Thompson under fire before he left

• By DOUG SIMPSON
• Associated Press writer
• Published: Aug 3, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The first resignation from Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Cabinet was a surprise, and still hasn’t been explained.

Richard Thompson spent about five months as head of the Office of Youth Development, which oversees youth prisons. He took charge in February at an agency that has been trying to shake Louisiana’s reputation as a state that locks up its young prisoners without bothering to train them for life on the outside.

Critics didn’t like Thompson from the start, even before he arrived in Baton Rouge with an unusual résumé that included cosmetology in the Caribbean. Once in office, he failed to impress the panel of elected officials that oversees his office.

Thompson declined to explain why he resigned late last month, except to say that he’s recently been blessed with two grandchildren, one in Alabama and one in Puerto Rico. He has been traveling and unavailable for comment, said Jerel Giarusso, his former OYD spokeswoman.

Timmy Teepell, the governor’s chief of staff, wouldn’t discuss Thompson’s exit but did nothing to squelch speculation he was forced out.

“Everyone seems to think very much that his departure was not quite voluntary. The story that he had a grandchild born in Puerto Rico doesn’t quite add up,” said Dana Kaplan, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which advocates on behalf of teens in OYD custody.

Thompson’s appointment was greeted privately, by reform advocates, as a step in the wrong direction. He had worked previously in the state’s prison system, ultimately running youth corrections in the late 1990s — when Louisiana was known for running the most violent and chaotic youth lockups in the country. At that time, he oversaw settlement of a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit over juvenile prison conditions.

When Jindal hired him, Thompson was running the Hispanic American College in Caguas, Puerto Rico, a small school offering degrees in manicures and hair styling. At the time, he said he would focus his attention on the state job but did not plan to sell the beauty school.

Soon after Thompson took control of OYD, the Legislature sent him orders to shut down the Jetson youth prison, near Baton Rouge, which has seen a spike in complaints about violence and a lack of educational and job-skills programs.

Plans to close Jetson are part of a long-term reform effort, accelerated under former Gov. Kathleen Blanco, to send teen offenders to education-focused facilities, rather than lock them up in high-security prisons. Teens will gradually transfer out of Jetson and into these smaller facilities, partly to keep them closer geographically to their families.

At best, Thompson had a communication problem with his overseers on the Juvenile Justice Implementation Commission, made up of Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, Supreme Court Justice Kitty Kimball and others.

The Legislature gave Thompson a Sept. 1 deadline to deliver a plan for transferring Jetson’s teenagers into smaller, better-operated facilities.

Sen. Don Cravins Jr., another member of the commission, said he never got the impression Thompson understood the deadline or what was expected of him. “It wasn’t clicking with him,” said Cravins, D-Opelousas, now a congressional candidate. “It just seemed like we were on a different page, and that was frustrating. It seemed he could never come up with a plan.”