The Realities of Life in Lansing Prison

by Johnathan Materne

My name is Johnathan and I’m originally from Louisiana but I’ve had something of a wanderlust for the biggest part of my life and through series of peculiar events I somehow ended up a wheat farmer in Kansas (Beloit, specifically).

Up until about 10 years ago I drank more than any mortal man should and ended up receiving a felony DUI in Colorado which, in fact, made me a convicted felon. Fast forward to Jul 2024 in Beloit, Kansas and I was found to have a firearm under the seat of my farm truck and I received another felony; criminal possession of a firearm. I received a short sentence in the Kansas Department of Corrections-27 months.

But I really don’t want this letter to be about myself. Unlike so many in this situation, I am certainly guilty. And from the way I generally perceive the world and our lives in it I feel that the sentence is appropriate.

You asked for experiences and perhaps observations from those of us existing inside of the KDOC. Well opinions and observations I have aplenty.

I’ll attempt to frame this in a manner that gives the most relevance to it, context is important when discussing matters such as this because when we fail to frame matters such as these in the proper context we lose people, or should I say we tend to lose their attention. Humanity, being such that it is, has difficulty seeing relevance in issues that on the surface appear so far removed from themselves.

One good example is education. Now I have a daughter and she is 22 years old and graduated high school 5 years ago so it would be easy for myself to believe that education and policies that pertain to it really no longer affect me. But that’s not actually the case, you see. Because I do not want to live in a community of uneducated or undereducated people, and because I care about the social and political future of the country I live in and honestly because I actually believe in some ways I am in fact my brother’s keeper. I believe that policies which affect education are very much relevant to my life. In other words, I have a stake in education, always.

Now given that a good 80% of Kansas citizens (ie, voters) are from and live in rural communities far removed from the streets of Wichita or Topeka, or Kansas City, I know how easy it is to feel that they do not have a stake in what goes on in their state prisons. It’s very easy to be seduced by the idea that we are so far removed from the world that it just simply cannot have any real bearing on our daily lives. After all, keeping prisoners out of sight and out of mind is precisely what we expect our leaders to do. But here’s the rub, and since I am using one Hamlet reference…something is truly rotten in the state of Denmark! And how it affects everyone in this state is very (and decidingly dangerously) clear.

Lansing Correctional Facility (LCF) is the epitome of a prison that has lost control of itself. It is a prison where the correctional staff have not only completely lost control of their facility, but they have simply given up on trying to regain control of it. The amount of illegal dangerous substances in this facility goes so far beyond the pale that no reasonably thinking person would ever believe it. The day that I walked into the unit that I am housed in I was immediately taken aback by not just the odors in the air indicative of the drugs here but also of the smoke–There is almost always a cloud of smoke lingering at the ceilings of every unit here. And correctional staff have absolutely nothing to say about it. They literally have to fan it out of their faces to see paperwork in front of them. And the enterprising in these illegal substances is performed in plain sight of correctional officers. There is never even a pretense of keeping it under wraps. Many times I have heard correctional staff state that they “don’t give a shit about what prisoners do”. These drugs include marijuana, methamphetamine, Fentanyl, and something known as “K-2” or “Deuce”. This K-2 is a particularly insidious substance which more often than not brings on tracks of seizures and incredibly violent and otherwise erratic behavior. I have already witnessed numerous over-doses on these drugs. I witness daily, young men selling their food, whatever they can steal, or begging their families to send them money daily so that they may continue with these deadly habits they have acquired while here at Lansing.

Another issue that cannot be overstated is the violence that the enterprising in these drugs brings into such an environment. Lansing prison is bloody. That’s the best way it can be put. And no one is safe. From the youngest to the oldest I’ve seen the victims of Lansing’s brutality in the very real flesh.

In my first week here I witnessed a man in my cell viciously attacked by another man with a padlock placed in a sock. This attack occurred while he was asleep. And before this attack occurred there were warnings that it was coming so the man and myself approached a correctional staff member and asked for assistance. The staff member said to us “It is impossible to avoid violence at Lansing”. The man who attacked my cellmate was never charged with a crime nor was he given a disciplinary action in the matter. This is in spite of written testimony given by my cellmate as well as myself.

The number of black eyes and cuts to faces one sees in the course of one day is staggering.

Lansing prison fosters a culture of drugs and extreme violence. One can only conclude that it is by design. The sheer amount of drugs in Lansing can only be entering the facility through correctional staff. And the violence can only exist to the degree in which it does because the staff allows it.

I am going to get to the point where I show you how this effects our communities in just a moment. Bear with me please.

Lansing also appears to be a massive mental health facility, although not officially. No, I am not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist. But one need not be to realize that a great number of prisoners here suffer from a myriad of emotional, psychological, behavioral, and criminally behavioral disorders. These disorders appear to go completely untreated. It’s nothing to witness men experiencing schizophrenic episodes, periods of lethargy, self-harm, etc. And many times these men are attacked and beaten by other prisoners simply because they don’t understand or they themselves suffer some affliction of the mind as well. Many of the men here are just mentally retarded and have the cognitive abilities of an 8-year-old at best. These men are brutalized too often to believe that Lansing staff care. They do not. I’ve witnessed first hand staff covering up these attacks by either ignoring pleas for help or losing complete files on incidents.

Kansas Department of Corrections ostensibly uses a classification system designed to place inmates according to their “criminogenic needs” It's utilized for purposes of proper rehabilitative program placement and for purposes of safety as well. It is designed to prevent the practice of housing the weaker or less experienced or hardened men with the most incorrigible and intractable convicts. It attempts to avoid what I have come to refer to as “Creating Greater Demons”. But there has been a massive failure in its practice. Lansing houses men classified as “minimum custody” with men classified as “maximum custody”. One need not stretch the imagination too terribly far to envision how this plays out. But the way it plays out that is so direly overlooked is the fact that young men from rural Kansas, from the farm community, from the last bastions of middle and small town America come here and are completely enraptured by the career convicts who engage in these dangerous drugs and brutality.

Do you have any idea how valuable fentanyl and methamphetamine are in a place like Beloit, Concordia, or Colby, Kansas? These men who have never before entertained such a proposition are making sound contacts with suppliers, learning the enterprise of trafficking in these substances, becoming well conditioned to an environment of abject and senseless brutality, and most of all are seeing the lack of concern and by extension the lack of control or authority the state is supposed to wield. There is money to be made in the far flung rural frontiers of Kansas and the state of Kansas, by way of its Department of Corrections is suiting and arming the hordes that will eventually matriculate into these communities. To be sure it's already begun; there were a number of fentanyl overdoses in the Beloit area just prior to my arrest. I recall several of the local folks confused about how such a drug could find its way into their community. Even I myself was perplexed over it until I arrived here at Lansing prison.

The objective of any prison system in the 21st century is to not only protect the people of the state from dangerous criminals not only as they currently exist but also as they may exist in the future. With very little exception, most men and women in a state prison will some day be released. Whether they will enter our communities as greater men and women or greater demons is totally up to the state. It appears that Lansing prison has made its choice.

When the drugs, gang activities, and senseless brutality is tossed into a cauldron of apathy and indifference on the part of the powers that are entrusted to the task of mitigating these things the result will always be communities that are exponentially more dangerous than ever. When men in our prisons are not even given a modicum of opportunity to be better people, when prison authorities essentially give up and give in, the world pays for their capitulation.

The Kansas Department of Corrections, as far as Lansing prison goes, is creating a Kansas that is more threatening to civility and order and peace than any single action or series of action that has ever been thrust upon this state. And these ripples will continue for an interminable period of time and cost us all so very much.

Johnathan Materne #