Darrick Smith spent the summer of 2006 in the St. Louis City’s Medium Security Institution, known as the “Workhouse,” after being falsely imprisoned for a crime he did not commit due to a mistaken identity.
In those long months, he witnessed several incidents that the correction officers organized, said Smith at a protest held in front of City Hall today.
“In the Workhouse, I saw guards organize gladiator-style fights between inmates,” Smith said. “The inmates that were fighting were denied food, then forced to fight each other as a spectator sport in exchange for commissary items like food.”
Aside from the fights, many of the inmates became ill after staph infections broke out in the living quarters.
“The medical treatment in the facility was terrible,” Smith said. “Oftentimes inmates were denied medical treatment even after fights where people were jumped by other prisoners.”
Today, about 20 people from the activist group Decarcerate STL gathered in front of City Hall to demand that Mayor Lyda Krewson close the Workhouse.
“By campaigning and billing herself with the ‘law and order’ rhetoric that she used to get herself into the mayor’s office, Mayor Krewson is being complicit with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ agenda – criminalizing blackness and poverty,” said Kennard Williams, an organizer with Decarcerate STL. “That is what this is about.”
In response to the protest, Krewson told the St. Louis American that “closing the Workhouse right now is not viable. There are many folks there awaiting resolution on many serious charges.”
However, she said she is committed to reforms that would reduce the time spent at the Workhouse and to reducing the jail’s population.
“We are also committed to pursuing alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders and minor charges,” Krewson said. “A low-level drug arrest should not follow someone for the rest of their life.”
Krewson’s biggest rival in the March mayoral primary, City Treasurer Tishaura Jones, gained much support for her call to close the workhouse during her campaign.
“Unlike operations in state and federal correctional facilities, there are no laws governing mandated reporting of conditions at the Workhouse, which is run by the City of St. Louis Division of Corrections,” Jones stated in an opinion column in the American.
However, she said the investigations led by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocates have laid out a “damning list of abuses,” including sexual harassment, medical neglect, extended or mistaken incarceration, and negligence resulting in death.
The Workhouse costs taxpayers about $16 million a year, Jones said, and the city currently spends $254 million a year repeatedly arresting the same people, trying them, and incarcerating them.
“If we can reduce the number of people cycling through the system, we will save a lot of that money,” Jones stated. “I believe that dangerous people should be in jail. But I do not believe that we should be spending money to brutalize young, sick or innocent people and make them a permanent part of our problem.”
Jones also demanded that the Workhouse be thoroughly investigated and addressed by the Circuit Attorney’s Office and the entire criminal justice system.
St. Louis University law professor Brendan Roediger spoke at today’s protest and said that many of those held inside the Workhouse, which is located on Hall Street, are homeless individuals and the city’s “most vulnerable.”
“The last time we were here, the response of the city was to say, ‘It isn’t supposed to be the Four Seasons,’” Roediger said. “We hope the new administration takes this more seriously. This is five decades of Hall Street destroying the lives of our brothers, our sisters, our mothers, our fathers, our children and our grandchildren.”
