Close the Workhouse
In 2018, Action St. Louis, in partnership with ArchCity Defenders and the Bail Project STL, launched the Close the Workhouse campaign. The Close the Workhouse campaign aims to attack mass incarceration, without legitimizing or justifying the continued caging of people as punishment. The campaign calls for a closure of the Medium Security Institute, better known in St. Louis as the Workhouse, an end to wealth-based pretrial detention, and the reinvestment of the money used to cage poor and Black people into rebuilding the most impacted neighborhoods in this region.
The Close the Workhouse Campaign emerges directly from the outcry that was the Ferguson Uprising. It is grounded in a commitment to end an ongoing war against Black people that has been waged against generations of families in St. Louis. Our aim is not to reform but rather dismantle a racist system that has destroyed lives and to abolish the practice of criminalizing the poor.
The Workhouse is part and parcel of a racist and predatory system of incarceration, which grew directly out of slavery and Jim Crow, that seeks to profit off the caging of Black and poor people. The city perpetuates this shameful legacy by unconstitutionally caging people in the Workhouse who are unable to afford bail and profiting off their incarceration. The campaign’s three primary organizational partners work collaboratively with folks on the inside as well as with lawyers and activists to free people from this unjust system.
And our organizing has led to tangible wins:
In 2020, the Board of Aldermen unanimously passed an ordinance to close the Workhouse, reinvest the 8 million dollars into the Division of Supportive Re-entry, and allocate resources to the Reimagining Public Safety Fund that would be governed through a participatory budgeting process. Read the legislation here.
In 2021, we continued to push to defund the Workhouse. The new city budget has defunded the workhouse and the public has been promised that the workhouse will close by the end of summer 2020.
While this latest win is a huge campaign victory, the work is not finished. We not only seek to close the workhouse but also to use the money currently spent to cage Black people to rebuild the most impacted communities. We embrace this task in order to vindicate the victims of the Workhouse and to secure the funding future generations need to survive and thrive.
Please join us in this fight to permanently limit the City of St. Louis’s ability to cage poor and Black people in this region. Help us share the report and plan throughout impacted communities in St. Louis. With your support, we can and must win this fight.