Jump to Navigation

Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing records

This last name index includes prisoners at Lansing from 1861 to 1952, and is the same as microfilm reels AR 7458-AR 7469.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

No last name given

Early mug shots of two state prisoner inmates in 1905.This prison index usually gives the prisoner number, crime, county where convicted and the volume and page number from the prison admission ledgers. The admission ledgers are the only records that have been saved for the earliest Lansing inmates. Starting in the late 1800s there are often individual prisoner case files as well. See an example of an individual prisoner's case file. The earliest case files are fully open to the public, but some of the later files include information, e.g. medical records, that is still restricted. After 1901 most prisoner files contain mugshots similar to the one on the left.

Before the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women opened in 1917, the prison index included both male and female prisoners. It also included prisoners that were sent to Kansas from Oklahoma Territory before statehood in 1907. Individual case files for the women prisoners and the Oklahoma prisoners are not available, but the early admission and discharge registers for women prisoners are on our Kansas Memory website: Inmates received, 1917-1926 and Inmates discharged, 1917-1926.

The index for prisoners after 1952, up to approximately 1984, is on microfilm reel numbers AR 2475 to AR 2478. That index includes two of Lansing's best known inmates: Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, who were executed at the prison in 1965 for the murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Finney County, Kansas. The murders were the subject of the book In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The open records from Hickock and Smith's prisoner files are online, along with items about the history of capital punishment in Kansas. Information about Kansas prisoners in custody after 1980 is available online from the Dept. of Corrections' KASPER database.