Pickleball Courts or Prison Beds? Caddo Parish's Priorities

You're listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for August 18, 2026.We open on the overcrowding crisis at Caddo Correctional Center, where more than 1,700 inmates are packed into a facility originally designed for 1,050 and now sits roughly 60% over capacity, well past the fire marshal's 1,500-person limit. We press on Sheriff Henry Whitehorn's silence on the issue and question why the Caddo Parish Commission hasn't prioritized jail expansion over projects like a proposed $60 million sports complex and a $10 million pickleball facility.We run through our Top 3 stories you need to know: Orleans Parish Chief Judge Juana Lombard's disqualification from reelection over unfiled 2023 state income taxes, Amazon's additional $6 billion investment in its Shreveport-Caddo data center footprint on top of its earlier $12 billion commitment, and a construction delay on the new DeSoto Parish Sheriff's detention facility after its general contractor filed for bankruptcy.We then bring on Caddo Parish Commissioner Chris Crackman, who confirms the sheriff has never formally requested funding from the commission to expand jail space and argues that money earmarked for recreational projects would be better spent adding beds to the correctional center and juvenile justice facility.From there we turn to the disparity between Dr. Fauci's unconditional pardon and his former senior advisor David Morens, who at 78 pled guilty to conspiracy charges tied to evading Freedom of Information Act requests during the COVID era, the same conduct we argue Fauci himself engaged in.We play a Say What clip of Senator Rick Scott arguing that Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have already capitulated to the Democratic Socialists of America on issues like open borders, court packing, and policing, and we walk through each of those policy areas ourselves.We discuss the Trump administration's plan to deploy roughly 1,000 DOJ election monitors for the November 2026 midterms, historic in scale but consistent with monitoring practices under past administrations of both parties, alongside recent reporting on foreign hacking attempts targeting U.S. elections.We play a guessing game around the Washington Post's ranking of the best college football towns in America, working our way through Fargo, Boulder, Austin, and more.We close by talking Rosie O'Donnell's guest-hosting stint on Jimmy Kimmel Live, her jokes about Trump, and what it says that he still occupies so much space in her head years after she left for Ireland and came back.Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776.