This morning I had a frantic call from the mother of one of my clients who is presently detained without bond and in the City with a pending, very serious felony. She said, “They are trying to send my baby to the workhouse, and the mayor already said on the news that the living conditions there are horrific . . . please don’t let them send him there. Please!”
I explained to her what precipitated the transfer.
However, I could not explain to her the rationale of the City or alleviate her fears. If the Medium Security Institution, the workhouse, is a hell hole as Mayor Jones has repeatedly said it is — with such deplorable living conditions that it needs to be closed, then why is her administration moving persons back to that facility? Does the fact that the Justice Center has its own problems suddenly make the living conditions at the workhouse better?
Well, now it seems that the City is suggesting that the workhouse isn’t so bad after all. “City officials draw a distinction between the front portion of the facility built in 1966 and the units built in the 1990s. Detainees are now being housed in the newer part of the workhouse, which previously underwent renovations.”
But if that were the case, what was the need to close the entire workhouse? Why not only close those portions that weren’t renovated? And why haven’t we heard that distinction before from Mayor Jones? As one of my favorite assistant public defenders from the past, Talat Bashir, used to ask witnesses, “Were you lying then, or are you lying now?”
What is clear, I think, is that the mayor is not really concerned about the lives of these confined persons. This is the same Mayor Jones that had all the federal detainees removed from the workhouse and Justice Center to make room for the City detainees (even though the feds asked to continue to use the workhouse as a federal detention center), resulting in many federal detainees being transferred to faraway places like Indiana or Kentucky.
As a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial pointed out, the workhouse issue is really not about making the lives of persons who are confined better — it is about being able to claim “political victory.”
The sad reality is that mayor’s political victory has not made the lives of the confined any better. It has made their lives worse. The measure of a policy isn’t in its intention but in its results.
Returning to my phone call with my client’s mother, as I spoke to her, for some reason all I could think about was this sketch: