By Nicholas J.C. Pistor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — In January 2014, registered sex offender Shawn Akery walked out of the St. Louis Community Release Center, a massive halfway house near downtown, and never returned.
Prosecutors allege Akery quickly wound up in the heart of downtown St. Louis’ business and residential district in the 200 block of North Ninth Street, forced a woman to the ground and attempted to rape her. Downtown’s bicycle police unit later arrested him. Prosecutors have charged Akery with one count of first-degree rape or attempted rape, a count of violating lifetime supervision and a count of tampering with electronic monitoring equipment.
Akery, originally from Union, had pleaded guilty in 2008 to an attempted forcible rape in Franklin County and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
The community release center that brought Akery to downtown St. Louis has been a concern of business leaders and residents who have sought to rejuvenate the region’s gateway in a time of rising crime. They worry downtown has become a dumping ground for the state’s parolees fresh out of prison.
Those concerns are now amplified after business leaders in Kansas City successfully lobbied to transform a sister release center in its downtown into a prison, leaving St. Louis with the state’s lone community release center.
“We continue to have significant concern about this facility and its impact on downtown,” said Missy Kelley, the chief operating officer of Downtown STL Inc. “We have been working on getting the St. Louis facility closed and feel confident that with the closure in Kansas City, our efforts to close the facility in the downtown neighborhood will be successful.”
But state officials say they have no plans to close the St. Louis facility, which is located near the new Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge and just a few steps from the proposed NFL stadium.
Police Chief Sam Dotson said police have been called to the supervised facility 31 times so far this year for a variety of complaints, from assaults to disturbances to someone being cut.
“It’s worth taking a look at the impact on downtown,” Dotson said.
The state’s two release centers had been designed to reintroduce Missouri’s high-risk parolees who have no home base to society. The St. Louis facility, at 1621 North First Street, gets people released from state prison in the eastern half of the state, and Kansas City received those on the western side. Offenders assigned to the facilities, which opened in 1978, live there while they take “personal responsibility” in finding employment and obtaining any necessary drug abuse treatment.
Many of the residents are free to leave during the day and often wind up in the areas near the facilities, giving them a closer relationship to the surrounding community than a common prison. They are required to return in the evening.
The state also operates seven smaller and differently defined “supervision centers” in St. Joseph, Farmington, Hannibal, Kennett, Poplar Bluff, Fulton and Kansas City.
In September, Kansas City’s top business leaders wrote to Gov. Jay Nixon complaining about the facility there, which housed about 410 offenders.
“As you know, out of the 115 counties in the state of Missouri, the Department of Corrections has chosen two counties — Jackson and St. Louis — to receive 100 percent of the unhoused, recently released individuals from the ... penitentiary system,” they wrote. “Regardless of where the former inmates are from — rural, suburban or urban communities — the department has chosen these two counties as the transit point of re-entry for all of these former inmates.”
The business leaders argued that residents of downtown Kansas City and St. Louis had been seriously harmed by former inmates assigned to the facilities. And they said placing a large number of parolees with a high recidivism rate all at one place threatened $6 billion of capital investments made in downtown Kansas City.
George Lombardi, the state’s corrections director, responded in February by saying the Kansas City release center will be converted “from a release center under the auspices of the Division of Probation and Parole to a minimum security institution under the purview of the Division of Adult Institutions.”
The change means the Kansas City facility will have more security and will mostly house prisoners who are about to be released but not yet on parole.
The department has been vague about where the current or future probationers and parolees at the Kansas City facility will go, saying only they will be “transitioned into the community using other alternatives and resources,” causing some to wonder if they’ll wind up in St. Louis.
David Owen, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, refused to speak on the telephone about the matter and also refused to make Lombardi available for an interview.
Mary Ellen Ponder, the chief of staff to St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, said Lombardi has promised the parolees won’t end up at St. Louis’ facility, which is at its 550-person capacity.
“Even if they intended to send us more, they couldn’t because there’s not the capacity for them,” Ponder said.
Still, Ponder said the city is concerned about the facility in St. Louis remaining open and the city bearing the burden for eastern Missouri’s recent parolees who have few if any ties to St. Louis.
“We are concerned at least of the perception of crime coming from the facility,” Ponder said.