Our government deceived us.
We were both handpicked by city leaders to join a civilian jail oversight board after chaos ensued at St. Louis’ jail.
Chaos is too vague. Let’s be clear. Hell has broken loose. People are dying in cells right across from St. Louis City Hall. City leaders respond with negligence, indifference and requests for more funding to fuel the same futile system.
As members of the civilian jail board, we had authority and jurisdiction to uncover jail data, records, tour the jail and assess complaints from detainees and staff as well as assess proof of compliance with jail suicide and death policies.
Yet since we were appointed in March 2022, we were blocked from shattering any glass ceiling in advancing humane treatment for detainees at the jail. But you can’t ignore their cries. Otherwise, detainees at the jail will continue to break the glass windows.
That’s what happens when guards unethically overuse Mace, shut off water, lock detainees in cells for 23 hours a day, withhold medicine and food and other atrocities that detainees or their families reveal to us.
These punishment systems were built on racial violence and white supremacy, not public safety. Additional funding will not change that.
Our fellow advocates even recently witnessed judges throw people in jail because they were homeless, detoxing or in need of a doctor. Money certainly won’t fix a system that leaves a 32-year-old man to die alone in his cell from lack of insulin or water, obstructing any attempt at oversight and accountability.
His name was Carlton Bernard.
So yes, we accepted a call in 2022 to change the jail’s culture, help empty the jails and rectify this fatal carceral system.
One of us is the founder and executive director of Freedom Community Center. At FCC, we model what alternatives for safety and accountability could look like, intervene in situations of violence, hold restorative justice circles to repair serious harm and build power alongside the families of those who died in the city’s custody.
The other is an abolitionist organizer working with youth in St. Louis.
We are both fully committed to these causes.
But for simply seeking information on the jail, we, as outspoken board members of the St. Louis Detention Facilities Oversight Board, were obstructed, villainized, physically dragged and shoved out of the jail by city government and jail officials.
Initially, we both believed in the dream because we knew now the law was in our favor.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones authorized unprecedented democratic power by signing Ordinance 71430 and placing the board under a new independent civilian oversight agency within her first two years. But over the last 18 months, only excuses were produced. It became clear to us that the city wanted to embrace the concept of transparency in speeches — but never through policy or action.
So in December we left the board.
The City “Justice” Center remains unfit for human beings. It’s no wonder the jail is one of the deadliest in America, with a per capita mortality rate six times the national average.
Mayor Jones’ Detention Facilities Oversight Board and entire new Division of Civilian Oversight was a smokescreen that even the former commissioner saw through. Matt Brummund, a former FBI agent dedicated to civil rights, publicly denounced the city administration’s obstruction in his own resignation letter.
St. Louis Blues hockey games were the sources of our cancellations as people died. City leaders responded to the deaths by stubbornly focusing on our training and paperwork. Aldermen substituted legislation which imposed more bureaucratic red tape.
We felt useless in a crisis.
A number of directors, commissioners, and bureau heads regurgitated the same useless talking points as to why the board couldn’t function properly.
But the names we are concerned about are: DeJuan Cole, Javon White, Carlton Bernard, Terrance Smith, Robert Lee Miller, Augustus Collie, Denelle Johnson, Donald Henry and Courtney McNeal.
These were beloved members of our community, and all of them died in St. Louis jails in the past two years. Their families demanded answers that never came. Today, they sit in the darkness of the unknown.
The carelessness doesn’t stop there.
Over the past two years, monthly reports published by the City of St. Louis show the number of deaths, suicides and hospital visits have been unrecorded or falsely misreported. We both shudder to think of all the things we don’t know.
The city ended last year concealing daily jail counts, a statistic that has been posted for years. It’s a practice that continues in 2024.
Our concerns of overcrowding were not nullified when St. Louis Public Safety Director Charles Coyle admitted days into the New Year that the city erroneously accounted for 300 extra people in the jail. We were even more outraged. Our city’s health director, Dr. Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis, confessed at a recent public meeting that the city’s backlog of jail medical requests was a complete mess.
Maybe had someone attended to Carlton Bernard’s medical needs, he might still be here with us. Or able to stand trial for his accusations as the law permits. Carlton Bernard was diabetic and left to perish in his cell without water or insulin.
The medical examiner listed his cause of death as natural.
Denial after delay after silence hurled from the city’s administration in wake of two deaths, weeks apart at the jail. Our ineffectuality as civilian jail oversight board members was morally reprehensible in the face of so much death and devastation.
One of us went to the jail lobby, across from St. Louis City Hall seeking answers. City government and jail officials responded by handcuffing, shoving and dragging me out of the jail unconscious.
Everything was necessary. The obstruction, dysfunction and lack of transparency at the jail does not merely inconvenience those who promised to hold the city accountable.
It kills people behind bars.
We remain committed to abolition and the transformative change necessary to improve public safety and keep our detained neighbors alive. People continue to suffer and die under the watch of St. Louis officials, so our fight for their lives continues.
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