Branded a Criminal: My Time in Kansas Corrections [Part Two]
By Devon Westerfield, Ellsworth Correctional Facility
Devon Westerfield is an artist currently incarcerated at Ellsworth Correctional Facility in Ellsworth, Kansas. [At the time of this article, he was at Lansing Correctional.] He is anticipating his release this summer. He enjoys working on his craft, reading fantasy novels, and caring for others.
Original Artwork by Devon. See a gallery of his work here.
If you haven’t read Part One of “Branded a Criminal,” start at the beginning of Devon’s story here.
Adapting to Society
My mom was let out of prison when I was eleven. I’d gotten to know her for a few years before I was taken away to the boys’ homes. She fought hard to regain parental rights after the courts saw her unfit to raise my brother and me. But when I came home at eighteen, I barely knew my mom and my brother, and they hardly knew me. We were together but not fully united, as the broken system had divided us for the majority of our lives, and gave little to no incentive for us to grow and heal. Now, full of rage, full of hurt, full of confusion, full of insecurities, I squandered my new “freedom.” With no real job skills, no education, no “normal” experiences with people my age, no drive or inspiration, and certainly no knowledge of a better life outside the hell I was living—I “survived” the best I could.
I didn’t know how to socialize with people because I had been institutionalized and grew up in a war zone. I tried to make new friends, tried to date, tried to work under the table, tried to meet people and socialize, but I was met with more accusations and unrealistic expectations. I fell in line with what was around me that seemed to bring everyone together: sex, drugs, and alcohol.
I partied for a few years without knowing why and without enjoying it, because that’s where my “friends” and “family” were. The party scene, the drug scene, and sex was all new to me. While most people my age had already been engaging in this behavior for years, I had been incarcerated all those years. Yet, no one believed me or took me seriously when I told them that I either didn’t know what I was doing or couldn’t keep up with them. I didn’t know who I was, where I fit in, where I belonged, or who truly loved me.
The challenge of adapting to society after spending my youth in incarceration was immense. I couldn’t find a job and developed new addictions to drinking and smoking. In the face of it all, I turned to robbing stores and houses, car-hopping, drug dealing, fighting, and “surviving” the only way I had learned how. By nineteen, I was a convicted felon for burglary and theft.,I was sentenced to serve time in county jail, but now had with a criminal history already so extensive that I was one mistake away from going to state prison long-term as an adult. I was just a teenager—a child—yet the court system had already labeled me a menace to society, a madman.
Living a Triple Life
All my life I was expected to act like an adult, or whatever I thought “adult” meant at the time. Since most adults I knew were angry, violent, mean, addicted, sexual, and assertive, I tried to be like them just to get through life without being bothered.
I was released from county jail at twenty years old with no ID, no birth certificate, still no people skills, still no job skills, still no education, and an extensive and growing criminal history. I was lost and lonely while on felony community corrections in small-town Independence, KS. I fell in love with a girl I grew up with who had also already been to prison at eighteen. I tried to do the “adult” thing everyone was telling me to do, and moved into a rundown rental house with her.
Without any preparation for these responsibilities and what it meant to share life with another person, we now had to find jobs to pay rent and legal fees. Since we were both on community corrections with the same corrections officer, we hid the fact that we were together so our corrections officer wouldn’t force us to separate. Once I finally confessed to my officer that I was with someone else on corrections, we were “allowed” to see each other as long as we continued to be positive influences on each other and search for employment.
We had to report to the corrections office every weekday at 8:30 a.m.—usually to wait an hour to be seen—so we could grab a job search form and bring it back by 5:30 p.m. We had to have no less than five signatures from hiring managers or other employees at the businesses where we were seeking work. With no vehicle, no ID, a criminal history, and all these rules and responsibilities to focus on when finding a job, young love was consuming us. Amidst the pressures of living out this “adult life” with little to no clue what we were doing, we managed to fill out eighty applications a piece before we both landed jobs. Ultimately, we got those jobs because we personally knew someone working there already, not because we followed the process prescribed to us.
Lucky to make $200 a week, I was expected to give up much of my money to the community corrections office for UA fees, monthly probation fees, court costs, fines, and attorney fees. It was impossible to satisfy my legal debts, pay rent, pay utilities, buy groceries and household items, pay for meager entertainment, and save for emergencies or a vehicle. I owed so much money and felt the pressure coming from so many different angles, so I turned again to car-hopping, scrapping metals, and burglarizing stores just to get by. All this time, I was also trying to be the kid I never got to be.
I could never quite master all of these roles in my life at the same time. I unintentionally became the monster I’d always been made out to be. By 22, I was still trapped in the judicial system, further in debt, no closer to correcting my life, and with my first child on the way. I was suddenly expected to master parenthood, too, with no experience or role models to learn from or standards to aspire to. By this point, I saw that my fiancée was viewed by those around us as an angel being held back by Satan himself—I was no better than a demon in the eyes of many. Feeling like a drain on everyone, feeling like a lost cause, feeling the judgment and hatred from others, and never feeling equal to others or my own fiancée, I awkwardly stumbled through this foreign life, overwhelmed by responsibilities and debts.
Grinding away for minimum wage in the food service industry, cooking and serving food for the greediest and snappiest customers I’d ever seen, I still couldn’t afford my life of responsibilities. Eventually, I was introduced to a meth dealer who seemed so flashy and self-made that I thought I’d invest my last $100 to get a start in the “dope game”—all in attempt to provide for my newborn son, my fiancee, and pay my debts at the same time.
Because I didn’t yet understand the people I was dealing to (and dealing with), I quickly found myself mixed up with the same people I’ve always naturally avoided. What I thought was a lucrative business move turned into an overpowering addiction to the drug and the adventures it took me on: the thrill, the high, the women, the sex. I ended up living a double life, maybe even a triple life. I was a father and husband-to-be. I was a meth dealer acting like a bachelor. And I was a “law-abiding citizen” on community corrections. I was all of this and more and still didn’t know how to be any of it. I was unhappy, depressed, lonely, lost, scared, overwhelmed, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, and afraid of the present.
Building From the Ground Up
Life went on this way, getting worse with rare moments of happiness and peace for the next couple of years. With my second son on the way, I was back in county jail for a domestic dispute with my spouse. After spending eight months in jail, I was railroaded and pushed into taking a plea deal I should never have taken just so I could get back home to the woman I loved and my two beautiful boys. For the hundredth time in my life, it seemed I was being released from incarceration and put right back into the community with an endless amount of debts and expectations, with little support, no skills, a huge gap in employment history, and an even larger criminal history.
I was lucky to land a job at the deli downtown. I did my best to be whatever I thought a man was supposed to be, and started building my life from the ground up—again. Now I had my own family leaning on me, looking to me as their provider and hero. As much as I loved the idea of that and tried to be that family man, my past was very present still haunted me daily. On community corrections in two different counties, on bond, all while being a beginner-level dad, everything quickly spun out of control.
Here and there, I'd get control back. I got some education and an ID. Sometimes I'd get lucky with a hand-me-down job, and I'd get a good routine going. Things would be nice for a short time, but the legal fees never diminished, the court dates never stopped popping up on the calendar, and debt collectors started tracking me down. The trust I’d worked so hard to earn was very easily lost, and the traumas I’d experienced my whole life were still taking a toll without me understanding why or how.
Long story short, I came to adult prison in 2017 while my spouse was pregnant with our third son. By this point, I’d lost the woman I loved, been stripped of my parental rights, and was ordered to never return to my home county. I was suicidal. I was sentenced to serve the rest of a 27 month jail sentence, with about 17 months left to serve, at the state prison. During that 17 months, I was served a “nunc pro tunc”—an illegal motion to change my one year parole to a lifetime parole after my 17 months in prison.
My experience in Kansas prisons was and has always been traumatizing and suffocating. Without trying to make myself out to be a completely innocent or sin-free person, I want others to understand that, aside from my broken upbringing, the broken justice system led me to this point in my life.
Creating True Change from Within these Cages
During my time in KDOC custody, I have been in a prison that had the highest employee turnover rate out of any prison in the country, losing about 250 employees in three months due to how poorly managed and unsafe the prison is. I’ve had to live in protective custody cellhouses or in segregation cellhouses otherwise known as “the hole” for a year and a half at a time. This happened during two different bids because I was wrongly classified as max security custody and forced to live with people who were the complete opposite of me, putting me in dangerous positions. I could go on and on about all of the corruption taking place in correctional facilities, but there’s simply not enough paper. What I can say is that the “criminals” in these prisons are not the inmates. A great amount of the criminal behavior taking place is from staff.
As I wrote in Part One of this essay, I’ve been a victim of abuse from staff members most of my experience in KDOC, constantly being subjected to harsh profiling and judgment in several different forms. I’ve endured unprofessional joking from officers and unit teams. I’ve had mental health counselors give me unprofessional and personally biased advice or counseling that was more damaging than helpful. I’ve been ignored, laughed at, or dismissed as a nuisance every time I’ve reached out for help with my release plan, interest in programs, issues with commissary not being delivered, and issues with my mail being tampered with. My photo albums have been “lost” or destroyed by property officers and considered as “miscellaneous paper” on property receipts.
My safety is unimportant or not taken seriously when I explain why I shouldn’t be housed with certain individuals who might cause me to defend myself and result in a disciplinary report (DR). The majority of my Form 9s—which must be filed to submit any formal request—are never responded to. Or, alternatively, they are intercepted by corrupt unit team officers to be either thrown away or returned to me with a belittling response that doesn’t address my requests.
Upon coming back to prison in August 2021, I was supposed to return to the prison I was last released from, Ellsworth Correctional, but I was mistakenly housed at Lansing (LCF). During the 22-day quarantine/admission process, I made my unit team aware of where I should be housed based on my low-medium custody level, and they ignored me and seemed completely inexperienced in their job duties. As I expected, after my quarantine process, I was housed in a four-man cell here in LCF, in a chaotic cellhouse running rampant with unruly behavior from staff and inmates alike. There, I was in close quarters with enemies I would need to protect myself from, undoubtedly leading to violent behavior. I requested that I be placed on protective custody to avoid drama and violence, and I was placed in the hole in a cell with a cellmate that made me extremely uncomfortable, putting me constantly on edge during the month I had to live with him.
During the last seven months I’ve only been outside two times, both times to to see the on-site dentist. I have only been able to call home for fifteen minutes at a time every other day, and I’ve only been able to shower every other day as well. All three meals a day are brought to my cell in a brown sack or a styrofoam tray, and most of the food is cold, hard, dry, and served in small portions. Cleaning supplies are never delivered to our cells as they should be, and cellhouses are so dirty that staff members sometimes decide to “sweep up” the trash and dirty clothes in the dayrooms with snow shovels. Staff members yell at us all hours of the night and day without reason. Mail is delivered to the wrong people regularly. The list of offenses goes on.
I’m not just complaining by telling these stories, I am trying to shed light on the corruption going on in these facilities, the criminal behavior coming from those who are supposedly put in place to enforce law, and the abuse that is hidden or swept under the rug. Even though I am incarcerated, I shouldn’t have to endure so much abuse. I believe that there is a minuscule amount of true growth, healing, rehabilitation, and “correction” offered to the inmate population, only accessible to a very limited amount of the population. By far, the majority of the population is experiencing abuse and mismanagement. In a place that calls itself the Department of “Corrections” and a “Correctional” facility, there is not enough offered to us to help us correct ourselves.
In restrictive cellhouses, such as the one I’m currently housed in, corrective programming isn’t even offered—or, when a program is offered, it’s only available to a handful of people out of at least 90 or more people per cellhouse. On the occasions a program is offered, it’s usually canceled in a matter of weeks due to staff quitting or our unit team forbidding the group to continue. They use safety issues or staff shortages as an excuse to cancel programs, but we lose out on opportunities to truly better ourselves when we don’t have access to these groups. Whatever “correction” I find in my life during my stay in prison is self-taught in solitary confinement. And, of course, even solitary confinement is not solitary anymore, as we are forced to live in a single man cell with another person, a complete stranger.
I hope to combat the abuse and harsh conditions by raising awareness and calling outsiders to help myself and others make a stand against the corruption in KDOC and the justice system. By limiting our phone calls to fifteen minutes every other day, they make it impossible to communicate with the outside unless our loved ones just happen to be available during that fifteen minutes of the day. And with the mail tampering going on, many of our letters disappear without cause or help to track them down.
It’s been tough for me to endure these living arrangements and I intend to go into further detail in future articles. This is only a peek into my experiences with this flawed system that claims to be in place to “correct” criminal behavior. In actuality, I’ve found that so many of us who are incarcerated have been the victims of true criminal behavior perpetrated by a system that claims to help us. I just want to create true change from within these cages, and bring about real positive change for those of us in chains. But we can’t do it alone. We need help.