John Bel Edwards served as the 56th governor of Louisiana from 2016 to 2024. Prior to his governorship, Edwards served in the Louisiana House of Representatives, first getting elected in 2007 and acting as House Democratic leader from 2012 to 2015. Before entering politics, Governor Edwards served in the United States Army. After leaving the Army, he attended law school at Louisiana State University and began his legal career, which he has returned to after leaving office. Governor Edwards was a Spring 2024 Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. During his visit, he sat down with the Harvard Political Review to discuss governing across party lines and to reflect on changes in Louisiana being put forward by his successor, Jeff Landry, and the new legislature.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Louisiana is often considered to be a more conservative state. But you’re a Democrat, and you were the first Democrat to be reelected as governor since 1975. What tactics did you use to work with the legislature that had a Republican supermajority?
John Bel Edwards: Well, it’s true that I was the first Democrat reelected since 1975, but it is also true that every governor elected since 1971 has been replaced by a governor of the opposite party — so in 1971 we elected a Democrat. He served two terms. He was replaced by a Republican, who was replaced by a Democrat, who was replaced by a Republican, and that has continued on until today. I was replaced by a Republican — not because he beat me. I couldn’t run again because of term limits. My hope, my expectation, is that will repeat itself again.
It was challenging — because I am a Democrat — that there was a supermajority of Republicans in the House and in the Senate. Especially with Donald Trump coming onto the scene, which happened about the time that I was running. I won in 2015. He won in 2016, but things kind of nationalized. And I think the partisan divide in our country and in our state grew and solidified, if you will, and made it a little bit more difficult than it otherwise would have been.
Because I had been in the legislature, I had personal relationships with members of the House and the Senate and especially with the leadership in the House and the Senate, whether they were Democrats or Republicans. And the personal relationship really helped. I think in a state like Louisiana labels can be misleading, and so forth. I like to think of myself and refer to myself as being a moderate Democrat. So I think it was easier for me to have serious conversations with Republicans, and Democrats, and the like in the legislature because of those relationships, because my political views are a pretty good fit for Louisiana. I think that was demonstrated by the fact that I won, and won reelection. But that’s really what enabled it, and, while it was the first big test out of the gate, the fact that we had to come together very early in our first term to solve the biggest fiscal crisis that our state had ever faced.
When I walked in the office, we were a billion dollars in general funds short from closing out the year. Our fiscal year ends on June 30. I became governor in January. We were a billion dollars short to end the year, and for the year starting on July 1, 2016, we were $2 billion short. And that’s not a huge amount for the biggest states in the country, but $2 billion was more than 20% of our state general funds in the budget.
We had to come together and fix it. It was very difficult. Almost all the Republicans had run on a platform of never increasing revenue, but they never said they were going to cut higher education, cut health care, close nursing homes, that sort of thing either. So we just had to work on it together. And because we came in January of ’16 under those conditions and literally just had to work together, I think that sort of set the tone for the whole time that I was governor. Although, I’m not going to pretend that it wasn’t without a lot of challenges.
HPR: Your successor, Jeff Landry, has been pushing to pare down the Louisiana constitution and is proposing a lot of changes. What are the implications of this?
JBE: Well, I think the implications are numerous and ominous. You know, the election cycle was just last year. This is not something he ran on, it’s not something that legislators ran on. They haven’t built any consensus for changing the constitution, much less for any specific changes that they want to entertain. And I think lawyers, and not just lawyers, but anybody who understands how government works, [know] the state constitution is the most important body of law in the state, obviously, and it can’t be changed or amended easily or quickly. And so you have to be very, very careful about changing — what do you get rid of, what do you add? And you typically want to do that in a very deliberate, transparent process. That’s not what’s happening.
It appears that there are just a handful of individuals who are trying to bring their preferences to bear and to do it in a hurry, so that they tack on a constitutional convention to the current legislative session. And I think their goal was to have people voting on the changes to the constitution as well. So the process, I think, is very problematic.
And then I think the specific things they’re trying to achieve will also be problematic. And quite frankly, there’s not a lot of transparency about exactly what they’re trying to do. But one of the fears that I have is that they will try to end support — there’s a minimum foundation program that provides a base level of support for K through 12 education, public education in Louisiana — I really think they’re trying to end that and make that support just contingent upon whatever the legislature wants to appropriate in any given year. And I think they’re doing that to diminish what they’re spending for public education. And I think that would be a disaster. I think that we have some very poor rural parishes, especially in the Delta in Louisiana along the Mississippi River and northeast Louisiana, but they’re trying to end certain support that the state has given to parishes. And I just don’t think that’s going to bode well for those parishes, and I just think there are real challenges with what they’re trying to do.
I hope that they go into a period of reflection and decide this is probably not what we want to do, and certainly not how we want to do it. But if not, if they sort of muscle through these changes and do it the way that they’re contemplating currently, I genuinely believe that within a couple of years when people in Louisiana realize what happened, they’re not going to like it very much. And hopefully that will be reflected if there’s something for people to vote on this fall. Hopefully, they will take the opportunity to really dig into it and study it and then cast an educated vote this fall.
HPR: You campaigned on, and during your time in office, focused on, reducing the prison population. There’s been some recent legislation in Louisiana around expanding the death penalty and ending parole for a lot of people. How does this affect the progress you made?
JBE: We made really good progress on a bipartisan basis with criminal justice reform and reinvestment, and we didn’t just make reforms. We realized we were locking up nonviolent, non- sex offenders at the highest rate in the country. In comparison: two times the rate of South Carolina, three times the rate of Florida, even though the overall crime rates were similar. And we weren’t offering any programming in any sort of robust way where people could get the education that they needed, learn a skill or trade, or get anger management or substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, those sorts of things. And we just weren’t safer as a result. So focusing on nonviolent, non-sex offenders, we made some adjustments and we made sure that people would spend less time [in prison], but we also knew that we would achieve savings. And 70% of those savings were reinvested every year into anti-recidivism efforts, into juvenile programs, into victims services, and other things.
And they were working. The prison population in Louisiana at the start of those reforms, we had about 36,000 people in prison. We had 27,000 when I left, and even though we had that many fewer people in prison, the number of people in prison for violent offenses as a percentage increased, but also as a raw number increased because like other states, we had an increase in violent crime coming out of COVID. But my successor and members of the legislature — and I think falsely, and without any factual support, no data to validate what they were saying, in fact, the evidence is to the contrary — they blamed the increase in violent crime on our criminal justice reform efforts, which, by definition, were directed at nonviolent offenders. And we just know that that wasn’t the cause of it. So they’ve made wholesale changes, and they said they were doing it to reduce crime and increase public safety, to reduce recidivism.
But you mentioned it: They ended parole. We absolutely know for a fact that people who are paroled reoffend at a much lower rate than people who have to stay in prison for the entirety of their sentence. That’s because, in order to be paroled, they had to take advantage of things that improve their lives to make it less likely that they’re going to be offended. If they can’t be paroled, they’re not going to have the incentive to do those things. They’re just going to be warehoused more often. So we know that that actually is going to produce the opposite of what they said they wanted to do. Lengthening prison sentences and so forth, I just think it’s doing what Louisiana did for decades and decades and decades, none of which ever made us safer.
But it takes a bit of courage to stand by criminal justice reforms after you have an increase in crime. But people like the Pew Charitable Trust, or the Vera Institute, and even conservative groups led by the Koch brothers, and in New Orleans we have the Pelican Institute, they all know that our reforms were data driven. They literally are best practices. Like me, they’re very disappointed that the current governor and legislature are moving away from those. But what we know is we’ve achieved more than $150 million in savings; 70% of that has been reinvested. Well, those savings are going to go away now. That reinvestment is not going to happen.
I’m not surprised, because as attorney general I heard Jeff Landry say those things, and now that he’s governor he’s following through. I guess when you’re running for office and you’re having an increase in crime, you feel like you have to say something. And the easiest thing to do is to say, “Well, we’re just going to lock more people up.” But it’s just not going to work, and it’s going to cost a lot of money. And we’re not going to be safer.
Of course, I don’t believe that the death penalty is good policy anywhere, but it’s particularly bad in Louisiana. In the last 20 years, we’ve executed one person and seven have been exonerated, meaning they were factually innocent of the crimes that they had been convicted of and sentenced to death for. And over 50 people weren’t exonerated, but their sentence was changed to something other than death because there were mitigating factors that had not been adequately considered and otherwise. And I think if you’re going to have capital punishment, your system has to be perfect. Our system is not perfect. But also, I think it’s antithetical to saying that you’re a pro-life state, that you have a pro-life position, if you are, in fact, in favor of killing people. And it’s a continuation of the violence by another means that I just don’t think that that’s the best thing that you can do as a state. And it costs us so much money to prosecute, and defend, and then house them, and so forth.
But it appears that my successor is very determined to restart execution as they’ve actually increased the number of ways that they can carry it out. Lethal injection [was] the only legally prescribed way while I was governor, but the truth is we could not legally access the drugs that were required. Now, in addition to lethal injection, they have now legalized the return to the electric chair. And they also legalized some manner of execution most recently, and I think for the first time ever, that was employed in Alabama: the nitrogen gas. So anyway, I’m very opposed to all of those things. I don’t think they’re right, but we’ll see what the people of Louisiana say about that over time.
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