The SWAT team’s arrival at the St. Louis city jail on the morning of Tuesday, August 22, put a quick end to the hostage situation that had broken out during breakfast service. Around 6 a.m. a 73-year-old guard let two detainees out of their fourth-floor cells to help him distribute food. The detainees instead rushed the corrections officer, shoving him into a shower, shackling his legs and hands and stealing his mace.
A slew of police and fire vehicles quickly took over Tucker Boulevard, the wide thoroughfare between the jail, officially named the City Justice Center, and City Hall, blocking it off to traffic. Both Police Chief Robert Tracy and Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson arrived on the scene, and the fire department perched a hose on a truck, creating a makeshift street shower in case any law enforcement officers were maced.
A little before 8:30 a.m., the SWAT team entered the fourth floor of the jail, firing rubber bullets and using other “less than lethal” force on the hostage-takers. It took them about three minutes to free the guard who had been held for more than two hours. He was taken to the hospital, where he was treated for a busted lip and concussed head.
With the guard's safety ensured, the police and fire crews gradually began to disperse. The fire department’s decontamination station was shut off after only being used to cool down reporters and rubberneckers. The combustible situation seemed to have been defused.
But in the days since, the hostage situation has shone a spotlight on the chaotic inner workings of the City Justice Center and the increasingly tenuous position that Mayor Tishaura Jones’ appointee, Corrections Commissioner Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah, occupies as its head. It's also thrown into stark relief the increasingly complicated position Jones finds herself in relative to jail reform.
To long-time watchers of the city jail, the events that Tuesday morning may have been surprising in their particulars but were otherwise a long time coming.
“Am I surprised it happened? I’m surprised it took this long,” says Everett Washington, who is serving a nine-year sentence for robbery at the state prison in Bonne Terre. He was locked up at the city jail for two years, until this past July, and says he spent much of that time in a dank, smelly cell that consistently flooded and never fully dried.
This summer, the civilian board tasked with overseeing jail operations called the City Justice Center a "powder keg." And throughout June and July, the poor hygiene of detainees coming over from the jail was increasingly hard to ignore. Attorneys say their clients inside the jail complained of going without showers, toothbrushes and in some cases even regular access to food. Last month, attorneys representing four current and former jail detainees in a class-action lawsuit made public numerous videos showing guards’ heavy-handed use of mace on inmates, in some cases administered seemingly without provocation. The attorneys say they cataloged at least 250 such incidents, some as recent as last December.
The revelations fueled tension between Clemons-Abdullah and the jail's civilian oversight board, who in June began calling on Mayor Jones to fire the corrections head she'd appointed less than two years prior.
Amid the fallout from the hostage situation, the oversight board has redoubled its calls for Clemons-Abdullah's ousting, and everyone from the NAACP to the editorial pages of the Post-Dispatch have criticized jail operations.
Last week, the vice-chair of the oversight board was forcibly removed from the jail. Janis Mensah refused to leave the justice center Thursday night after the jail's administration would not hand over any information about a detainee who died there earlier that day.
That death was the second detainee in as many weeks.
"The mayor's not doing anything. The blood is on her hands," oversight board member Mike Milton told the RFT.
Amid the escalating turmoil, Mayor Jones tells the RFT she's sticking by her appointee.
Jones' office says in a statement, "Mayor Jones has confidence in Commissioner Clemons-Abdullah, who has overseen major projects and construction at the CJC, including fixing broken locks and upgrades across the facility. In this role, the commissioner has improved food service and expanded educational programming."
Mayor Jones came into office in April 2021 during a particularly fraught time at the City Justice Center. That month, detainees staged their second riot of the year, breaking out windows on the building's third floor and throwing burning trash to the ground below as a gaggle of reporters and assembled law enforcement looked on.
Their riot surfaced reports about the horrific conditions within, including the capricious use of mace and, absurdly for a jail, doors that didn't lock. Video that became public about a year later showed that between the two public uprisings, a corrections officer opened one detainee’s cell door so that two much larger inmates could beat him within an inch of his life. The casual way they carried out the attack suggested this sort of violence was not all that uncommon.
Corrections reform had been a key plank in Jones’ campaign for mayor, and she notched some early successes in that area early in her tenure. The month after she took office, then-Corrections Commissioner Dale Glass resigned. He had drawn ire from activists after blaming them for emboldening the detainees to riot. Jones called his leadership a failure.
As a candidate for mayor, Jones had aligned herself with the "Close the Workhouse" campaign, promising to shut down the city's other jail, the Medium Security Institution, commonly known as the Workhouse, within 100 days of taking office. The facility's closure had long been the goal of activists in the city, and though it took Jones longer than promised to make it happen, the last detainees left the north city facility for the downtown jail in May 2022.
Jones' other key reform initiative was the creation of the Detention Facility Oversight Board, a group that includes jail reformers, faith leaders and former public health officials. Saying they would be empowered to hold the administration of the city corrections to account, Jones signed the new board into law in December 2021.
However, in the years since, the board has yet to provideany actual oversight. It remains mired in disagreements with City Hall over how board members should be trained — and the city insists board members can’t examine the jail or investigate inmate deaths (there have been at least eight since the start of last year) until its training is complete.
"We hear second- and third-hand that things are bad and deteriorating in the jail," oversight board secretary Pamela Walker told the RFT about two weeks prior to the hostage situation. "But we can't investigate it because they say we haven't fulfilled our training requirements, which is ludicrous."
Walker has more than 40 years working in government, including as the city's acting health director and running Missouri's Center for Emergency Response and Terrorism. She said about her frustrations with jail administration and City Hall, "Sometimes it feels like obstruction is on purpose. Sometimes it feels like it's accidental. And sometimes it feels like it's just gross incompetence."
City ordinance stipulates that incoming Division of Civilian Oversight board members complete an orientation. The statute delineates more than a dozen topics that must be covered in that orientation, some of them specific, like Missouri’s Sunshine Law, others much more broad, like Constitutional law and the "history of the relationships between people of color and the economically poor and the police and correctional officers."
Nick Desideri with the mayor’s office says that the training required of board members is in line with the training recommendations made by the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement.
But multiple members of the oversight board say they feel the training requirements are more about creating obstacles to prevent them from entering the facility than anything else.
Matthew Brummund, a former FBI agent who until May was in charge of the city’s Division of Civilian Oversight, told the RFT earlier this year that the primary obstructionist to the board’soversight work was City Attorney Sheena Hamilton, who, according to Brummund, has indicated that tasking civilians to uncover problems at the jail would be tantamount to providing a "road map" for outside entities to sue the city over the jail, already a not-uncommon occurrence.
The board has been vocal in calling for Jones to fire Clemons-Abdullah, citing what they say is a lack of transparency, the deteriorating jail conditions and her lack of a plan to remedy either.
Prior to the oversight board's initial call for Clemons-Abdullah's ousting, which came in June, Walker sent a text message to Jones' advisor Richard Callow as a "heads up" to the mayor about the board's forthcoming demand.
"It should not matter who the Commissioner is or who the City Counselor (she needs to go too) is for us to meet our mandate. City staff need to get on board or go home," shetexted.
Callow responded: "Unclear why the board members won't go to training."
"Seriously!?" Walker replied. "Sorry I tried to give Tishaura a heads up through you. Won't bother you again."
Callow posted a screenshot of the back-and-forth to the group chat with Jones and her father, Virvus, and it wound up part of the exchange released inadvertently as part of a Sunshine request.
Virvus Jones was the only one to respond. "They are taking themselves way too serious," he wrote of the oversight board.
"It's just weird," Walker says today. "You passed an ordinance. You signed it. You appointed us. You did background checks on all of us, you vetted us. And now you don't want us to do anything. Well, we're not going to be window dressing. We're not that kind of people. You put the wrong people on here if that's what you wanted."
Even as the oversight board that Jones created is proving to be a liability on her left flank, the other chief accomplishment of her jail reform agenda, closing the Workhouse, is now providing fodder for critics to her right.
The mayor’s political opponents have pointed to the hostage situation and ongoing chaos at the City Justice Center as evidence that, as an August 26 Post-Dispatch editorial phrased it, she closed the Workhouse with “too little forethought about overcrowding it would cause elsewhere.”
Frequent Jones critic Jane Dueker, a Democrat who is closely allied with the police union, tweeted two days after the hostage situation that "closing the Workhouse is a direct cause of the sub-human conditions at CJC." She referred to the closing of the jail as a "political slogan policy."
Jones' office is unequivocal in the Workhouse's closure being a success, telling the RFT that "Mayor Jones ran on a promise to close the Workhouse. The Workhouse is closed, and we are currently engaging the community in a reenvisioning process on how best to use this space to address an existing City need in forward-thinking ways."
Even sans the Workhouse, the city jail system shouldn’t have any capacity issues. On paper, it’s supposed to be able to hold more than 800 inmates. Monte Chambers with the Department of Public Safety tells the RFT simply, "There is no overcrowding."
However, one year ago this month, KSDK reported that the jail was turning away defendants that police were trying to turn over to jail custody, saying that the facility was full. According to city jail data, at that point, on September 1, 2022, 562 people were locked up in the jail. As of last week, the headcount in the jail stood at 670.
Chambers says that the conditions that caused those issues last September were temporary, adding that maintenance, repairs, and renovations can have short-term effects on capacity by taking specific areas offline. But overall, he says, "upgrades at the jail have created more space."
Some have said that the capacity issues stem not from physical space but from the jail being understaffed.
Sheriff Vernon Betts, whose deputies are responsible for transporting detainees from the jail to court, tells the RFT that he's heard from detainees that all the doors still don't lock and that there isn't enough staff to guard all the floors of the jail — suggesting that while the building may have higher capacity, that’s not the case as it’s currently staffed or maintained.
Of staffing levels at the jail, Chambers says, "We cannot comment on staffing numbers due to security concerns and recent events. CJC was adequately staffed during last week’s critical incident."
The assertion that there are no capacity issues at the facility does seem to be at odds with jail administrators’ decision in the wake of the hostage situation to use temporary transfer areas as ad-hoc housing. "They brought them over to my side," says Betts, whose department controls several holding pen cells that act as transfer points for detainees coming to and from court.
Betts says that the detainees broke the windows out in those transfer pods. "They were banging on the doors, banging on the glass, kicking on the doors," Betts says, adding that he heard from some of the detainees that they hadn't eaten in two days.
"We had almost had a repeat of the riot the next day," Betts says.
In the wake of the hostage situation, conditions at the jail deteriorated further, at least temporarily. Criminal defense attorneys described in the days following the standoff the jail losing track of their clients, not feeding them or allowing them to meet with legal representation. One attorney, Bob Taaffe, says that attorneys with his firm had to wait two hours to meet with a client. When they did, the man came into the interview room wearing only his underwear.
When Clemons-Abdullah took the top corrections job in August 2021, she had most recently been the assistant warden of a federal prison in Arkansas. She told the RFT shortly after stepping into the new role here that the biggest difference between her old and new jobs was money. "Because the federal government is what it is," she said. "You know, we always had money."
In its announcement of her hiring, the Department of Public Safety said that Clemons-Abdullah had worked at nine institutions and had earned "46 specialized certificates of leadership training within corrections."
"They tout how qualified she is, but when I looked at her qualifications, when she worked for the federal prison in Arkansas, she didn't run the prison, she ran programs, which is quite different," says Walker.
In addition to funding, one of the biggest differences between federal prison and city jail is the nature of the inmate population. Jails are transient places with people arriving and leaving at unexpected and irregular intervals, unlike federal prisons, where many inmates are serving long sentences, with their intake and outtake typically happening with advanced notice.
Walker says her other major critique of Clemons-Abdullah is "she appears to be frightened." Walker cites as evidence the fact that the commissioner recently wore a bulletproof vest as she spoke to the media from her office via Zoom, and that detainees say the corrections commissioner is rarely on the floors where they’re actually housed. "That is really a formula for disaster," Walker says.
When Clemons-Abdullah spoke with the RFT in 2021, she said that she dropped in on the jailhouse floor, sometimes at night, conducting "pop up" visits. "I go from cell to cell sometimes," she says.
But Washington, the man now in state prison who spent two years at the justice center, says that Clemons-Abdullah never once stopped by his cell. He says he only spoke to her once; when he was working in the jail kitchen, she came by, and he went up to her. "Did she meet with inmates?" Washington says. "No."
The relationship between the Division of Corrections and the Sheriff's Department has also been frosty in the past two years, according to Betts. He tells the RFT that he and Clemons-Abdullah had a contentious working relationship from the start.
"Somebody has told that lady that Vernon Betts wants to take over the jail," Betts says. "She's got this wild hair up her butt that I want to run the jail."
Betts says when he was a candidate for sheriff he did talk about consolidating the sheriff's deputies with corrections officers and city marshals, but he dropped the idea when he came into office and realized how impractical it would be.
"She's had it in for me since she's been here," Betts says.
Betts says that the animosity between him and Clemons-Abdullah hasn't abated in the past two years.
"Tuesday, we have the riot. I shout to my guys, 'Get your stuff together. Get the gear,'" says Betts. He says that Clemons-Abdullah instructed his deputies to line up on 11th Street and "stand by."
It's notable that Betts describes August 22 as a riot. Public Safety Director Charles Coyle referred to it as "a critical incident" at a press conference, the same phrase used by Chambers, the spokesman for the department.
Six men were ultimately charged with kidnapping, assault and damage to jail property in connection to the incident.
The two detainees accused of instigating are Eric J. Williams, 20, who is in jail on murder charges, and Anthony D. Newberry, 29, who also faces murder charges.
The 73-year-old corrections officer was speaking to Newberry in the pod when Williams allegedly struck the guard on his head. The detainees dragged the guard into a shower stall where they cuffed his hands and legs. Newberry then allegedly started unlocking cell doors, both in the pod where the guard was taken hostage and in an adjoining pod. Newberry and another detainee, Richard C. Bolden III, 30, who was being held on charges of attempted rape, allegedly used extension cords to lasso televisions bolted to the ceiling and pulled them to the ground.
"The inmates disassembled the televisions and located broom and mop handles to create a variety of weapons," the police probable cause statement says.
The detainees moved the guard to a table near the entrance to the pod, where one of the hostage-takers held a makeshift weapon to the guard's throat and said, according to police, "I'll cut your throat if they come in here."
According to court filings, "dozens" of inmates were out of their cells for the two and a half hours the guard was held hostage.
To some, this might sound a lot like a riot, and one guard recently told KSDK it in fact was. Yet the previous corrections commissioner resigned five weeks after the last riot, which may explain why public safety officials are now not only avoiding the word but are being generally tight-lipped about the incident.
Adolphus M. Pruitt, II, president of the St. Louis City NAACP, last week blasted jail administration for a lack of transparency, saying, "The public deserves a more detailed 'briefing' of efforts being undertaken to address the lack of CJC effective oversight and the adverse conditions in the City Justice Center."
Later, on September 1, President of the Board of Aldermen Megan Green called the recent deaths at the jail appalling and issued a statement calling for "an immediate change in leadership at the City Justice Center and greater oversight of our correctional facilities."
In her only public comments about the hostage-taking, the ones made while wearing the bulletproof vest, Clemons-Abdullah demurred from several questions, including ones about staffing levels, what the detainees were doing prior to the incident and what sort of weaponry was used to respond to it.
Clemons-Abdullah said she couldn't offer any specifics in reply. She cited “security issues."
Subscribe to Riverfront Times newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
