Last year, officials in St. Louis demolished the city’s medium-security jail, known as “The Workhouse.” The closure followed a multi-year campaign to shutter the facility, long known for hazardous conditions including rats, roaches, mold and extreme heat.
On Nov. 6, “Hell on Hall Street,” a documentary from HLK creative directors Troy Jones and Ben Pfeiffer, premieres at the St. Louis International Film Festival. The film chronicles the joint efforts of community organizations Action St. Louis, ArchCity Defenders and Freedom Community Center to convince city officials to empty and ultimately knock down the jail.
As in many cities across the country, St. Louis officials have struggled to improve conditions in the local jails, which are primarily designed to hold people awaiting trial for short periods of time. Lengthy pretrial wait times have meant some people sit for months or even years in these conditions — in certain cases, only to be found not guilty and released after major disruption to their lives and livelihoods.
The demolition of The Workhouse hasn’t fixed dangerous conditions for pretrial detainees in St. Louis. The city’s remaining jail, the St. Louis Justice Center, has been called a “potential powder keg” due to overcrowding, poor hygiene, and lack of medical and mental healthcare. Twenty-two people have died there since 2020.
But advocates say the campaign to shut down The Workhouse demonstrates that it’s possible for community members to get together and push to meaningfully improve conditions for the city’s most vulnerable.
The Marshall Project sat down with Inez Bordeaux, deputy director of partnerships and organizing at ArchCity Defenders, to discuss what the film reveals about pretrial detention in America, and how local communities have organized to improve those conditions. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Marshall Project: In your own words, what is “Hell on Hall Street”?
Inez Bordeaux: “Hell on Hall Street” is the story of how we closed a hellhole jail here in St. Louis. It’s a story that is hopeful and ambitious and more than anything, motivational. For me, the whole point of the story is: How do we inspire other people in other cities to close the hellhole jail that is impacting their communities?
You spent time at this particular jail, called The Workhouse. Could you describe what the conditions were like and what you experienced in your time there?
If you are Black in St. Louis, you’ve heard of The Workhouse. You either have been there yourself or you know someone who has been there.
So I, of course, had heard the stories about The Workhouse, about the inhumane conditions, the rats, the roaches, the snakes, the flooding, the way that people are treated. I had heard those stories, but I didn’t necessarily believe them because I could not wrap my brain around the idea that in the 21st century, in the richest country in the world, in a major metropolitan city, we were holding people in these types of conditions.
But then I got there in March of 2016 and I saw firsthand that every single thing I had heard about The Workhouse was absolutely true. It was infested with rats and roaches. It did have snakes. The toilets didn’t flush, and the showers didn’t work, and it did flood all of the time, and there was water pouring from the ceilings, and the correctional officers there did treat people like something they would scrape off the bottom of their shoe.
So when I go out and I tell the story of The Workhouse, and I talk about experiences people had there, I’m not telling you what I heard. I’m telling you what I know, what I saw, what I experienced for myself.
The vast majority of people in jail are awaiting trial, so they have yet to be found innocent or guilty. For a lot of people, the idea that you could just be waiting for an outcome — in conditions like these — is really hard to wrap their heads around. How long did you spend there and what was the impact on you over time?
Fortunately for me — and it’s weird to say fortunately — I was only in The Workhouse for 30 days. But that 30 days meant my four children were without their mother for a month. They did not have the support and care they needed while I was being incarcerated. It meant I couldn’t go to work, which meant I couldn’t pay my bills, which put me at risk of eviction. It put me at risk of my utilities getting turned off. It put my whole livelihood and my life at risk.
But many people I organized with — people I’m friends with who spent time in The Workhouse — were there for a year, 18 months, waiting for their cases to be adjudicated. And you’re right, the vast majority of people inside The Workhouse had not been convicted of anything. They were simply there because they were too poor to be able to pay the ransom that the state was holding them for, which was a bail or a bond.
The Bail Project St. Louis was able to determine that among their clients being housed both in The Workhouse and St. Louis City Justice Center, which is our other jail here in St. Louis, 50% of they cases were dropped. That meant some people had spent months and months, sometimes years inside of jails, only for their case to be dropped. And then what happens? They don’t have a job to go back to. They don’t have a home to go back to. Where’s the car? Where are their children? It has a major impact on people.
There’s this myth about who goes to jail, and also this idea of who “belongs” in jail. Oftentimes there’s an association between jail and acts of moral wrongdoing, that somebody has done something wrong to end up in this place. How do you respond to people who take that position?
If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say, “Well, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” I would be a very, very, very wealthy woman. But when we talk specifically about The Workhouse, people are there for what we call “crimes of poverty.” People are out here choosing between two bad choices. They are doing what they have to do in order to survive.
A lot of the women that I was in The Workhouse with were there because they had stolen diapers or formula or committed some other small crime in order to take care of themselves, feed their children, pay their rent. So when we talk about who “deserves” to be in jail, none of those women deserve to be in jail.
And the fact of the matter is, it is cheaper and easier to help people with what they need. I ended up in The Workhouse because I stole unemployment benefits from the state after fleeing a domestic violence situation. I could not get help paying for childcare, which was $1,600 a month. I could not afford that.
I didn’t just jump right to committing a crime. I went to the state. I asked for help, but I was turned down time and time and time again because I made $52 too much to qualify for childcare benefits. It would have been more morally right, cheaper, and easier if the state had just assisted me with my childcare. And my case is not an anomaly.
This is happening every day, not just in St. Louis, but everywhere. And the vast majority of people who are being held in jail pretrial are dealing with those same things.
What do you hope people take away from this documentary, especially people learning about The Workhouse for the first time?
A couple of things. I hope people are inspired that, guess what? We can do hard things. The things they tell you are impossible — that you can’t do, that there’s no chance — you can absolutely do it.
Elected officials laughed in my face when I told them that we were starting a campaign to close this jail. So I hope people know that you can change your community for the better if you get together, go get your people, and you organize.
I hope it's instructional. We tell you step by step in the story exactly what we did to get to a place of not just defunding a jail, but demolishing a jail. That jail no longer exists, and we did it in three and a half years. And if you don’t think that’s a big deal, name someone else who’s done it. Name another city that has closed a jail and not opened another one.
And lastly, I really hope that the film gives people who have never experienced jail some insight into the real toll it has on people. And when we’re talking about the toll, that means the toll it has on their families. It means the toll on a neighborhood, and that impact branches out to a community, to a whole city.
So I hope people can get a real understanding that the people inside of jails are real. They are real people with real problems, who need real help. And we can do something about it.