Kansas City plans to send inmates elsewhere as makeshift jail loses insurance
A rehabilitation facility that Kansas City has been using as a jail lost two insurance policies last month, forcing city officials to make other plans for housing about 110 municipal inmates.
Heartland Center for Behavioral Change on Campbell Avenue east of downtown primarily provides substance abuse treatment. But it has doubled as a jail since the Jackson County Detention Center stopped taking city inmates earlier this year. Its chief executive told city and police officials in a Nov. 19 letter that insurance carriers for liability and workers compensation had canceled their policies, effective in January.
Heartland chief executive Kyle Mead wrote that he was uncertain the policies could be replaced or, if they could, without an increase in premiums.
“With much regret, Heartland proposes that the City, KCPD and Heartland mutually agree to terminate the contract effective as of the end of the day on December 31, 2019,” Mead said. A cancellation letter obtained by The Star indicates that Heartland’s insurer canceled the liability policy after the facility was changed to include a jail, which increased its risk.
All parties have agreed to walk away from the contract with no payments for liquidated damages.
The city started sending inmates — those arrested, awaiting trial or convicted of municipal charges — to Heartland after its previous arrangement with the county lapsed this summer.
Placing inmates at Heartland, which was not designed as a detention facility, has not worked well. Several inmates have escaped and at least one has died.
“I remember having significant questions when this first came to the city council...wondering if we could really just kind of throw up a few more bars on a facility that was not equipped for it and make a jail out of it,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said. “And I think the answer we have all seen is no.”
Officials are finalizing plans to send Heartland inmates elsewhere.
Fifty inmates — 35 men and 15 women — will go back to the Jackson County jail under a new deal being negotiated with Sheriff Darryl Forte.
The Jackson County jail has been beset with its own problems in recent years, ranging from filth to episodes of violence. In 2016, for example, an inmate obtained a key from a jail guard and let other inmates out of their cells where they roamed the facility for two hours. One of the inmates who was let loose entered a woman’s cell and raped her.
Lucas said he believes Forte is doing a better job of running the jail.
“It’s my view that conditions have changed for the better in the Jackson County jail facility,” Lucas said.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker agreed, saying conditions aren’t perfect but that reports of troubling incidents are fewer.
“Over the last year it has really leveled off,” she said.
Diana Turner was named director of the Jackson County Corrections Department, which oversees the jail, on March 12, 2018.
Vernon County, Missouri, which is about 100 miles south of Kansas City, will house 70 municipal inmates. Johnson County, Missouri will take on 45, and another six to 10 inmates with drug court charges will enter into rehabilitation programs through the Kansas City Municipal Court.
The average cost for each inmate per day is $76.95, an increase over past arrangements.
The Kansas City Council is expected to discuss plans for inmates later Thursday during its business session.
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 1:17 PM.
