The Bail Project’s St. Louis city office is closed after almost four years of providing free bail assistance and pretrial support for more than 3,000 low-income people. The organization also worked on the effort to close the Workhouse (the city’s Medium Security Institution) with local activists.
The Bail Project will remain active in St. Louis County and St. Charles County.
Organization officials said of the people they assisted in St. Louis, 86% of them returned to their court dates, and nearly 50% of them had their cases dismissed. In addition, the city jail population decreased from an average daily population of 1,304 to 710 people from 2018 to 2021.
“From day one, our goal has been to put ourselves out of business,” Robin Steinberg, CEO of The Bail Project, wrote in a statement. “Sometimes, we get there through legislative reforms, sometimes through court decisions or changes in prosecutorial practice, and sometimes, we exit because there has been significant progress and a new organization is ready to take up the baton and dig deeper. Here, I’m proud to say it’s because of the vision and leadership of our very own Mike Milton, who will now lead his own organization and continue this work.”
“We thank The Bail Project for drawing attention to this practice and giving people tools to fight for their freedom. But this work is far from over. The system continues to hold people at alarming rates without bail.” —Arch City Defenders
Milton is the Freedom Community Center founder and CEO, a newly formed organization that “seeks to interrupt violence by disrupting harm inflicted by the criminal legal system and harm that happens within communities.” The initiative received funding through an inaugural grant from The Bail Project.
In April, Milton told the St. Louis American that he created a pre-charge program to encourage accountability and community to foster transformation in offenders, something he asserts jail time cannot do.
The Freedom Community Center hopes to serve 50 survivors of interpersonal violence by the end of the year. The program is 15 months long and was developed based on models proven in other cities, such as Common Justice in New York, an incarceration-alternative program running for over a decade.
“When we began, our priority was to help as many people as possible who were trapped by the bail system,” Milton wrote in a statement about The Bail Project’s office closure. “In the process, we saw firsthand how the current approach undermines due process and reinforces racial disparities, but also how it fails to meet the needs of victims. I’m taking these lessons as we build the Freedom Community Center, our vision for how communities can address harm and violence without relying on the carceral system.”
The Bail Project, a national organization, came to St. Louis in 2019 when a federal court judge ruled that every detained person has to have a bail hearing in a reasonable length of time. Activists argued this ruling confirmed what they suspected — hundreds of people were being held sometimes for months without a proper bail hearing.
After this ruling, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled judges must consider a person’s income and ability to pay when determining bail. Following this, most people accused of crimes in St. Louis were jailed with no bond at all.
“We thank The Bail Project for drawing attention to this practice and giving people tools to fight for their freedom,” ArchCity Defenders wrote in a statement. “But this work is far from over. The system continues to hold people at alarming rates without bail.”
The advocacy organization said in the coming weeks, the Close the Workhouse campaign will explain what the courts, Mayor Tishaura Jones and Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner can do to close the Workhouse, end pretrial detention and reinvest the money used to jail poor people and Black people into rebuilding the most impacted neighborhoods in this region.
For more information on the Freedom Community Center, visit www.freedomstl.org.
