Louisiana law makes arrest and custody records public, but finding them is rarely simple. The state’s 64 parishes each run their own Sheriff’s office booking systems and Clerk of Court case files, and those sit entirely separate from the statewide portals maintained by the corrections agency and the state police. A record that exists in one system may not appear in another at all. This site maps every layer of that structure and routes you to the official source that holds what you actually need.
What you can look up here
An arrest record — sometimes called a booking record — is created the moment a person is processed into a parish jail. It shows the charges listed at booking, the arresting agency, and the date. Those records live with the Sheriff of the parish where the arrest happened, and this site’s county pages link directly to each Sheriff’s public roster or booking log.
Active warrants are a separate matter. A warrant is a court order, not a booking, so it lives in the Clerk of Court’s system rather than the jail roster. The warrant pages here explain how to check whether one has been issued and what steps to take if you find one — including why acting through an attorney is almost always the safer path.
Inmate and jail lookups tell you whether someone is currently held in a parish facility. For people serving sentences in a state prison rather than a local jail, the route is different. The county-by-county index below leads to a dedicated page for each of Louisiana’s 64 parishes, and each page covers all three record types for that jurisdiction.
Where Louisiana records actually live
Parish-level records split across two offices. The Sheriff controls the jail and produces the booking log — that is the first place to check for a recent arrest. The Clerk of Court maintains the case file once charges are formally filed, and that file is where you find arraignment dates, plea entries, and dispositions. Those two offices are independent of each other, and neither automatically updates the other in real time.
At the statewide level, three institutions matter. Court case records across Louisiana’s district courts are searchable through the Parish Clerk of Court case search system, though not every parish has migrated to a shared portal — some still require a direct visit to that parish’s own Clerk website. For anyone held in a state correctional facility rather than a local jail, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections maintains an inmate locator that covers the state prison system. The Louisiana State Police holds criminal history records and sex offender registry data at the statewide level, and access to full criminal history is governed by separate rules from the public booking logs parishes publish on their own.
No single portal ties all of this together. That gap is exactly why a guide organized by parish is useful.
Before you search
Most search tools ask for a first name, a last name, and ideally a date of birth. A common name without a date of birth will return multiple results, and sorting through them is your responsibility — the databases do not flag which record belongs to whom.
A parish search covers only that parish. If you are not certain where an arrest occurred, you may need to check more than one county’s system.
An arrest record is not a conviction. Charges filed at booking are allegations. A case may be dismissed, reduced, or result in an acquittal, and the booking record does not automatically update to reflect that outcome. Always check the Clerk of Court’s case file for the current status of a charge.
Systems update on their own schedules. A very recent booking may not appear yet. Sealing and expungement are real processes under Louisiana law, and when a court orders a record sealed, it should eventually disappear from public-facing systems — though timing varies. The individual records pages on this site explain those processes in more detail.
How we keep this current
Every source linked from this site is an official government URL. We date each verification so you can see when a page was last confirmed accurate. When an agency moves a portal, renames a database, or takes a lookup tool offline, we update the affected pages and correct the links.
Public records infrastructure changes more often than most people expect. Treating this as ongoing work rather than a finished product is the only honest approach. If you find a broken link, a wrong address, or an outdated description, the Report an Error link at the top of this page reaches us directly, and confirmed corrections are applied quickly.
This site is an informational guide. It is not legal advice and is not a law firm. It is not a government agency or court and has no affiliation with any. It cannot access private data, and it cannot remove, seal, or alter any official record.