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Schriro is one of the country’s foremost experts on jail administration. She did two stints in St. Louis, running the long-derided Medium Security Institution known as the workhouse, and also ran state correctional departments in Missouri, Arizona and Connecticut. She’s been an adviser to the Department of Homeland Security.

We spoke during last year’s debate to close the workhouse, which Jones aims to accomplish as mayor, having zeroed out its budget for the next fiscal year.

When Schriro and I talked about protecting the safety of detainees and the officers who supervise them, she identified a simple word as a key to successful efforts: dignity.

There are some in our society who don’t believe in treating people who are locked up and accused of crimes with much dignity. I hear from such people every time I write about closing the workhouse, or other issues involving people in jail or prison. When people involved in running the system — former public safety director Jimmie Edwards comes to mind — are the ones diminishing the dignity of people in their care, it’s not difficult to imagine how such treatment leads to the sort of angst that fuels jail uprisings like the ones recently at the city’s downtown jail, the City Justice Center.

Most of the people in the city’s two jails have not been convicted of the charges that landed them there. Many of them have languished in jail for months without even the barest of legal opportunities to address the charges, by having a preliminary hearing. Some of them are accused of violent, heinous crimes. But they’re still brothers and sisters, uncles, sons and daughters, people who, except in the narrowest of circumstances, will be expected to return to our community some day.

If you want a safe jail, treat the people inside with dignity, Schriro told me.

To me, that was the greatest value in the visit by Jones and Bush to the city’s two jails. Imagine being a detainee in one of those jails, where visits with family were cut off during the coronavirus pandemic, where court dates seem like a mirage in the distant future. Imagine that in the first few days of her tenure in office, the mayor comes to see you. There’s the mayor and the congresswoman, and they look like you — of the people jailed in St. Louis are Black — and they are asking you questions about your living conditions.

Here’s what Jones told reporters after her visit to the city’s two jails:

“People deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” she said, before referencing her father, Virvus, who spent time in federal prison. “As the daughter of someone who was incarcerated, this is personal for me. This is someone’s father, someone’s mother, brother … grandfather.”

One visit isn’t going to end violence at the City Justice Center. Jones still has to figure out how to quickly fix the broken locks, and how to reduce the overall population so that closing the workhouse doesn’t create overcrowding in the downtown jail. Long term, she must build on efforts from the last several years to reduce jail populations in the city as a whole.

Those are serious challenges that have existed in some way or another since back when Schriro was in charge of the workhouse in the early 2000s. ������Ƶ won’t be solved overnight.

But that first step, the simple introduction of dignity to the process of how the city treats the people in its care, is a big one. It’s an element of the that too many of its critics have missed as an underlying strategy to improve public safety in St. Louis. For decades, the workhouse has been a symbol of oppression to Black people in the city. Closing it gives them a victory that provides some level of dignity to a criminal justice system that often lacks it.

It’s a first step to a safer St. Louis.

Tony Messenger • 314-340-8518 @tonymess on Twitter tmessenger@post-dispatch.com