On the morning of Keon Clark's 34th day in jail, he rode a bus packed with other inmates, past scrap yards and factories along the Mississippi River, to another jail in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. When the bus arrived, a sheriff escorted the detainees to a bare holding cell. Most of the people in the cell, including 18-year-old Keon, were charged with misdemeanors—criminal offenses carrying sentences of less than a year in jail. Few in the room had a lawyer.
Across the street, at the 22nd Circuit Court of the State of Missouri, presiding Judge Calea Stovall-Reid swiveled her chair toward a monitor perched on a lectern behind her bench. She switched it on, and the back wall of Keon's crowded holding cell appeared on the screen. The detainees took turns on a two-way video call with Stovall-Reid from across the street—a practice intended to speed up the legal process for less severe crimes—as she read to each inmate their charge, bond, and next court date. Some were making their first court appearance after spending a couple days in jail, even though they had never stepped foot in a courtroom. Others had been held for weeks, even months, with neither enough cash to cover bond nor an attorney to request a reduction.
[For more of this story, written by Steven Hsieh, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...ts-a-public-defender]
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