All Wichita work release inmates being transferred after COVID-19 cluster found
The Wichita Work Release Facility is being cleared out after 38 inmates tested positive for coronavirus.
Kansas Department of Corrections spokesperson Rebecca Witte said the about 100 inmates remaining at the downtown Wichita facility would be moved Thursday to the Lansing Correctional Facility.
After the first Wichita case was reported April 12, the KDOC has shuffled hundreds of inmates back and forth from Wichita to Lansing after at least one person tested positive in the same cell block. However, a cluster reported at the facility this week has affected the remaining inmates. One staff member and 38 inmates have tested positive at the Wichita facility. Of the inmates, 34 are asymptomatic, according to the KDOC.
“With the open dormitory set up at WWRF, that facility is not conducive to separating symptomatic from asymptomatic from negatives,” Witte said in an email. “There’s little social distancing in a prison setting, but even less opportunity in the open dorm style” like at the Wichita Work Release Facility.
She said the inmates will be moved to the prison in Lansing “and will be quarantined or isolated depending on their test results.”
When inmates were previously moved, Witte said those from Wichita were kept separate from the ones at Lansing. Witte said she couldn’t be certain this time that the Wichita inmates would be separated from the inmates at Lansing, where about 40% of residents have tested positive.
“Right now, I don’t think I can say definitively if they will or will not be housed alongside anyone from” the Lansing prison, Witte wrote. “I can definitively say though that they will be housed with those who tested similarly: positive and symptomatic are most often housed in individual cells. ...negatives are housed with others who tested negative.”
Inmates who test positive but are asymptomatic are generally housed with people who were tested around the same time, she wrote.
Lansing has about 95% of the roughly 900 reported cases in Kansas prisons, including staff. It also has the Department of Correction’s only coronavirus-related deaths in Kansas. Two staff members and three inmates have died from the disease.
Inmates rioted at the facility last month, purportedly over lack of health care access.
Lansing has 750 inmates and 88 employees who have tested positive. Of those inmates, 645 are asymptomatic. The large number of cases at Lansing were found after KDOC tested all of its roughly 1,600-plus inmates at the prison.
The cluster at the Wichita facility is the 10th reported in Sedgwick County.
The KDOC describes the Wichita facility as a satellite unit of the Winfield Correctional Facility. The all-male, minimum-custody state prison had a population of 248 prior to the pandemic and a new temporary population of 175.
In a news briefing Wednesday, Gov. Laura Kelly said she is “confident that the department of corrections … has done all that they can” at Lansing and will continue to try and improve the conditions there.
Kansas has released six inmates for house arrest while trying to mitigate the spread of the virus in prisons. None of the inmates were at Lansing, according to the Kansas City Star, which reported other states releasing hundreds of inmates.
During the news conference, KDOC Secretary Jeff Zmuda said: “We’re not contemplating additional releases at this point.”
Contributing: Jason Tidd of The Eagle
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 1:29 PM.