New Orleans to be safer, is unrealistic and it puts the public’s safety at risk,” Gusman continued.

The full text of the planned ad is pasted, after the jump, along with the text of Gusman’s statement.

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Three years ago, filmmaker Spike Lee and CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien gave video cameras to several New Orleans teens to document their lives in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Brandon Franklin, saxophonist for To Be Continued Brass Band, was one of those children. (2:38 mark) He survived the floodwaters and went on to become a young father and a beloved and widely respected musician and teacher. He was gunned down on Mother’s Day this year at the age of 22.

Although TBC has been one of my favorite brass bands for years, I didn’t know Brandon very well and had only hung out with him a few times in the weeks just prior to his death. Yet writing an article about the loss of this young man has been one of the most difficult assignments I’ve ever faced, harder in some ways even than reporting from Ground Zero after Hurricane Katrina. Before the levee breaches, folks in New Orleans joked after every storm, somewhat morbidly, about how we dodged a bullet, ‘The Big One’ that would surely one day hit and fill our bowl-shaped city with water. Five years after surviving a near fatal wound we, the ‘resilient’ ones, have finally turned a corner in the recovery of our city. But we’re also still dodging bullets that threaten to take out what we’ve fought so vigilantly these last five years to save - a future for New Orleans. We all must commit ourselves to addressing this threat if we’re truly going to redeem this city. Brandon’s story serves as a testimony to what’s worth saving in New Orleans and a portending of darker days should we fail to heed its warning.

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This Saturday, Aug. 28 brings the 5th annual Rising Tide, the lively day-long discussion put together after the storm by New Orleans bloggers at home and away …

After the flood that followed Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, the internet became a vital connection among dispersed New Orleanians, former New Orleanians, friends of the city and of the Gulf Coast region. A surge of new blogs erupted and, combined with those that were already online, a community of bloggers with a shared interest in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast developed. In the summer of 2006, after the success of the first Geek Dinner, and to mark the anniversary of the flood, the newly formed NOLA Bloggers organized the first Rising Tide Conference, taking their shared interest in technology, the internet and social media and turning advocacy for the city into action.

This year’s event (held at the Howlin’ Wolf) has a great lineup of speakers, starting with the keynoter: Mac McClelland of Mother Jones, who has been doing a spectacular, skeptical kickass job reporting on the oil disaster. Other panelists include NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas; Gambit’s Clancy DuBos (if you want your chance to hear Clancy use his full vocabulary, this is it); The Times-Picayune’s excellent columnist Stephanie Grace and equally excellent TV Ranger Dave Walker; Tulane criminologist Peter Scharf; and many more. Topics include public safety, politics, the environment, HBO’s Treme and “Why Can’t We Get Some Dam Safety in New Orleans?”.

Gambit is pleased to sponsor the event. Tickets are only $25 and can be purchased in advance here.

At NOPD headquarters this morning, Superintendent Ronal Serpas introduced a 65-point plan to reform the troubled department and allow citizens to track its progress. You can download your own copy of the report here, but here are a few items of interest.

An outreach program to the growing number of Spanish-speaking residents who settled in New Orleans after the storm:

39. The NOPD in the First Quarter of 2011 will establish an El Protector Program to engage its Hispanic/Latino community. The El Protector Program originated in the California Highway Patrol and was initiated in the Washington State Patrol in 2002, and the Nashville Police Department in 2005. Nashville’s El Protector Program, in February 2009, received national recognition from the Vera Institute of Justice as a “best practice” in reaching across the language divide. El Protector-type programs will enhance the NOPD’s ability to serve the ever changing diversity of our community. The NOPD will also analyze the need for this or a similar program in our Vietnamese community, as well as others that may have language differences.

More cops on bikes, in all districts:

41. The NOPD in 2011 will field Bicycle Units and an expanded Mounted Officer program in the eight Districts. It is well established in Community Policing literature that programs such as these serve to put officers closer to the communities they assist, thus creating better relationships, communication and information sharing.

And — as Serpas told his officers at the meeting this morning — “If you lie, you die”:

44. The NOPD on September 1, 2010 will implement a revised Honesty and Truthfulness policy that will call for presumptive termination, without progressive discipline, for any employee who makes a materially false statement with the intent to deceive. IN PLACE

45. The NOPD on September 1, 2010 will implement a revised False or Inaccurate Reports policy that will call for presumptive termination, without progressive discipline, when an employee knowingly makes, allows or causes to be made, a false or inaccurate oral or written report of an official nature. IN PLACE

There’s more (including a prohibition on cops accepting cash payments for paid details). Get your copy here — and chime in with what you think about it below.

Spike Lee’s wife, Tonya Lewis, is hot. Let’s be quite clear: This was perhaps the biggest new story to come out of last night’s red carpet premiere of If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise at the Mahalia Jackson Theater, and yet The Times Picayune’s write-up doesn’t even mention her. Shame!

This image is a little blurry because my iPhone was shaking, but still. I’m not overblowing the hotness of Spike Lee’s wife. She is incredibly hot:

Also on the carpet, Phyllis Montana-Leblanc and Wendell Pierce, both of whom are featured in the film. “He’s a total scoundrel,” said Montana-Leblanc, of Pierce. “Don’t believe anything he says.”

“We met five years ago,” said Pierce. “And when they told me we were going to play a married couple in Treme I said, ‘This is going to be great. This is going to be easy.”

The director, dressed in a seersucker and Nikes, also hugged Mayor Mitch Landrieu, and posed for photographs alongside him with musician Terence Blanchard, and basketball star Chris Paul.

“This sends a message to the people of America,” said Landrieu. “Whether it’s Katrina or the BP oil spill or the recession, the people here are still standing.”

Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao got the biggest round of applause during the premiere, for the scene of him pulling out a knife in front of the White House, and miming committing hari kari. This, Cao feels, is the key lesson that BP executives need to learn from the disaster, and to this observer, the audience reaction may well sway Cao’s chances of reelection in the fall.