Rachel McClurg
Lantern Staff
In the past six months, Larned Mental Hospital, Lansing Correctional Facility and Hutchinson Correctional Facility have began to move their inmates to El Dorado Correctional Facility. Despite being understaffed and overpopulated, the prison has received up to 500 new prisoners and mental health patients in such a short amount of time.
“The plan for Lansing and Hutchinson was to send their max custodies to El Dorado Correctional Facility, but it was put in place too fast and tried to make it happen too fast in my opinion, Unit Team Supervisor, Jarred Watson said. “Larned Mental Health Unit will move to El Dorado Correctional Facility as a mental health unit closer to mental health services in Wichita.”
Despite the danger of moving the inmates and mental health patients into one prison, there are future plans for the Larned patients in particular.
“Larned will refocus on youthful offenders with programming to try and break the cycle of them coming back to prison,” Watson said.
The increase in inmates and mental health patients has already proven itself dangerous. Several critical incidents have occurred in the short span of time.
“There’s been at least a dozen stabbings,” Nurse Thomas Plush said. “Over half of those injured have been sent to a hospital or critical care.”
There was also a riot that occurred on Friday, June 29, where there were several inmates that refused to lock down. Many news articles said there was no violence; however, that was not the case.
“There was violence, there was fights, lots and lots of damage,” Plush said. “Ceiling damage, phone damage, a window was spray painted, offices were trashed and they were climbing through the ceiling at one point.”
The overpopulation has already affected several factors that are important in maintaining a safe and peaceful prison.
“Increased fights, increased medications, decrease in staffing and limited space, so they are double bunking beds, and they usually don’t get along,” Plush said.
A lot of the prison staff have been personally affected as well. The inmate to staff ratio is unbalanced, which causes more work for the staff.
“My work load went from having to deal with 1,400 prisoners to having to deal with 1,900 prisoners,” Plush said.
The change of environment and for some even a change in rules are just some of the factors in what is causing the violence and uprisings that have been occurring at El Dorado Correctional Facility in the past six months.
“They’ve taken maximum security offenders from Lansing and Hutch and moved them to one location,” Plush said. “At those places, their rules are more relaxed and El Dorado runs a very tight ship. You can get into trouble for the smallest thing, so when you try to implement those strict rules on guys that have very little to lose it creates conflict.”
Because of the overpopulation and the current amount of officers on staff, the Kansas government has decided to give only the officers a pay raise, which hasn’t been done in at least a couple of years.
“It’s just the officers, uniformed staff,” Plush said. “Nobody else, not medical, not behavioral health, not management or unit team.”
The staff believe that the main reason for the pay raise is because of the shortage of uniformed staff in the prison.
“That is the largest decrease in staff, even though the state denies that the reason all of this started is because they are down 80 to 90 positions,” Plush said.
Many members of the staff have expressed that they think that the pay raise is unfair especially with the addition of inmates, though they understand the circumstances involved in receiving a raise from the government.
“I think in whole, all Department of Corrections employees are deserving of a raise,” Watson said. “We provide a civil service job that society in general does not understand or think about.”
Though the raise for uniformed employees will not be in effect in 2017, the rest of the employees will have to wait until another meeting takes place.