Former deputy corrections director writes Kansas jails book

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - The fact Gary Bayens wrote “Frontier Kansas Jails” is a natural fit.

“I’m just a jail guy,” said Bayens, a former corrections officer and administrator. “It just gets in your blood. I enjoyed working there. It’s a tough place to work.”

Bayens worked in the Shawnee County Jail when it was operated by the Shawnee County Sheriff’s Office and was housed on two floors in the Shawnee County Courthouse, The Topeka Capital-Journal (https://bit.ly/2hwoHUD ) reported.

“I worked in that jail for years,” Bayens said. At times, he worked weekend shifts when five deputies were in charge of 100 prisoners.

Bayens made the move to the jail’s location at 501 S.E. 8th, where it was administered by the newly formed Shawnee County Department of Corrections.

Overall, he worked in law enforcement and the county corrections department for 22 years. In the jail, he worked as a jailer, supervisor, manager and deputy director of the county corrections department. Bayens and Earl Hindman, the first director of the county corrections department in 1986, aided in designing the new jail, Bayens said.

In 1996, Bayens started at Washburn University, where he has been a faculty member and is now associate dean of the university’s school of applied studies. He earned a doctorate in criminal justice.

“Frontier Kansas Jails” covers city and county jails from 1850s in the Kansas territorial days to 1890.

The jails evolved from wooden structures to concrete and limestone or native stone buildings to jails that were near the sheriff’s residence, both being housed in county courthouses, Bayens said.

Early jails were built to keep the inmates locked inside and the mobs seeking to lynch them outside, Bayens said. Lynchings in Kansas numbered in the hundreds, particularly in the state’s early years, according to Kansas historical records.

Colorful characters populate the book.

They include a young William “Wild Bill” Hickok, who was a constable in Monticello, a thriving Johnson County township, and later city marshal in Abilene, where he accidentally fatally shot the jailer.

In pre-Civil War Lecompton in Douglas County, abolitionists were incarcerated in the town’s first jail, a frame house, but the prisoners could walk outside the building, then return, Bayens said.

Living conditions in 19th century Kansas jails were basic.

“You got adequate care for that time period,” Bayens said. “You got fed, and if you did what they asked you to do, you were taken care of.”

On the other hand, an early-day jail was noisy, isolated, the toilet was a bucket, temperatures were too cold or too hot, standards didn’t exist for inmate care, and “the weak got preyed upon,” Bayens said.

Lawrence carries the distinction of building the first “iron jail” in the West. It was considered the strongest jail in the Kansas Territory and was a haven for prisoners fearing lynch mobs, Bayens said.

Leavenworth, the first city to have a city jail, was nicknamed “Prison City” because the state prison, the military prison and the federal prison were built there, Bayens said.

Two frontier Kansas jails that are favorites of Bayens are the Chase County Courthouse Jail in Cottonwood Falls and the Nemaha County Jail in Seneca. The two-story brick Nemaha County Jail operated for 97 years as a jail, but now houses the Nemaha County Historical Society.

“When you see those, (they’re) what a jail is supposed to look like for the mid-1800s: steel walls and bars,” Bayens said.

Perhaps the most novel jail design was the Sedgwick County Jail, which was a “rotary jail,” also known as the “squirrel cage.”

Built in Wichita, the rotary jail was a circular structure subdivided into 20 wedge-shaped cells on two tiers and mounted on a central shaft, the Bayens book said. The whole structure rotated to add prisoners to cells or remove them, Bayens said.

Each tier had one door to enter and leave each cell as the cell rotated to the door, the book said.

The city of Wichita thought the rotary jail was the most secure jail built, Bayens said.

But it did have a safety problem.

Some overheated prisoners would lean their arms through the cell bars to try to cool down only to have them severed when the jail rotated, catching an arm between a bar and the immobile wall it was passing.

“Some people lost arms,” Bayens said.

Prohibitionist Carry Nation, who used a hatchet to wreck saloons in Topeka and Wichita, spent time in the rotary jail in Wichita, Bayens said. The first prisoners entered the rotary jail in October 1888, but by 1916, the jail had flaws, the book said, and the squirrel cage was dismantled in 1924.

Bayens knows of 32 frontier jails in Kansas, and “I understand there may be more.”

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Information from: The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, https://www.cjonline.com