Blake Strode (’15), Executive Director of ArchCity Defenders, was featured as a guest columnist for The St. Louis American pointing to the reparations ordinance for Chicago police torture as a model approach for addressing harms of St. Louis’ Workhouse jail (“St. Louis Reparations Begin with the Workhouse,” Sep. 26). “[W]e are arguably on the right path with the community process well underway. But that cannot truly happen while our city continues to oppose the years-long effort by survivors to collect the debt that they are owed. . . . [W]e must also fight for acknowledgement, repair, and recompense for those who survived the evils of a jail whose very name long betrayed its moral rot. For decades, the Workhouse was a place where we threw people away. Let us not leave behind those very same people again.”
