Kansas corrections officer hospitalized after attack at understaffed Lansing prison
A corrections officer at Lansing Correctional Facility was hospitalized Wednesday evening after being injured by a resident, the Kansas Department of Corrections confirmed Thursday.
The officer is in stable condition and investigators with KDOC are investigating the incident, said Carol Pitts, a spokeswoman for the department.
Pitts did not disclose what injuries the officer suffered or additional health information, citing privacy laws.
But the officer suffered facial fractures and likely had a severe head injury, said Sarah LaFrenz, president of the Kansas Organization of State Employees which represents corrections employees. LaFrenz said the officer spent the night in the intensive care unit.
Staffing shortages at Lansing contributed to the incident with the corrections officer, LaFrenz said. Lansing had 73 vacancies as of Nov. 1, according to Department of Corrections data LaFrenz provided to the Star.
Staffing shortages can lead to unsafe conditions when one or two corrections officers are assigned to an area that holds several hundred inmates.
That’s what happened Wednesday.
The corrections officer that was injured was assigned to a pod that holds approximately 127 inmates, LaFrenz said.
“There’s one person there,” LaFrenz said. “So when someone attacked her, there was no one to call. There’s no one else to see that.”
There are other situations, she added, where there might be two corrections officers assigned to work at a pod that houses close to 300 residents. That creates a problem because one corrections officer may be on one end of the pod and the other officer may be on the other end.
“If something happens on the other end, unless you have someone close by just accidentally, you can’t get an alarm hit quickly,” LaFrenz said. “You can’t get out of there and you can’t call for help.”
The understaffing at Lansing is not an isolated situation — it’s a challenge across the country. In 2020, the Justice Department budgeted 20,446 full-time correctional officer positions. But the agency that runs federal prisons employed 13,762 officers, the Associated Press reported in May.
Last month, members of the Kansas National Guard were sent to Lansing to help with staffing and inmates at El Dorado Correctional Facility, where Gov. Laura Kelly declared a staffing emergency in 2019, were spending more time confined to their cells because of staffing shortages.
In Kansas, staffing shortages is a longstanding problem exacerbated by the pandemic. The state prison system had been under stress from years of understaffing, overcrowding and riots. In April 2020, members of the Kansas National Guard were sent to Lansing to help with staffing after several members of the prison staff tested positive for COVID-19.
But the staffing shortages are still affecting workers there and staff members are upset and angry, LaFrenz said.
“They’ve known forever, for months, years, how unsafe this is,” LaFrenz said. “These people are going back to work today, some of them in the same place where this occurred and they’re supposed to just go back to work like nothing happened?”
The Star’s Katie Bernard contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 4, 2021 at 4:20 PM.
