The Situation
Heat
Kansas prisons are dangerously hot in Summer: People have died. This is a Death Sentence!
The "Bad Touch"
Murder
There was at least one homicide per year at Lansing prison in 2022, 2023, and 2024. To put this in perspective, this is a murder rate of 4.16 per 10,000 people. The United States has a murder rate of 0.5 per 10,000 people. This is more than eight times the national murder rate, in a facility where the population is under the total control of law enforcement.
This is not the natural consequence of imprisonment. KDOC has complete and total control over these prisons, every object that enters and every single person inside of it. Furthermore, KDOC regularly takes extreme measures, such as incommunicado detention and solitary confinement, supposedly in the interest of safety for the inmates. Where any certain authority has such complete control over a population, there is no excuse for this.
Murder is not a natural consequence of imprisonment, nor should it be.
Torture
Kansas prisons regularly resort to solitary confinement for the "safety and accommodation" of people with mental disabilities and routinely apply disciplinary sentences to solitary confinement in excess of thirty days.
Hutchinson Correctional Facility, which has a capacity of 1,800 residents, held hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement during the height of the months long overdose crisis and in the most restrictive housing units, prisoners only shower once every three days, and are allotted one phone call a week. It is a common practice to hold mentally ill inmates completely incommunicado for extended periods of time.
Incommunicado detention is considered torture by international standards. In Kansas prisons, incommunicado detention is "mental health treatment" and torture is considered "safety and wellbeing."
The torture extends far beyond prison walls. I have literally seen mothers become so distraught, that they throw their backs out, break out in hives, and disconnect from the world completely, lost in tears for their sons, day and night.
Read more about solitary confinement in Kansas prisons here: liberationlit.org
Read about solitary confinement and mental illness here: Solitary Confinement and Mental Illness in U.S. Prisons: A Challenge for Medical Ethics | Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
A Typhoid Outbreak Waiting to Happen
Predicated on the explosion of drug overdoses inside Hutchinson, Kansas prisons in Spring of 2025, Kansas Department of Corrections officials made supplies for environmental sanitation unavailable to inmates who had spilled blood or encountered vomit, urine, or feces in their cell when relocated. Inmates were given nothing but water to clean their living areas, meanwhile there remains standing water in the kitchen and shower area where some inmates reside twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To top it off the more fortunate residents of these facilities are issued two rolls of toilet paper a week. Yes, they run out.
What does standing water and traces of feces all over the prison mean to you? It means they are lucky these guys aren't catching dysentery, helicobacter, h pylori, or typhoid. Or are they? We know very little about infectious disease rates inside Kansas Prisons, and they want to keep it that way.
KDOC literally took prison sanitation and hygiene backwards by a hundred years, for months on end. This is unacceptable, and should not have persisted for even one day.
There is a solution:
State and local health inspectors should thoroughly and routinely review Kansas Prisons and make their reports available to the public, and state prisons should comply with health code, for the safety and welfare of the people living near them. State prisons must be responsible and accountable to the public they serve, and they can be, and with YOUR advocacy, they WILL be!
