Topeka Correctional Facility is a

Kansas Department of Corrections The Kansas Department of Corrections is a cabinet-level agency of Kansas that operates the state's correctional facilities, both juvenile and adult; the state's parole system; and the state's Prisoner Review Board. It is headquartered in Topeka ...

state prison for women located in

Topeka, Kansas Topeka ( ; Kansa: ; iow, Dópikˀe, script=Latn or ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the seat of Shawnee County. It is along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, in northeast Kansas, in the Central U ...

. Built in the 1970s, in 1995 it became the only women's prison in the state. It administers a wide range of security levels, from maximum security through work-release. The site was founded in 1905 as the Topeka Industrial Institute by the

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

educator Edward S. Stephens, as a school on its own farmland, more or less modeled on the

Tuskegee Institute Tuskegee University (Tuskegee or TU), formerly known as the Tuskegee Institute, is a private, historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama. It was founded on Independence Day in 1881 by the state legislature. The campus was de ...

. The school closed in 1955.

Conditions

Conditions in the facility have long been identified as extremely problematic. A series of investigative articles in ''

The Topeka Capital-Journal ''The Topeka Capital-Journal'' is a daily newspaper in Topeka, Kansas, owned by Gannett. History The paper was formed following numerous name changes and mergers, including the merger of ''The Topeka Daily Capital'' and ''The Topeka State Jou ...

'' in September 2009 revealed a "complex black market" of contraband, bribes, and a sex trade, practices that culminated in a prison employee impregnating an inmate. In January 2010 two independent audits, one by the

National Institute of Corrections The National Institute of Corrections (NIC) is an agency of the United States government. It is part of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. History The NIC was created by the United States Congress in 1974, based on the recommendation of the National ...

and another by a committee of the state legislature, recommended two dozen operational changes, and the facility's administrator was reassigned elsewhere. The result of a 2011–2012 investigation by the

United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is the institution within the federal government responsible for enforcing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability, religion, and national origin. T ...

found that the problems persisted. The Division's September 6, 2012 letter to Kansas Governor

Sam Brownback Samuel Dale Brownback (born September 12, 1956) is an American attorney, politician, diplomat, and member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party who served as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Fr ...

concluded that "TCF fails to protect women prisoners from harm due to sexual abuse and misconduct from correctional staff and other prisoners in violation of their constitutional rights. TCF has a history of unabated officer-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse and misconduct."

Notable Inmates

Debora Green Debora Green ( Jones; born February 28, 1951) is an American physician who pleaded no contest to setting a 1995 fire which burned down her family's home and killed two of her children, and to poisoning her husband with ricin with the intention ...

- Sentenced to 40 years to life for killing her two children.

References

External links

Kansas Prison Inmate Database
- Kansas Department of Corrections {{Women's prisons in the United States Prisons in Kansas Buildings and structures in Topeka, Kansas Women's prisons in the United States 1970s establishments in Kansas