Kansas Prisons | DOC | Prison Inmate Search

Clicking on any of the Kansas facilities below will direct you to an information page with Inmate Search, Visitation, Mail, Phone, Email, Most Wanted and FAQ for families and friends.

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Kansas Department of Corrections - Prisons & Inmate Search

Kansas State Prisons and Juvenile Facilities

Kansas keeps both its adult prisons and its youth correctional complex under one roof: the Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC), a cabinet agency headquartered in Topeka. The department also runs parole supervision and staffs the Prisoner Review Board. Its oldest institution is the former Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, built by prison labor in the 1860s; its cellhouse began holding felons in July 1868, and it took the name Lansing Correctional Facility in 1990. The state folded its separate Juvenile Justice Authority into KDOC in 2013.

How many people are in Kansas prisons?

KDOC reported 10,434 adults in custody on August 31, 2026: 9,602 men and 832 women. Every one of them was held in a state-run facility. That is a change from 2018 and 2019, when severe staff shortages pushed the state to send roughly 600 men to a private CoreCivic prison in Arizona. Recruiting and keeping officers remains a constant challenge for the department.

Kansas adult facilities

Lansing Correctional Facility (Lansing), the largest, with more than 2,600 men
El Dorado Correctional Facility (El Dorado), the main maximum-security prison and the men’s intake center
Hutchinson Correctional Facility (Hutchinson)
Norton Correctional Facility (Norton)
Ellsworth Correctional Facility (Ellsworth)
Winfield Correctional Facility (Winfield)
Larned State Correctional Facility (Larned), a mental health-focused prison
Topeka Correctional Facility (Topeka), the only prison for women
Wichita Work Release Facility (Wichita), for men nearing release who hold outside jobs

Lansing changed dramatically when a new main prison opened there in 2020, replacing the 19th-century buildings. In 2024 the Lansing Historical Society took over the old penitentiary.

Reception and Diagnostic Unit

After sentencing, men are transferred from the county jail to the Reception and Diagnostic Unit (RDU) at El Dorado. Women complete the same process at the Topeka Correctional Facility. RDU usually takes about two weeks, although an opening at a permanent prison can take up to two months for men. Family members cannot visit during RDU; only attorneys, clergy and law enforcement are allowed. While in RDU, the person fills out a list of people they want as visitors. Each of those people must then return a mailed application and pass a background check before visiting. Calls can go out shortly after arrival, but people in RDU can’t receive calls, and letters must include the person’s full name and KDOC number. Packages are not allowed.

Kansas inmate search

KDOC’s public search tool is called KASPER (Kansas Adult Supervised Population Electronic Repository). It covers people in prison and those under KDOC supervision in the community. You must accept a disclaimer before searching by name or KDOC number.

Capital punishment in Kansas

Kansas has the death penalty but hasn’t used it in six decades. The state’s last executions came in 1965, when it hanged Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the Clutter family killers made famous by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, followed by spree killers George York and James Latham. Kansas reinstated capital punishment in 1994 with lethal injection as the method and built a lethal injection chamber in 2001, yet it has carried out no executions since 1976. Nine men remain under death sentences, and no new death sentence has been handed down in about a decade. In spring 2026, eight of them asked outgoing Gov. Laura Kelly to commute their sentences. By mid-July she had denied three of those requests, from brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr and from serial killer John Robinson.

Juvenile corrections in Kansas

Youth committed by a Kansas juvenile court come under KDOC Juvenile Services. The state now has a single youth prison, the Kansas Juvenile Correctional Complex (KJCC) in north Topeka, with girls housed on the West campus and boys on the East. KJCC became the only one after the Larned Juvenile Correctional Facility closed in 2017. Kansas can treat children as young as 10 as juvenile offenders, and KDOC can keep a young person at KJCC until age 22 and a half. Major reforms passed in 2016 (Senate Bill 367) steered most lower-level youth away from state custody toward community programs. Short-term detention before a case is resolved happens in county or regional juvenile detention centers, not KJCC. Juvenile records are confidential, so parents should contact KDOC Juvenile Services or the facility directly.

To search for an inmate or juvenile, or to learn how to visit, call, write or send money to someone in the Kansas Department of Corrections or KDOC Juvenile Services, choose a facility from the list below.