Wichita’s accumulation of parolees, registered offenders has police concerned

On any given day in Wichita, one out of three suspects in crimes is a parolee or registered offender, Deputy Police Chief Jose Salcido says.

Those are serious crimes, Salcido said, from theft to murder.

Example: In recent months, Wichita police responded to a 911 call about a driver acting suspiciously. He was stopping and talking to children. Police traced the tag number to a registered sex offender from north-central Kansas now living in Wichita. (Police couldn’t bring charges partly because they couldn’t find the young eyewitnesses.)

Wichita/Sedgwick County is home to the state’s largest number of parolees and registered offenders and home to the state’s only work release facility for male inmates.

Many of the parolees are from other counties or states. Part of that is because Wichita is the state’s largest city, with plenty of jobs and resources.

The Wichita Police Department says the concentration of convicts is straining its resources and posing risks for the public.

“I think the public has a right to know that,” Salcido said.

Example: In 1996, an 18-year-old man was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl in northeast Kansas. That crime put him on the state’s sex offender registry. Over the next 22 years, he went in and out of prison — and was released on parole to Sedgwick County 17 times. When he was out of prison, he got convicted of 14 crimes in Sedgwick County, including aggravated burglary, battery, theft, drug possession and aggravated escape from custody.

He is back out of prison and on parole now, living near First and Grove, according to the offender registry.

Two Wichita legislators say the concentration of convicts is a complex problem with no short-term solution. With the state corrections agency already dealing with prison riots, crowding and staffing shortages, the lawmakers say, dealing with parolees and registered offenders isn’t as pressing.

With the state’s prison population increasing at the same time prisons are understaffed, that could raise the pressure to release more people from prison and into Wichita.

“Self-fulfilling prophecy”

Wichita is getting other cities’ convicts.

Some of them are on parole supervision after being released from prison. Others are on the state’s offender registry for certain violent, sex or drug crimes. Not everyone on the registry is still on parole.

According to police, a little more than one-third of the prison inmates paroled to Wichita as of Oct. 9 — 401 parolees — had been released to Wichita after being convicted of crimes outside Sedgwick County. While some of them might have personal ties to Sedgwick County, their crimes occurred elsewhere.

As of Feb. 22, Sedgwick County had 2,959 registered offenders, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter said he was surprised that so many of the offenders — 1,027 — have convictions in other counties or other states.

The Sheriff’s Office monitors offenders to make sure they comply with state law, which requires them to put their current address and other information on a register the public or law enforcement can see. Of the offenders in the county, 56 are homeless — camping out under bridges and in alleys and alcoves and city parks.

This past fall, Wichita police noted, Sedgwick County had 2,819 people on the state’s offender registry because of sex, violent or drug crimes. That was more than three times the number of registered offenders in Johnson County — 877 — according to state data. So Johnson County has far fewer registered offenders even though it has a bigger population than Sedgwick County.

During the past fiscal year, ending June 30, the Kansas Department of Corrections had released to Sedgwick County 1,269 people under parole supervision. That compared with 360 released to Johnson County, according to the Department of Corrections. Shawnee County received 318 parolees; Wyandotte, 315. Those counties also received parolees with a conviction in a different county.

An argument can be made that Sedgwick County has more parolees and registered offenders than Johnson County because Sedgwick County has more crime.

Still, Salcido said, “If historically you’ve sent more people here who are registered offenders,” it creates a “hyper-concentration” of offenders, and “you are going to have more crime here. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

‘Strains our resources’

The Wichita Police Department is voicing its concern about the numbers.

“This a very friendly city, but at some point, it just kind of strains our resources,” said Salcido, the deputy police chief.

One example, Salcido said, is the department’s Homeless Outreach Team. The unit, which responds to 911 calls and calls for service involving homeless people, devotes about a quarter of its resources to homeless parolees.

In recent months the Police Department and local Kansas Department of Corrections staff have worked closely to better track violent offenders and to provide treatment and prevention, Salcido said.

Still, he said, federal statistics show that parolees are likely to commit a serious crime after leaving prison. Overall, 68 percent of released state prisoners were arrested within three years and 79 percent within six years, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

It not only costs the Police Department in time and money, Salcido said.

“What about the victim cost, both property and person?” he said.

The case of parolee Robert Greeson might most dramatically make the point: Greeson, who had aggravated battery and drug convictions in Ellis and Pawnee counties, was released to Sedgwick County on parole twice since 2011, most recently in 2015, according to the Department of Corrections. Greeson also spent several months in 2015 at the Wichita Work Release Facility.

After 2015, he was in and out of jail or prison and transferred on parole to Greeley County. But by this past September, Greeson had returned to Sedgwick County, where he went on a crime spree, carjacking, stealing a gun and dying in a shootout in which he fatally wounded Sedgwick County sheriff’s Deputy Robert Kunze.

Unique facility

District Attorney Marc Bennett, whose office prosecutes the most serious crimes in Sedgwick County, said he thinks that one unique facility in Wichita helps explain why there are so many parolees and offenders in the county — the Wichita Work Release Facility.

It’s a 250-bed minimum-custody state prison at Waterman and Emporia. It sits across the street from Wichita’s main entertainment venue, Intrust Bank Arena. The men sleep at the Work Release Facility but get to work jobs, go shopping and attend church out in the community as they finish their prison sentences.

It’s the only work release facility for men in the state. Topeka has one for women.

“I don’t blame” the Department of Corrections, Bennett said. “It’s not as if they have chosen to have one release facility” for men, in Wichita. “This is a function of larger policy decisions that have been made.”

Still, he said, “With one facility, there’s a higher percentage of those folks coming into one facility.” A significant number of them, he noted, are from elsewhere. And because those men have fewer ties to the Wichita community, he said, it makes them more apt to break parole rules or commit new crimes here.

Around the nation, communities have complained that they’ve become dumping grounds for convicts coming out of prison. St. Louis is one. In 2014, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, a registered sex offender allegedly walked away from Missouri’s only community release center in St. Louis, attacked a woman and tried to rape her in the middle of downtown.

Kansas has had a work release facility in Wichita since 1976, and it has been expanded over the years, said Chuck Simmons, deputy secretary with the Department of Corrections.

Simmons said he assumed that Wichita was chosen as the location for the facility because the city anchors a metropolitan area with strong job opportunities.

He said there is no proposal for another work release facility elsewhere.

Last year, the 250-bed facility in downtown Wichita took in 349 inmates. Not all of them stay in Sedgwick County, Simmons said.

Of those 349 inmates, 99 had been most recently convicted in Sedgwick County. So 250 of them — or almost 72 percent of the total placed at the work release facility — had convictions in counties outside Sedgwick County.

So far, 60 of those 250 inmates from other counties have been released: The biggest share, 32, went to Sedgwick County. The other 28 were released to 12 other counties and six other states.

Difficult problem

State Rep. John Carmichael, D-Wichita, who serves on the House Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice, said it appears that Wichita gets a disproportionate number of parolees partly because of the work release facility. Because they get jobs while transitioning onto parole, some end up staying.

Some of them settle in Wichita because it also has the mental health and drug treatment programs that they need to be successful, he said.

“So in some ways, our success as a metropolitan area has brought this on us,” Carmichael said.

Still, because of the disproportionate number of parolees who commit new crimes, he said, having so many parolees “imposes a burden on law enforcement and the citizens and taxpayers in Sedgwick County,” Carmichael said.

“We know what the problem is; it’s finding the answer.”

With the state’s prison population increasing at the same time prisons are understaffed, he said, that could raise the pressure to release more people from prison and into Wichita.

He doubts that there is enough funding now to establish other work release centers around the state.

State Rep. Gail Finney, D-Wichita, said that although “the over-concentration is concerning ... I don’t know what the solution is now.”

And with all the other problems that DOC is facing, Finney said, she doesn’t see it as a top priority.

This story was originally published March 10, 2019 at 7:00 AM.