The term “workhouse” sounds like something that belongs in the mouth of Ebeneezer Scrooge (presumably to be followed by a remark about reducing the excess population); it’s certainly not something you would expect to exist in 21st century America. And yet the infamous St. Louis penal institution known as the Workhouse, which was used primarily to house people awaiting trial who could not afford bail (and thus had not been convicted of anything), remained in operation through the first half of 2021 and was only demolished in 2025.
Troy Jones and Ben Pfeiffer’s short film “Hell on Hall Street: The Story of the St. Louis Workhouse” (46 min.) is a hard-hitting issues documentary that will fill you in on the history of the Workhouse and the campaign to close it while also introducing broader issues that raise the question of why an institution like the Workhouse should have ever existed. These issues include the relationship between poverty and crime, the costs of our current way of policing and delivering justice, and why many people believe there are better alternatives to our current carceral system. It’s composed primarily of interviews, both with people who have been incarcerated in the Workhouse (some of whose stories are simply heart-rending) and those who were part of the movement to close it, along with some archival materials.
In case you’re wondering, the Workhouse began life in 1843 as the British kind of workhouse, a labor camp where people who couldn’t pay their debts, or were simply poor, spent their days doing physical labor (in this particular case crushing big pieces of limestone into small pieces). If that sounds like hell on earth, it’s a tradition that continued after the limestone was long gone: people held at the Workhouse report being subjected to, among other things, infestations of rats and roaches,1 20° temperatures, physical and sexual abuse, and correction officers arranging gladiator-style fights among inmates. Even if you think our prison system is necessary, there’s no way to justify those kinds of abuses, not least because cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It’s also worth remember than no one at the Workhouse was charged with a violent crime, so releasing them to await trial would not have posed a danger to the community.
“Hell on Hall Street” is not a “both sides” documentary, which may annoy audience members who have a set of rules in their mind about what constitutes documentary filmmaking. In this case I think the filmmakers made a reasonable choice because there’s really only one side worth considering: you don’t have to be a prison abolitionist to appreciate that something was very wrong about the Workhouse and, more generally, that punishing people for being poor is not a good organizing principle for a just society. For all the abuses documented in “Hell on Hall Street,” however, it’s not a downbeat documentary: instead, the message is that ordinary people can organize and work together to change things for the better. | Sarah Boslaugh
“Hell on Hall Street” will be shown at 7 pm on Nov. 6 in the Brown Hall Auditorium on Washington University’s Danforth campus as part of the 35th annual St. Louis International Film Festival. Tickets are free but it’s advisable to reserve them online because often all the tickets to free screenings are claimed in advance. Information about tickets and the full festival schedule is available from the Festival web site.
