“If there ever comes a day when we can't be together, keep me in your heart. I'll stay there forever.”

― A.A. Milne

Stop Calling Us “Kansas Felons” – We’re More Than Our Worst Mistake

by Andrew Patterson

Every time a news story breaks involving someone with a past conviction, I brace myself for the inevitable headline: “Kansas Felon Involved in…” followed by the incident of the day. It’s a phrase used with such casual certainty that it almost goes unnoticed—except by those of us who live under its weight.

"Kansas Felon." Not "Kansas Father," not "Kansas Entrepreneur," not "Kansas Volunteer" or "Kansas Citizen." Just “Felon.” That one word, often dropped into local reporting without a second thought, manages to erase everything else about a person’s life. It reduces someone’s identity to a past conviction, no matter how long ago it occurred or how much they've grown since.

Let’s be honest: people make mistakes. Some mistakes are serious. But a felony conviction is supposed to be a moment in time—not a permanent brand seared into a person’s forehead. Yet in Kansas, and across much of the country, it doesn’t feel that way. For those of us who have served our time, made amends, and tried to rebuild, it often feels like we’re dragging that label behind us everywhere we go—especially in the media.

When a local outlet refers to someone simply as a "Kansas Felon," what message does that send to the public? That redemption is impossible? That people don’t change? That we are nothing more than the worst thing we’ve ever done?

It’s not just lazy journalism. It’s damaging. It fuels public stigma, making it harder for people with past convictions to find jobs, housing, or even a second chance. It tells employers and landlords that they don’t need to look any further—because the media already did the work of defining us.

But here’s the truth the headlines don’t tell: many people with felony convictions go on to live honorable, hardworking lives. We raise families. We start businesses. We mentor at-risk youth so they don’t end up on the same path. We give back to the communities we once harmed. We strive, every single day, to become better than our past.

So why won’t local media acknowledge that? Why does a felony conviction eclipse everything else about us? Would you want your worst mistake to be the first thing people learn about you? To be the first word attached to your name in print?

I’m not asking for the past to be erased. I’m asking for fairness, humanity, and dignity. A recognition that people are more than the labels society gives them.

Media outlets have a responsibility—not just to inform, but to reflect the communities they serve. That includes telling more honest, complete stories about individuals who’ve paid their debt to society and are trying to move forward.

Stop calling us “Kansas Felons.” We are Kansas neighbors, Kansas workers, Kansas parents. We are more than our worst day. It's time the headlines reflect that.

Disappointment

by Andrew Patterson

This justice system disappoints me.

In more ways than one, it shows the epitome of human error. Precious lives are temporarily put on hold and changed forever. Innocent people—many of them placed in impossible scenarios that nobody can understand—endure unimaginable suffering at the hands of simple mistakes and misjudgments formed from “training and experience” that doesn’t even apply to a fraction of situations.

Coincidentally, I’ve witnessed convicted violent criminals come in and out of jail, treating the place like a local bread and breakfast, racking up new felony charges, and are somehow still not deemed a danger to their community.

Meanwhile, those of us with mental health issues and years of unresolved traumas sink further down in mental comatose over petty behavior that formed trumped-up charges that makes living everyday life—which produces enough struggles on its own—that much more difficult when it wasn’t a warranted course of action to begin with.

I was charged with domestic terrorism and faced the death penalty for journaling my experiences with obsessive and intrusive thoughts and then telling my mother about them when she asked me what was wrong. Because of the high-profile nature surrounding my case, the bi-monthly updates in local and statewide news headlines painting a portrait of myself as a criminal mastermind and homicidal monster and fearing a conviction at trial based on emotional fear, I accepted a plea bargain.

I pleaded guilty to an amended count of attempted murder.

Attempted murder. Over a journal and legitimate mental illness.

I was incarcerated with somebody who was charged with a violent felony simply because he tried to harm himself. He barricaded himself in his vehicle, and when officers asked what he had in his hand, he proceeded to brandish a sharp object and began to impale himself in the wrist. Upon arrest, he was charged with aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and faced several years in prison.

Another man was charged with numerous violent felonies for an alleged “crime spree” where nobody was killed, injured, or even touched. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Another man was convicted of numerous felonies after he tried to enter his ex-girlfriend’s home with an unloaded shotgun only in an attempt to take his own life in a mental health and drug-induced episode.

There’s so many others I could go on writing about. In a justice system that boasts of being “fair for all” and “innocent until proven guilty,” how are those circumstances and eventual outcomes fair?

How is that justice?

People put too much blind faith in our justice system, especially if they’ve never been put through it before, themselves. They say if you’re innocent, it’ll come out in court.

If you’re innocent, you’ll be okay.

Except, that isn’t entirely true.

It’s estimated that one percent of the prison population in the United States—roughly twenty thousand people—are innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. That doesn’t even include those who served their time, were released on parole, or those sentenced to serve time on probation.

While one percent doesn’t seem like a large number, it is too high when the end result is taking away someone’s life in an alleged system that so many believe is foolproof.

The criminal justice system isn’t one operated by machines with a perfect outcome each and every time—it’s run by people, who, like all things, judge from emotion. A jury judges based off of emotion over evidence in every single case, and there are stories of innocent men and women serving twenty, thirty, sometimes forty years in prison for crimes they did not commit, only to be exonerated decades later after serving the majority of their lives in prison.

Even the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t make sense when human beings judge primarily from emotion. An emotional ruling cannot be “proven,” when so many people are wrongfully convicted. It is statements like that, spoken for so many decades that give people the false interpretation that the system is ironclad and foolproof, when it’s not.

I, like so many other things controlled and ran by people, am heavily flawed. And, given the way inmates in county jail—those who are allegedly innocent until proven guilty—are treated by the system as they go through it, the mantra makes no sense.

Bogus charges, outrageous bonds, and pressured into plea bargains by lawyers who would rather negotiate than fight, we do this to possible escape multiple years of our lives being ripped away from us.

We are not innocent until proven guilty. Rather, it’s actually quite the opposite—we are guilty until proven innocent.

Innocence is a hard thing to prove when you have a high-profile case and the media is involved, as they often broadcast the allegations that hold little to no merit straight to the public as if it is fact. Rumors from the police, the prosecution, and the community, fly rampant for so long in advance. This creates bias in potential jury members who may later be called to decide a man or woman’s fate.

In my case, I was charged with a second count of attempted terrorism for an alleged plot against a school, when it never even happened. There was zero evidence to support that charge because it never occurred. However, the media fanned the flame and called me a school shooter. Eventually, the charge was dismissed completely.

Another inmate I’ve gotten to know over the past few weeks had a very high-profile case that was covered by Time Magazine, People Magazine, and the Associated Press among others. She’s currently serving a Hard 25 sentence (life without the possibility of parole for 25 years). While she sat in jail awaiting her outcome, the media attempted to make her look like a violent criminal by saying she was on parole for an alleged robbery.

A robbery that never existed. They simply pulled it out of their rear ends.

They attempted to make her look like a bad stepmother by addressing that her home had had multiple calls to Child Protective Services prior to her case. What they failed to address was that she was the one who made those anonymous calls. Still, she was pressured into a plea bargain and currently is serving a life sentence in prison.

The media twists things around without any kind of research, and in a way, the District Attorney gets to try their side of the case for months, or even years, through the media while the defense only gets a few days to a week, usually. In a high-profile case, jury members often already have some kind of an opinion of the accused before their day in court. While they’re supposed to be honest during jury selection—people can, and often do, lie. And by the time it’s found out by a higher court, if at all, years can pass with the accused serving time in prison.

With a case that makes headlines constantly, solidifying false information in the community’s minds for so long, it is very difficult to sway them to believe another side when all they’ve heard/read/watched for so long solidifies their belief in the first place.

For defendants in a high-profile case, their assigned District Attorney is usually less likely to offer a favorable plea bargain, as they’ll want to make a name for themselves or fearing public scrutiny based on the allegations pushed forced in the public eye.

This leads the accused to have two options: either plead guilty and hope for mercy from the judge or go to trial with a heavily flawed system and a likely-tainted jury.

They’re set up for failure.

How is that an ironclad system? How is that fair?

A day passes, but not really. Then a week, but still nothing. A day, a week, a month. Two months, half-a-year, one year, and a year-and-a-half. All milestones that have come and gone in county jail.

But not really.

Even though so much time has passed, and it feels like much longer, it still feels like I’m in the same day I was arrested sixteen months ago. The same day this nightmare began.

It’s all been one long, continuous bad dream, and though from the beginning I was told by everyone—family, friends, even my attorney—that I wouldn’t be here long, my ultimate release date seems no closer than it was the day I came in.

Physically, I’ve lost over one-hundred pounds from chronic stress, severe anxiety, and drastic loss of appetite that comes with facing a life sentence in prison. My thick curly brown hair has faded into thin strands, so much so that I opt out to shaving it off twice a week. My bushy beard and thin mustache now sport a grayish tint. Permanent bags have formed under my eyes, and new wrinkles have appeared like a badly pressed polo shirt.

At the age of twenty-five, I look like I’ve aged twenty years, and then some. But it also feels as if no time as passed at all; like I’m stuck in purgatory in an identical physical and mental cage.

The concept of time does not exist when you are incarcerated. There is a clock, but it’s nothing more than just another string of changing numbers that hold no significance.

Besides a small window in the ceiling thirty feet in the air the size of a welcome mat, there is no view of the outside. No way to watch the sun rise or set. No sounds of rush hour traffic or a church bell going off on the hour, every hour. It can be five in the morning or five in the evening, and I wouldn’t know the difference.

The temperature inside is controlled by staff and maintenance. There are no windows to determine the changing of the weather or the differing seasons. It’s a moderate sixty-five degrees all year round. Winter, fall, or summer; July, October, or December, I don’t know the difference. Everything is a dead color with no life; a steady white, gray, or beige all the way around. I could be twenty-five, fifty, or one-hundred years old, it wouldn’t matter. Time does not exist.

Though I always live in my mind, mentally, I turned to living there, physically, as well. The inside of my mind is nearly identical to the jail I’m incarcerated in. I am trapped; no windows to peer out from the inside, or from the outside in.

There is no change in the weather or the temperature unless I get really upset.

Time

by Andrew Patterson

It is so quiet, with nobody besides me to fill the overbearing silence. There is no day or night, just one long continuous moment of simply existing.

Mentally, I sit, and I ponder, and I wait. Physically, without the brief intervals of normalcy that periodically remove me from my mental lockdown, I only sit, and ponder, and wait.

On the outside, there’s so many things to prove the concept of passing time. Holidays, birthdays, shifts at work, paychecks, appointments, and vacations. While in jail, there is nothing. You only sit—or lay down—and wait for something to happen. The concept of time passing is completely nonexistent.

There is nobody to celebrate the yearly holidays with. No watching the splotches the bright colors seep into the sky with each sunrise and sunset. No stars spread out in clusters among the sky; only worn ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights. Minus the conversations and interactions with other inmates in similar predicaments, like my mind is, it’s dead quiet.

I sometimes forget where I am, and what lies outside the walls beyond this facility. I forget the street it sits on until I copy down the address on an envelope when sending out a letter. I have to think really hard to bring images of the open fields on all sides of the jail to mind. The animal shelter and connecting dog park is just a block north, and the maximum-security prison is just a bit further up the road. Carey Park, where I spent so much time as a child and adult, is only a stone’s throw away west.

For so long, I’ve been behind these walls, I sometimes forget that there’s a world outside of here, and other people besides the staff and inmates I see on a daily basis. My existence is confined to such a small area, like a picture frame or a painted canvas, with nothing in existence beyond the borders. Just like my mind, it only occupied the space in my head nothing beyond the confines matters.

Life only seemed livable before, as I could be pulled out of my mental cell and enjoy the quiet, simple things that life has to offer. For so long now, I haven’t had that. Instead, I get pulled from my mental cage and get put into a physical one that’s nearly identical in nearly every possible way. Each time I did, I found it hopeless and wondered why I leave in the first place. I pushed down further into the dark abyss of mental illness, contemplating the extra time and effort it would’ve taken me to pull from its grasp.

Is it even possible? Is it even worth it to try? I won’t know until the time comes. And when that time comes, I have no idea.

Because as I’ve said, time does not exist when you’re incarcerated.