The City Justice Center’s latest commissioner, Nate Hayward, still believes in the rehabilitative power of correctional facilities. Hayward, 60, just entered his seventh month leading the infamous city jail, which has seen all kinds of issues from allegations of poor heating in the dead of winter to a number of inmate deaths (22 in the facility since 2020, KSDK reports—including one in January on Hayward’s watch).
Hayward came to the CJC less than a month after leaving the other local CJC: the St. Louis County Justice Center. He says he could immediately tell he’d inherited an institution in deep disarray.
“I told the Mayor’s Office [on] my first tour of here I went home and I couldn’t go to sleep because I’d seen all the things that needed to be done,” he says. “I just stayed up ‘til two in the morning and typed up a four-page assessment report.”…