This is the year.

Some may know St. Louis for the militarized police that rolled down Ferguson’s neighborhood streets - violently demonstrating the state’s willingness to use repressive tools against its own citizens. For those of us working in St. Louis’s legal institutions, we know how the violent policing is reflective of a broader legal design that keep poor and black communities criminalized, physically segregated, and under-resourced. But St. Louis also holds an important place for many of us as a critical site of resistance as we saw and were a part of the Ferguson uprising that called out the guilt of the entire system. Today in St. Louis - a new movement is building from inside and outside of the cages of the Workhouse. Created in the 1800s as a debtors’ prison, the Workhouse jail remains at the heart of the brutal criminalization system in St. Louis. To call the jail hellish, inhumane, and discriminatory only attempts to capture the urgency with which people are willing to do anything to escap