Radical Lawyering Support in St. Louis - Legal Innovators' Fellowship RADTALK
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 escape its walls.
At the Workhouse, over 98% of people are held pretrial. They are caged for an average of 291 days because they are too poor to buy their own freedom. People are jailed in incredibly inhumane conditions - caged with rats, snakes, and sewage in their cells, mold on the walls and excruciating temperatures. The Workhouse reflects a political commitment to an arrest and incarcerate approach with over 50% or the budget spent on police and jails and less than 1% on social services.
People inside the jail and those impacted by the Workhouse have clear demands for the movement and know the solutions. People demand the Workhouse’s immediate closure, and that no new jail be built to replace it. They demand a commitment to decarceration and decriminalization and a re-investment of that public money into community-designed local programs.
But a movement that at its root is about dismantling oppressive systems and redesigning a new just vision for St. Louis requires radical innovative approaches to win. As a fellow and a lawyer with ArchCity Defenders, I have the opportunity and duty to work with organizers and our members to co-create the strategies that will win our movement’s demands.
Our legal support is and must be grounded in the joint commitment to defending our community leaders so they may continue to resist and designing legal interventions that build the power of resisting communities. In St. Louis, we are designing participatory defense models that get and keep our members out of jail. We are working together with members and organizers to investigate the local systems incarcerating targeted communities and have armed the movement with a bold new plan that lays out the steps to win the campaign’s demands and immediately Close the Workhouse. And hand in hand with protest, we are using the flawed but real pressure of civil rights lawsuits to force the city to interrogate and account for the inhumane conditions at the jail and the unconstitutional pretrial mechanisms that keep people in jail.
We know that the story of the Workhouse illustrates St. Louis’ oppressive history rooted in legacies of slavery, Jim crow, and legalized segregation. We know that the dismantling of this system will not be won through legal approaches alone. However, system transformation requires legal support committed to innovative radical approaches and designed to shift power as we try to do everyday.
And so, I end with two important asks. First, raise up the urgent fight called for by those in the Workhouse’s cages. Support Close the Workhouse and share our plan and vision for a new St. Louis. And second, interrogate your own roles as lawyers and supporters of legal work and support local movements led by impacted communities. Ultimately, we have no choice but to think radically and outside traditional legal approaches if we truly want to liberate our communities and transform our world into one we all can and want to live in. Thank you.
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 escape its walls.
At the Workhouse, over 98% of people are held pretrial. They are caged for an average of 291 days because they are too poor to buy their own freedom. People are jailed in incredibly inhumane conditions - caged with rats, snakes, and sewage in their cells, mold on the walls and excruciating temperatures. The Workhouse reflects a political commitment to an arrest and incarcerate approach with over 50% or the budget spent on police and jails and less than 1% on social services.
People inside the jail and those impacted by the Workhouse have clear demands for the movement and know the solutions. People demand the Workhouse’s immediate closure, and that no new jail be built to replace it. They demand a commitment to decarceration and decriminalization and a re-investment of that public money into community-designed local programs.
But a movement that at its root is about dismantling oppressive systems and redesigning a new just vision for St. Louis requires radical innovative approaches to win. As a fellow and a lawyer with ArchCity Defenders, I have the opportunity and duty to work with organizers and our members to co-create the strategies that will win our movement’s demands.
Our legal support is and must be grounded in the joint commitment to defending our community leaders so they may continue to resist and designing legal interventions that build the power of resisting communities. In St. Louis, we are designing participatory defense models that get and keep our members out of jail. We are working together with members and organizers to investigate the local systems incarcerating targeted communities and have armed the movement with a bold new plan that lays out the steps to win the campaign’s demands and immediately Close the Workhouse. And hand in hand with protest, we are using the flawed but real pressure of civil rights lawsuits to force the city to interrogate and account for the inhumane conditions at the jail and the unconstitutional pretrial mechanisms that keep people in jail.
We know that the story of the Workhouse illustrates St. Louis’ oppressive history rooted in legacies of slavery, Jim crow, and legalized segregation. We know that the dismantling of this system will not be won through legal approaches alone. However, system transformation requires legal support committed to innovative radical approaches and designed to shift power as we try to do everyday.
And so, I end with two important asks. First, raise up the urgent fight called for by those in the Workhouse’s cages. Support Close the Workhouse and share our plan and vision for a new St. Louis. And second, interrogate your own roles as lawyers and supporters of legal work and support local movements led by impacted communities. Ultimately, we have no choice but to think radically and outside traditional legal approaches if we truly want to liberate our communities and transform our world into one we all can and want to live in. Thank you.
Comments
Post a Comment