St. Louis Mayor Touts 'Transformed' Workhouse, But Jail's Critics Call BS

What exactly is a "prison vibe"? Whatever it is, the members of a grand jury said they didn't feel it during a recent tour of the notorious St. Louis Workhouse, a jail facility which has been repeatedly sued and subject to accusations of hellish conditions for an inmate population composed almost entirely of people awaiting trial for non-violent offenses.

In a tweet earlier this week, St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson highlighted the "interesting" findings related to the facility officially known as Medium Security Institution, or MSI.

"Take a look at what the jurors had to say after going on tours of the two [St. Louis City] correctional facilities," the mayor tweeted Monday evening, in which she embedded passages from a report's description of the Workhouse as "professionally run," "lean" and "transformed."

Link to tweet

The written account of the grand jury's tour acknowledged that the facility had been subject to "years of bad press due to poor conditions," but then it went on to claim that the jail's "current reality" was nothing like that.

Read more: https://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2019/11/22/st-louis-mayor-touts-transformed-workhouse-but-jails-critics-call-bs