The four candidates for Lafayette Parish Sheriff took turns speaking with the editorial board of The Daily Advertiser Monday on issues like corrections, race relations and the budget.

John Rogers, Rick Chargois, Chad Leger and Mark Garber met with The Daily Advertiser editorial board and answered questions about their experiences, the current state of the office and their plans if elected.

Here are some of the issues candidates spoke on posed by board members:

Thanks in part to Neustrom’s alternative sentencing programs like GPS monitoring, day reporting, rehabilitation and transitional work release programs, Lafayette Parish has one of the lowest levels of recidivism in the U.S. with 21 percent of inmates never returning to jail. The national average for recidivism is 67.8 percent, and Louisiana is at 42.7 percent, according to data provided by LPSO.What programs created by Neustrom would you keep? Which ones would you get rid of?

The re-entry programs that help inmates obtain their GED or gain job or interview skills has been very effective in reducing recidivism, Garber said.

“We’re reshaping their decision-making paradigm,” Garber said. “If two out of ten people take to the stuff we teach them, that’s a 20 percent decrease in crime. When’s the last time you’ve heard of a 20 percent decrease in crime?”

The sheriff’s work-release program was another keeper on Garber’s list. The program, according to Garber, takes 60 percent of their pay for the cost of bringing them to work, and allows inmates to work outside the jail, earning money for their family or victims of the crimes they committed.

“Employers get a drug-tested, on-time employee that they’ll know hasn’t been out drinking all night,” he said.Employment

Rogers, a litigation specialist with the sheriff’s office, said addressing morale issues within the jail would go a long way to address recruiting and retainment of officers, especially in corrections.

“These people are overworked and underpaid,” he said. “There has to be a way to address those issues.”

Between managing the day-to-day duties of a jail that employs more than 400 people as well as the diversionary programs set forth by Neustrom, Rogers and Garber agreed that Director of Corrections Rob Reardon just has too much on his plate.

“If you have too many irons in the fire, how can you function when something happens?” he said.

Rogers’ solution: Appoint a major for every division in the sheriff’s office to increase communication and efficacy within the departments. He said, if elected, he’d also establish a “cabinet” of division majors who he’d meet with monthly.

“We’d have much more accountability that way,” he said.The jail

Synthetic drugs, cell phones and weapons are getting into LPCC, Leger said, and it won’t stop until the jail is properly staffed.

“When I worked in the LPCC, we were four deputies on the floor, and every hour on the hour we’d check the cells,” Leger said. “They’re not able to do these checks a lot of the time because of staffing. You have to have enough staff to make these checks to keep these inmates safe.”

Leger said there were six cases of inmates who smoked poisoned synthethic marijuana, and there were 240 incidents last year where locks on jail doors were popped. If elected, he said he’d work to make sure there would be at least four deputies on each floor to help

Garber said in his interview that the issue of the locks has been addressed.Race relations

In the wake of rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore last year after police officers took the lives of two black men juxtaposed to the officer-involved shooting of Tevin Lewis in Lafayette earlier this month, Chargois said his office would work to keep the peace through timely information.

“We have good people who live here, and they do not want it to get to that level,” he said. “I can be a positive force for the black community.”

He also said he would have released the video of Lewis’ shooting captured by a surveillance camera as quickly as possible. Community members gathered in front of Lafayette Police headquarters recently to demand the footage be released.

“Let them understand what’s happening day-to-day so they can go back and let their people know what’s going on,” he said.