Criminal Justice on the St. Louis Mayoral Ballot

One month after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, shook the nation to its core, St. Louisans awoke on February 6 to another uprising taking place within their own city. Unlike the Capitol insurrection, however, not only was the uprising by inmates at the St. Louis City Justice Center justified, but it was rooted in the oppressive and inhumane treatment of the incarcerated and was the third such uprising at the CJC since December 2020. With the mayoral election looming—the March 2 primary is followed by the general election on April 6—issues of criminal justice are beginning to take center stage.

The CJC sits just a few blocks from the Gateway Arch National Park on Tucker Boulevard. A generally unimpressive, six-story building of concrete and glass, the Justice Center on Saturday, February 6 was unmistakable as the source of palpable tension and discontent. The glass from its shattered windows littered the street below as inmates tossed flaming bedding material and furniture from the fourth floor, shouting and holding up signs with messages such as “Free 57,” a reference to the 57 inmates who other inmates allege have been held in solitary confinement following one of the uprisings in December.

According to activists, the February 6 uprising was an organized protest by inmates demanding an end to the inhumane conditions that they are experiencing in the CJC. Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO) St. Louis member Tracy Stanton explained that inmates want “proper heat, they want proper [personal protective equipment], proper clothing and visits from families, who can visit them from the other side of the glass.” ArchCity Defenders activist Inez Bordeaux said that inmates are not receiving access to COVID-19 testing, personal protective equipment (PPE), adequate cleaning supplies, or nutritional food. Indeed, many of the recent complaints from inmates at the CJC, as well as at St. Louis’s infamous “Workhouse” jail, are related to COVID-19 issues, including the grouping of symptomatic or COVID-positive people with others who were not displaying symptoms. 

The CJC uprisings dovetail with broader discussions about criminal justice in the city and St. Louis’s treatment of inmates at its jails, particularly the Workhouse. The Workhouse has been a target of St. Louis activists for decades due to its long history of maltreatment and abuse of its detainees. In an excellent Jacobin article, Mihir Sharma and Clark Randall detail how the Workhouse “effectively operates as a debtor’s prison: it almost exclusively cages legally innocent residents, i.e., ‘nonviolent offenders’ pre-trial, indeed for an average of 290 days. Their only offense is that they can’t afford cash bail.” In 2009, the Missouri ACLU described “endemic abuse of inmates” at the Workhouse; the U.S. Department of Justice ranked the Workhouse nationally as having the third-highest rate of reports of sexual misconduct by staff. 

Demonstrating the link between the CJC and the Workhouse, Montague Simmons of ArchCity Defenders told Jacobin that “We have heard Jimmy Edwards [the director of public safety] say explicitly that that is his cash cow—he keeps the Workhouse, so he can keep generating funds for the other facility,” the other facility being the CJC.

The upcoming mayoral election, in which current Mayor Lyda Krewson will not be running for reelection, will have significant consequences for criminal justice and jail conditions in St. Louis. While Krewson denies the accusations of inhumane conditions at the city’s jails, city officials are using the recent events at the CJC to argue that the city needs both of its jails to remain open. Krewson effectively blocked a public vote on whether or not to close the Workhouse through a nonbinding referendum, letting the bill sit unsigned until the deadline passed. The referendum was set to appear on the upcoming April 6 ballot before Krewson killed it.

Of the four candidates in the St. Louis mayoral race—St. Louis Treasurer Tishuara Jones, Alderwoman Cara Spencer, Aldermen President Lewis Reed, and utility executive Andrew Jones—all but Andrew Jones have expressed a desire to close the Workhouse. Treasurer Jones told the St. Louis American that “Every day that the Workhouse remains open is a moral failing for our city, and I will close it.” Alderwoman Spencer has voiced support for ending a voluntary contract between St. Louis and the federal government by which the city chooses to hold federal detainees. The city is partially reimbursed by the state and federal governments for housing these detainees, but the effect is that St. Louis is subsidizing the housing of federal detainees at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Spencer believes ending this voluntary contract will allow the city to “swiftly and safely close the Workhouse” by freeing up space in the city’s jails. 

Aldermen President Reed’s position on closing the Workhouse is murkier, on the other hand, since he expresses that he wants to close it but that now may not be the time, considering that jails need to keep capacities under a certain level for social distancing. Although Reed filed a motion to begin the process of closing the Workhouse this past summer as Board Bill 92, local activists were skeptical of his intentions then. Sharma and Randall write:

“After releasing Board Bill 92, Reed told local reports he ‘always supported’ criminal justice reform. ‘First of all,’ [St. Louis organizer Michelle] Higgins told us in response, ‘no he ain’t. We questioned him repeatedly about closing the Workhouse in 2018 when he ran for president of the Board of Aldermen, and we organized the debates. His responses were worthless.’ Indeed, in early 2019, in the run-up to those elections, Reed was the only candidate who refused to sign a pledge proposed by the coalition to definitively close the Workhouse. And even in the days and weeks leading up to his bill, Reed and his staffers publicly opposed such calls to shut it down.”

Reed’s Board Bill 92, as originally introduced, “did not necessarily guarantee the closure of the Workhouse, or respond adequately to the decades-long demands to address structural inequalities by reinvesting in public health, education, and social programs.” Amendments proposed and made by ArchCity Defenders pushed the bill towards their vision of closing the Workhouse, however. 

Some activists believe that Reed’s intention with introducing a bill to close the Workhouse in the first place is a simple game of bait-and-switch, designed to draw attention away from Reed’s efforts to privatize St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch puts it well when he writes that though “All three of the most prominent mayoral candidates have advocated closing the workhouse,” only “two of them appear to really mean it.”

Much is at stake, then, in the upcoming mayoral election. The city must reckon with its long, dark history of racial injustice in dealing with abuses at both the CJC and the Workhouse. Only Tishuara Jones and Cara Spencer appear to truly be interested in closing the Workhouse and radically changing the institutions of criminal justice in the city. In light of this past summer’s uprisings, in addition to February 6, this mayoral election could prove to be one of the most consequential for the city of St. Louis in confronting the institutions and systems that perpetuate racial injustice in the city. 

Aidan Smyth ’23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at a.smyth@wustl.edu.