This is Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative.

I'm Ashley C. Ford.

Everyone's heard the stories, but I thought they were exaggerations.

Like, you think there's no way in the world that that's happening.

It's really inefficient government.

We need to stop using the court system as a virtual ATM.

I usually am the one that's like, no, we should run up on the mayor right now.

You know what I'm saying? Like, we should run up on her right now.

Right? Oh, hey! saying, like, we should run up on her right now.

In our final episode of our series from St. Louis and the Workhouse, How to Close a Jail.

Let's get into it. I got elected kind of out of the Ferguson protest movement.

I didn't know a lot about our pretrial detention system until the Ferguson uprising.

Megan Green is the president of the St. Louis Board of Alderman, which is basically St. Louis's City Council.

You know, I looked at it and was like, this is pretty much a debtor's prison, and those are supposed to be illegal, and we're still operating them today.

And so it's sort of like once you know, you can't unknow, and once you know you have a responsibility to do something about it.

She was at the very first meeting for the closed the workhouse campaign in 2018.

Getting behind that community effort was a no-brainer for the older woman.

But that wasn't the story for the rest of her colleagues.

I think that there's still a lot of connotation

or misunderstanding that folks that were in the workhouse were violent offenders and folks that

had already been convicted of crimes. And so there was a lot of education that needed to happen

about what pretrial detention was exactly the types of crimes that folks

...