Help us improve in just 2 minutes—share your thoughts in our reader survey.
Janet Hays
Janet Hays (No party preference) ran for election for Orleans Parish Sheriff in Louisiana. She lost in the primary on November 13, 2021.
Hays completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2021. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Janet Hays was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She attended the University of Calgary. Hays' career experience includes working as a director and founder with Healing Minds NOLA, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, as a recording engineer and producer, in restaurant management, as a community organizer, and as a consultant with assisted outpatient treatment courts. She has served as an outreach coordinator with SAVE Charity Hospital.[1]
Elections
2021
See also: City elections in New Orleans, Louisiana (2021)
Louisiana elections use the majority-vote system. All candidates compete in the same primary, and a candidate can win the election outright by receiving more than 50 percent of the vote. If no candidate does, the top two vote recipients from the primary advance to the general election, regardless of their partisan affiliation.
General election
General election for Orleans Parish Sheriff
Susan Hutson defeated incumbent Marlin Gusman in the general election for Orleans Parish Sheriff on December 11, 2021.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Susan Hutson (D)  | 53.3 | 31,975 |
| Marlin Gusman (D) | 46.7 | 27,987 | ||
| Total votes: 59,962 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Nonpartisan primary election
Nonpartisan primary for Orleans Parish Sheriff
Incumbent Marlin Gusman and Susan Hutson defeated Christopher Williams, Janet Hays, and Quentin Brown in the primary for Orleans Parish Sheriff on November 13, 2021.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Marlin Gusman (D) | 47.7 | 35,903 | |
| ✔ | | Susan Hutson (D) | 35.4 | 26,666 |
| Christopher Williams (D) | 8.8 | 6,651 | ||
 | Janet Hays (No party preference) | 4.3 | 3,230 | |
 | Quentin Brown (Independent) | 3.7 | 2,791 | |
| Total votes: 75,241 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2021
Video for Ballotpedia
| Video submitted to Ballotpedia Released October 17, 2021 |
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Janet Hays completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2021. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Hays' responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
| Collapse all
I am board director and founder of Healing Minds NOLA, acting chair of Mental Illness Policy Org, board treasurer of Hope Street Coalition, and consultant for Assisted Outpatient Treatment Court of New Orleans.
My professional career has been focused on removing policy barriers to reduce incarceration, reduce homelessness, and reduce wasted spending and senseless revolving doors for people living with serious mental illness.
Leadership starts at the top. When leadership is corrupted, the whole system is corrupted. Reform starts with a clear vision, and I have that vision.
My success is tied to her core principles of leadership – principles such as communication and collaboration, transparency that breeds trust, and honesty, integrity and accountability.
I am a fighter for safety, accountability, transparency, reforming our jails, and reducing the rate of reoffense through outcomes-based transitions and solutions.- Accountability 3-fold 1. Hold systems actors accountable: courts and judges, the police, the behavioral Health system, government departments. 2. The Sheriff: The Sheriff must be accountable to the community, not to political parties or agendas. 3. Individuals with justice system involvement: accountability leads to the opportunity to assist with support, services and programs to help them make their lives whole and become better citizens.
- Communication and Collaboration: Communication and Collaboration is the backbone of successful and effective outcomes-based systems. Change begins with collaboration. The Sheriff must be someone independent who people trust and who can bring entities and individuals together to collaborate on common goals despite past differences. We need to accept blame and agree to move forward to repair broken systems and create new people based systems that need to come into being.
- Transparency is Trust: Leadership means letting vulnerabilities show. Transparency breeds trust. We need to reimagine the sheriff's office. Incarceration is a community problem that requires community solutions. The people of New Orleans should be able to trust that the sheriff is not trying to cover up mismanagement with clever PR or denials that problems exist. When leadership is corrupted the whole system breaks down and people are harmed.
Too often families are handcuffed to help their loved ones living with serious mental illnesses. Imagine how it must feel to find out that your family member must commit a felony to access long-term treatment for a chronic disease. Yet this HAPPENS. Every. Single. Day. In America. Here is the horrifying truth... People with no-fault SERIOUS mental illnesses who often need months of treatment are being shoved into acute care revolving doors that only make them sicker and sicker and sicker until they finally meet the legal standard of dangerousness.
Why should families and our communities have to wait until a serious crime is committed in order to thread people through a jail into a forensic hospital…. assuming they’re lucky and don’t end up in prison. Note: there will have to be a victim. But the system doesn’t care about that.
We need to fix mental health laws to allow earlier and longer therapeutic intervention for people with cognitive impairments and chronic addiction that impede their ability to seek treatment on their own.
The position of sheriff is one of the most powerful in the city of New Orleans:
"The sheriff in all parishes is the chief law enforcement officer in the parish and has both criminal and civil jurisdiction. The sheriff is in charge of all criminal investigations and is responsible for executing court orders and process and is the keeper of the public jail in the parish."
I am motivated by the work of Judge Steven Leifman. A visionary who is now a national leader/expert on developing and creating alternatives to incarceration, homelessness and death for people living with chronic mental illnesses and addictions.
• Ability to collaborate
• Integrity, honesty, transparency and accountability to voters
• Ability to take responsibility
• Has empathy/compassion
• Workplace transparency demonstrated through communication, respect, honesty, admitting wrongs and regular feedback.*
- https://www.thehrdigest.com/workplace-transparency-are-you-100-honest-with-your-employees/
• Integrity, honesty, transparency and accountability
• Ability to take responsibility
• I have empathy/compassion
The book is about my Grandfather who mentored me through some of the most difficult times in my life.
There seems to be consensus that people with serious mental illnesses who are too cognitively impaired to care for themselves do not belong in jails. The sheriff can take action to hold the state accountable to provide needed programs, services & facilities to stop the mental illness to prison pipeline.
• Seriously mentally ill people are a vulnerable population who suffer with unpreventable
& incurable, but manageable, neurological diseases.
• Civil commitment laws REQUIRE individuals with such no-fault cognitive impairments
to meet the high bar of dangerousness or grave disability before therapeutic treatment
interventions can be provided. This is cruel policy by the state that has abdicated its
responsibility to provide treatment & care, thus placing people into homelessness or
jails & prisons that cannot refuse to admit them. Yet neither sheriffs nor corrections
officers have the expertise to manage mood, emotional & thought disorders of the brain
nor facility to care for them. Being punished for unintentional bad behavior compounds
trauma adding to already existing challenges.
• After an often grueling process of legal competency restoration requiring trips to &
from the forensic East Louisiana Mental Hospital System, a person may be judged not
guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) at which time they are transferred to state custody for
an indefinite period of time (often years) or, adjudicated guilty & sent to the
• Expertise in conflict resolution
• Ability to adapt to change
• Good communication skills
• Resourceful
• Ability to problem solve
• Critical thinking
• Responsive
• Ability to multitask
• Humble
• Curious
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2021 Elections
External links
|
Candidate Orleans Parish Sheriff |
Personal |
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on October 18, 2021
| |||||||||
