Inside Vernon County jail, vacant-looking Kansas City inmates walk around in circles | Opinion
Vernon County Sheriff Mike Buehler was not exactly happy to hear from me when he picked up the phone last week. And there’s no reason he should have been, since I’ve been peppering him for months with the complaints I get about his jail, where Kansas City sends all of its male inmates.
A lawsuit was just filed against Vernon County by Jeremy Boyd, the former inmate I wrote about in December, about what allegedly went on under Buehler’s predecessor, Jason Mosher, who was sheriff for a dozen years until Jan. 1. Buehler, who is not named in the suit, was not allowed to so much as stick his head inside the jail before he took office that day. “I’m cleaning up the aftermath,” the new sheriff told me this week. “It can’t be done overnight.” And I do get that.
Boyd’s suit alleges that he was assaulted by staff, isolated in a cell flooded with urine and feces, denied medical care and food, and on one occasion, served raw chicken. Mosher, who now runs a pest control business, has never returned any of my messages, and didn’t this time, either. Neither did the presiding county commissioner, Joe Wilson.
As recently as a few weeks ago, Sheriff Buehler said he still wasn’t ready for me to see the jail, because it hadn’t been painted yet. Then last week, when I called with yet another new report from the worried wife of an inmate, he changed his mind in pique: “You are listening to inmates, and they’re not in here for telling the truth! I am tired of the negativity,” he said, so “come on down.” OK, how’s Monday? And on Monday, I did finally get to see inside the jail.
The sheriff was still angry when I got there, though that changed over the next couple of hours. “What’s your objective today? I feel like we’ve been targeted. What is it you want?”
Only to know that our Kansas City inmates, 63 of whom were in his custody on that day, out of 112 detainees in all, are safe. So I want to talk to some of them.
‘You’re not talking to any inmates’
“You’re not talking to any inmates,” Buehler said. Later, he said that was “for safety and security reasons.” If he meant my safety, I’d be OK, I told him, and he said I did not know that. “They’re not in here for being unicorns and rainbows.”
According to Kansas City Presiding Municipal Judge Courtney Wachal, those who aren’t awaiting trial in Vernon County are mostly here serving short sentences – 53 days is the average – for assault, including domestic violence, violating protective orders, damaging property or many counts of trespassing.
What Buehler let me do was look into the windows into the large, dormitory-style pods where inmates live. The men in the “Kansas City pod,” which has tinted windows that block any view to the sky at the very top of its high ceilings, sleep double-bunked. There is old graffiti on the walls, and a phone one man was using.
Most of the inmates looked vacant and unwell – which was not surprising, since many of those sent here from KC had been living on the street, and suffer from a mental illness. Some were walking around in circles. Two were playing chess, and a couple were asleep.
There were two TVs, in the two adjoining rooms, and one guy was watching something. Everyone I saw in the pod was Black or brown, but mostly, they just looked gray, and absent. They could do telehealth therapy, Buehler said, but “you can lead a horse to water…”
‘We’re not mental health workers’
I’m no MD, but even through the window looking in from the hallway, you could see that at least some of these horses need the kind of treatment this jail is just not set up to offer. That’s not the sheriff’s fault, but it is another reason, in my mind, anyway, that this is not where our inmates should be.
Buehler did not, of course, put it that way, but he did volunteer this: “Ninety percent of the people I get from Kansas City are medical problems, and it’s tough, because obviously, we’re not mental health workers, but we are.” I could not agree more.
“At the end of the day, I want to beat my head against the wall. They teach us to be cops and arrest the bad guy and put them in jail. They don’t teach us to be mental health workers.”
It’s frustrating for Buehler, too, he said, that men get detoxed here – when they’re here from K.C., that’s often after coming down from PCP – and then “there’s no aftermath” of treatment after their release. Also right.
I asked City Councilman Crispin Rea, who chaired the committee responsible for making recommendations on Kansas City’s new rehabilitation and detention center, what he thought during his recent visit to the jail in Vernon County, when he saw our inmates there. He did not talk to them by his own choice, he said, though “they were made available to us.”
He mentioned their lack of access to sunlight and outdoor space. And yes, he said, he saw the men walking around aimlessly, too: “They had nothing to do.”
‘It’s brighter and clean’
The sheriff has definitely made some changes. He replaced the entire command staff, and all but four of 12 detention officers. He started giving all inmates a shower every day, which apparently hadn’t been happening, and changing their clothes two or three times a week. Before, said Chief Deputy Derald Neugebauer, they were changed once a week “at best.”
Buehler showed me some of the repairs that had already been done, including painting some gray walls ivory. “If it’s brighter and clean, people live brighter; am I wrong?”
Staff now gets 8 hours of training a month “on everything from deescalation to con games.” Con games? Years ago, Buehler said, he had an inmate who wanted a cup of water, then an extra meal, then was pushing him to violate policy so as to get some leverage over him. “It’s important to teach” staff how to avoid being manipulated by detainees, he said. “They just didn’t have leadership prior to me, and now they do.”
“I try to get it to not smell like a jail,” he said as we walked back to his office. It kind of does, though, I told him, and he had to agree.
Did inmate get his meds?
It was after yet another call from yet another worried family member of an inmate that I’d called Buehler the previous week. I’d asked whether 46-year-old Jeremy Pyle – not to be confused with Jeremy Boyd, the man who just filed suit – had, as his wife Christine Roper-Pyle told me, not always gotten his meds for what court documents called his life-threatening high blood pressure. His public defender had filed a motion to that effect.
Pyle, who was in Vernon County for four months without bond for a probation violation, had tried to commit suicide in the jail, by hoarding his antidepressants and then trying to overdose on them. In mid-April, he was sent to state prison for 17 years – 13 years for an underlying auto theft charge, and 4 for possession of meth. This was instead of the long-term inpatient drug treatment that all parties had agreed on, and that Pyle had been expecting. And yes, his wife said, he did, just as I’d been told, loudly curse Judge David Munton when that decision was announced. “He sure did,” she said, so sadly.
These are heartbreaking situations, and why we wouldn’t rather give Pyle the chance to get well and make restitution instead of locking him up for so long makes no sense to me, but I guess Missouri has millions and lives to burn.
“I know who that is,” Buehler said when I first asked him about Pyle. Then he assured me, without checking any paperwork, that yes, “he was given his meds. He was given the appropriate medication.” I don’t see how he could have known that.
Text traffic between Pyle’s wife and a jail employee I don’t want to get in trouble by naming does suggest that he missed some.
Three on suicide watch
Pyle had originally violated his probation after losing his job and then as a result his home in Springfield. That’s when he and his wife had to move in with their daughter in Nevada. And that’s why he missed his check-ins with his probation officer in Springfield, and also couldn’t pay the $1,170.00 he owed in fines. If you don’t think we criminalize poverty, think again, though I’m not saying Pyle was blameless.
His wife said that some of his kids had traveled three hours to visit him in jail, only to be told that the visitation kiosk wasn’t working. She said, too, that she’d only heard that he had had some sort of medical event from another inmate, after she couldn’t reach him for three days, and that she eventually heard about his suicide attempt from him.
Am I sure everything her husband told her was accurate? No. He said that while he was on suicide watch, he was forced to sleep on a concrete floor. Unfortunately, there were three people on suicide watch when I was in the jail, and I could see on a monitor that they were inside sleeping bags on rubber mattresses. “They’re only on the floor if they decide to be on the floor,” the sheriff said.
But how Pyle got where he is in a larger sense is such a familiar story that it’s one we need to figure out how to do something about instead of just writing him off.
“Jeremy’s been through a lot,” his wife told me: He lost his parents at a young age, grew up on his own, got into drugs, and first went to prison at only 17. He’d been doing so well, after his first-ever stint in a sober living house, she said, and then began blaming herself for his relapse.
“I didn’t help; my brother was killed in a car wreck, I quit my job, I was depressed, and everything was on his shoulders.” He’s still being evaluated, and she’s planning to move wherever he’s sent to prison. Whatever else you do, Christine, don’t think that this was your fault.
‘Get those folks back here’
Before I left the jail, Sheriff Buehler said that what he wants people in Kansas City to know is that inmates are “not being shackled, chained and tied down to the floor. I don’t want people to think we’re running some kind of insane asylum and doing experiments on people.”
Of course they aren’t. And sadly, I’m not positive there would be any huge outcry if they were. “I actually do have a heart,” he said, and that, too, I believe.
I think Buehler is a good person doing his damndest. I appreciate that he picks up the phone, even when he’s mad, and that he let me come anyway. He has a cop’s outlook because, as he himself said, he is a cop, not a counselor. And yet, not only when he talks about how the people in his care are not all unicorns and rainbows, which he said several times, I also think our people need to be back here.
Why? Because they need services that this jail just is not set up to provide. Because it’s too far away for meaningful oversight. Because our own officials need to take responsibility, and actually learn how to run a jail in a way that’s both effective and compassionate. We haven’t done that since 2009.
Nancy Leazer, who ran the Municipal Correctional Institution until it closed that year, said what she hears about Vernon County from her contacts with municipal corrections still worries her: “Double-bunking should be a constitutional offense. The answer is to get those folks back here, where they could be watched by family and friends.”
And also so Kansas City could “begin to train staff for the new jail. You don’t want to hire from other institutions,” she said, because then you import all the problems of those places before you’ve even gotten started. “Do the permanent jail right.” Meanwhile, “the solution is the temporary jail solution they could do in a few months.” I agree 1000%.
Mayor Quinton Lucas said that while that’s definitely in the conversation, he only gives it a 50-50 chance of happening, because right now, “it doesn’t have an advocate.” And “I’m not sure it’s as cheap as everybody has been told.”
I think it’s got nothing but advocates, if only because we might want to have some local cells lined up before next summer’s World Cup matches here.
“I have said all along that we need to have more control over our own inmates,” Councilman Rea told me. “I certainly think there’s interest in a midterm and modular option” while the new jail is being built, “now that the public safety sales tax is behind us, we need to move quickly.”
Once a new city manager is in place, I hope that will be at the top of that person’s do-list. At Thursday’s City Council meeting, a resolution will be introduced directing the city manager to report back on the feasibility of a modular temporary facility.
This story was originally published May 8, 2025 at 5:09 AM.
