The empty jail will remain open as contingency plan
The final 50 detainees on Thursday morning were transferred from the Workhouse to the City Justice Center, marking a major milestone in St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones’ plan to close the controversial jail within the first 100 days of her administration.
“Today the final group of detainees at [the Workhouse] were moved out of the complex into CJC. This is a major accomplishment, and we are pleased with our current progress.” Interim Public Safety Director Dan Isom
This transfer, according to Dan Isom, the city’s interim public safety director, brings the capacity at the CJC to approximately 95%, but also combines both facilities’ employees, ending severe staffing shortages at CJC.
“Today the final group of detainees at [the Workhouse] were moved out of the complex into CJC. This is a major accomplishment, and we are pleased with our current progress,” Isom said. “Despite the case backlog due to COVID-19 and other major factors, the city is working hard to meet its goals — repairs and upgrades at the CJC are going well.”
He said the city does not currently have a timeline as to when the Workhouse will be completely shut down. Isom did confirm the city has no plans at this time to use the property for enrichment programs and did not detail what will happen to the closed facility.
The CJC cell door and lock repairs, Isom noted, will be completed in two units at a time because they will be decommissioned during the work. Two units are home to 132 cells altogether and there are four units on each floor.
The repairs began at the beginning of March on the fourth floor, the location of the first public uprising in February in which inmates broke out of their cells and broke the exterior windows in February. Officials said this happened because the cell locks did not, in fact, lock.
A similar uprising occurred Easter Sunday on the third floor.
Prior to these, two other protests occurred just before and on New Year’s Day. Each time, the inmates refused to return to their cells in protest of inadequate protections against COVID-19 for those being held there.
City officials approved a $1.5 million budget transfer Feb. 17 to repair the broken locks at the CJC.
Officials in former Mayor Lyda Krewson’s administration estimated the work would take three months.
Once those lock repairs and a “complete overhaul of the entire system” are completed, Isom said the Workhouse will be rendered obsolete and officially shuttered.
Jones campaigned on the promise to close the Workhouse by the end of July, which will mark her first 100 days as mayor.
Her team is working with Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s office and other criminal justice partners to expedite the backlog of pending criminal cases created by the coronavirus pandemic — which exacerbated the overpopulation of both jails.
Almost all the detainees housed at CJC are awaiting trial — meaning they have only been charged, not convicted, of a crime. There were 569 people in custody there on Thursday, according to the city’s website.
“Well, as you might imagine this is an ongoing process,” Isom said. “… As you can see now the population has been greatly reduced and we are at a point in which we can manage the number of detainees in our CJC facility, but that will be an ongoing process as we work with our partners to keep those numbers low.”
Another issue regarding the out-of-state transfer of federal inmates sparked an hour-long argument Wednesday afternoon between Aldermanic President Lewis Reed on one side and Jones and Comptroller Darlene Green on the other during the city’s Board of Estimate and Apportionment meeting.
Isom noted that the federal detainees were transferred to reduce the CJC’s population to be able to close the Workhouse. He also confirmed that the city was “working on ways in which we can ensure that they are connected to their families.”
Without those federal inmates, the city will not receive $5.7 million in federal funding— which created a deficit in the proposed $1.15 billion budget after it was sent to the Board of Aldermen.
“We had no idea that we had been sent an unbalanced budget,” Reed said during Wednesday’s meeting.
Jones and Green asked Reed to return the bill to the Board of Estimate and Apportionment so that they could deal with the deficit — Reed refused, wanting those changes to the budget to be made through a supplemental appropriations bill that does not face the same passage deadline (July 1) as the proposed budget.
The aldermanic president on Wednesday said he planned to let the budget go into effect by failing to act on it in time.
“We’re in the process of looking at monies that will satisfy that budgetary shortfall,” Isom said Thursday. “That could come from reduced-cost meals, it could come from reduced-cost medical costs, but there will also be other budgetary adjustments we will have to make to absorb those costs.”
Reed released a statement Thursday afternoon regarding the transfer of the final Workhouse detainees.
“This abrupt move to move all detainees from MSI into CJC does nothing to positively impact public safety or the lives of the citizens of the city of St. Louis,” he wrote. “The Board of Aldermen passed a law stipulating a responsible plan to close MSI. Today’s move by the mayor’s office falls short of a responsible plan.”
