Over the weekend, there was an inmate uprising at the dystopically named City Justice Center in downtown St. Louis. Detainees threw chairs out the window, set fires and held signs with slogans such as “what about Anthony Smith” and “free 57” up to the broken windows. This was the third such protest by people held in the Justice Center in the past month, though the first in which any major jail property was damaged.
Public safety director Jimmie Edwards took this as an opportunity to instill fear. In his statement Feb. 6th, he said not once, not twice, but three times that, these are “very violent” men.
Rather than investigating what the conditions were that prompted this protest, he dehumanized those in the jail in his language. “These were just very angry, defiant, very violent people,” he said, saying nothing about the spread of the coronavirus in the jail, which prompted the uprising in the first place.
If we look at this in context, though, we are forced to reckon with the fact that the real villain here isn’t the prisoner who broke some glass or threw some chairs out the window. It’s the criminal justice system that is still holding not one but two jails open unnecessarily — each with deeply inhumane conditions inside. This was the third uprising at the Justice Center this month, the first two less visible to those of us on the outside.
But as those clearly didn’t work to improve conditions, inmates chose a tactic they knew we’d be forced to listen to.
When the City of St. Louis chooses to maintain a jail environment in which people are not being kept safe from a deadly pandemic, they throw any pretense of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ out the window and serve every single person inside with a potential death sentence.
We know from city officials that there was a December surge in COVID-19 cases in St. Louis correctional facilities, and that at least 85 people in St. Louis’ two jails have tested positive since the beginning of the pandemic.
The City of St. Louis, in its failure to cultivate bare-minimum health and safety conditions in the jails, is in effect sentencing every single individual inside to the punishment of potential infection.
Mayor Lyda Krewson’s announcement this week that the city would be establishing a task force to examine jail conditions was long overdue, though certainly a step in the right direction.
It did not, however, go far enough. The task force will only examine the City Justice Center and not the Medium Security Institution, known more commonly as the Workhouse.
After this protest, as with the two that preceded it, dozens of people were moved from the Justice Center to the Workhouse. If the two jails are, as it seems, being used to house people more or less interchangeably, it is a useless gesture to investigate conditions inside one without even taking a peek inside the other.
In striving toward an ethical future for the St. Louis criminal justice system, listening to Edwards’ scare tactics about the supposed innately violent nature of the men inside won’t take us far.
Far better to listen to those who have been speaking up for the rights of incarcerated people all along, who have been warning us for months that conditions in the jails were unsustainable.