Trauma-informed care offers a paradigm shift in how we treat people who have suffered from trauma. Instead of asking, “What is wrong with you?” trauma-informed care suggests we ask, “What has happened to you?”
Currently our policies punish asylum-seekers for attempting to seek a better life for their family, escaping violence and poverty. What would our country look like if we replaced our punitive approach to immigration with a trauma-informed care approach? Also, how could St. Louis contrast our policies against those of Trump?
Under Trump’s presidency we read reports of massive traumas inflicted upon unauthorized immigrants in the name of the United States. Families arriving to the border seeking asylum are often turned away by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), coerced to enter illegally. When they do so, they are detained. Initially, they are held in the Icebox – a sealed truck that blasts air conditioning. This is known as hypothermic torture.
Hypothermic torture was used widely in the War on Terror after other forms of torture were stopped. At Quantico, hypothermic torture was also used against Chelsea Manning, the political prisoner who released thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Now, families seeking refuge in the United States are treated as prisoners of war or political prisoners.
In St. Louis, detainees have suffered a similar fate. People being held at the Medium Security Institution – better known as the Workhouse – were held without air conditioning. They faced temperatures as high as 125 degrees during last year’s summer. They were heard yelling in pain, begging for bearable living conditions. Mayor Lyda Krewson ignored their pleas until protests formed outside of the Workhouse demanding air conditioning.
Even when detention centers are appropriately climate controlled, they are neither cost-effective nor humane. Missouri prisons have a 60 percent recidivism rate. People leaving jail have been removed from society for years. They will have a harder time finding a job and are no longer eligible for subsidized housing. At the Workhouse, the average stay is 236 days, and the average bail is $20,000-25,000. Those numbers equate to 80 percent of a calendar year and 80 percent of the average annual salary in Missouri. The average detainee held here will forgo almost a year’s worth of two principle resources, although 90 percent of the detainees there haven’t been convicted of a crime.
Incarceration is particularly cruel when used to punish people fleeing violence in their country of origin. Incarcerating people based on their race is a civil rights violation, yet there are eight times as many black detainees than whites held at the Workhouse – paralleling the racist policy we see taking place on the Southern border.
After the Icebox, children are stripped from their parents. Parents are told that the children need to be questioned or bathed, leaving the parents to count the seconds until they realize their children aren’t returning. Upon separation, the children are relocated into other warehouses serving as detention centers, places such as former Wal-Mart buildings with windows and entrances sealed. In these warehouses, it is reported they aren’t allowed to touch or hug siblings or cousins, and are given foil blankets with which to sleep. These detention centers have refused to allow cameras in, and initially denied entrance to U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon).
Similarly, Workhouse operations have remained obscured in secrecy. On August 4, 2017 Alderwoman Megan Ellyia Green snuck journalists and activists into the Workhouse under the guise of graduate social work students. These journalists were following up on reports of mold, rats, roaches, and broken toilets in the Workhouse. Accusations of living conditions in immigration detention and the Workhouse beg the question: What is happening to those behind these closed doors?
Research shows that trauma experienced by children before the age of 18, such as incarceration or separation from one’s parents, will change their brain development and alter their lives, setting them on a trajectory where they are more likely to become homeless, further victimized, incarcerated, and have medical, mental health, and substance use conditions.
Not only does each childhood trauma change one’s life, but each additional trauma has an escalating impact. Those with more than six types of trauma can expect to die as much as 20 years earlier than their untraumatized peers. Having a parent removed from the house for incarceration is considered a specific type of childhood trauma.
Protective factors, such as the presence of a supportive parent, can help people deal with stress. When children are traumatized and removed from their parents, the impact is compounded. A petition penned by Dr. Dana Sinopoli and Dr. Stephen Soldz states, “To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma.” The petition has been signed by over 13,000 mental health professionals.
Rather than address the causes of poverty or crime underlying illegal immigration, our border policies do the opposite – forcing more violence upon immigrants, punishing them for the trauma they’ve faced. In the same manner, the Workhouse punishes people for their poverty by jailing them if they are unable to pay costly bail.
How can largely Democratic cities differentiate themselves from Trump and the Republicans? In deep blue St. Louis, where “resist” is ubiquitous, we must insure our policies don’t separate people from their families, rely on mass incarceration, and further traumatize vulnerable communities. We should enact a bold position of resistance and declare incarceration for what it is – an inhumane practice that disproportionately separates people of color from their families, resources, and future opportunities. By allowing the Workhouse to exist, we are complicit in a particularly cruel form of bigoted detention.
A city lead by trauma-informed governance would insure that those with the greatest needs receive the most support, not the worst punishment. Trauma-informed policies work to recognize, respond to, and prevent trauma, and they can keep families together. This approach can benefit society by empowering individuals to maximize their potential. It is time to utilize these evidence based practices to prevent social problems instead of responding to them. The group www.CloseTheWorkhouse.org is working to build resilient communities where people are less likely to experience homelessness, incarceration, disabling medical conditions, and drug and alcohol problems.
As people across the country organize to build resistance against Trump, we need people across St. Louis to organize against local policies that inflict the same harm. While people fight nationally to end family separation and indefinite detention of immigrant families, people locally must fight to close the Workhouse. Rather than funding policies that only respond to crime, we need policies that prevent crime.
As the mishandling of the immigration crisis is a problem created by Trump, so are the disparate impacts of the Workhouse, a problem created by St. Louis leadership. Both of these examples are symptoms of a systemic problem, which must be overturned. As stated by Inez Bordeaux, organizer for Close the Workhouse, “The very existence of the Workhouse shows me that this city is willing to throw people away.”
