[Reshaping the Kansas Technical Institute’s campus into an
actual prison provides a perspective on what it means when, over time,
whole populations are functionally criminalized.]
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ONE SCHOOL’S MISSING HISTORY: A FAMILY HEIRLOOM, LOST IN PLAIN
SIGHT  
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Tamar Sarai
September 26, 2023
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ Reshaping the Kansas Technical Institute’s campus into an actual
prison provides a perspective on what it means when, over time, whole
populations are functionally criminalized. _

The Topeka Correctional Facility, pictured, sits on the original
campus of the Kansas Technical Institute. (Photo:
www.PrisonInsight.com/CC),

 

Not long after moving to Topeka, Kansas, in the early 1980s, community
organizer Curtis Pitts learned about a hidden slice of that city’s
history that would come to shape his life’s work over the next four
decades. He was introduced to the Kansas Technical Institute, or KTI,
a Black vocational college that had prospered throughout the early
twentieth century, only to close in the mid-1950s.

Founded in 1895, KTI enjoyed the distinction of being the second Black
college established west of the Mississippi. Built in part by its own
students, the school became a self-sustaining campus, training them in
agriculture, nursing, printing, tailoring, and theology, among other
subjects. The story of KTI almost immediately captured Pitts’s
attention, both because of its grandeur at the time and the ways its
absence had impacted the city.

“Thinking that this was the _Brown v. the Board of
Education _city, this should be just like Atlanta with the Black
community prospering,” Pitts told me, recalling his early
observations of Topeka. “Once I found out that the school closed,
you can see a direct correlation to the demise of Black businesses and
families and communities because it was a hub and many of the business
owners had learned their trade from the school.”

The benefits — both tangible and intangible — of any school,
particularly one designed with Black students in mind, compelled Pitts
not just to educate himself in the history of KTI but also, in the
end, to try to reopen it, ushering in a new twenty-first-century
version of the school. If its closure was sobering, its later
transformation should have been confounding.

The shock of that change was captured in the moment, more than 40
years ago, when a friend first told Pitts about the school. “At that
time, we were standing in his front yard and he kept looking across
the street and he started talking about the college and why he came
[to Topeka],” said Pitts. “I’m trying to figure out which
college he was talking about because all I could see was a prison.”

RETALIATION FOR _BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION_?

KTI’s role in contributing to the rise of local business owners
speaks to the importance of vocational training for young Black
students nationwide at the time. Throughout the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, such training was the underpinning of many
Black secondary schools and colleges. Most of them focused on specific
trades with the goal not just of preparing their students for decent,
steady work but also indoctrinating them with values like
industriousness, efficiency, and self-reliance.

Perhaps the best-known and most influential leader of that pedagogical
approach was Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute
in Alabama. He crafted its curriculum in a way that married vocational
trades to academic study and famously instructed Blacks to “cast
down their bucket where they are” and acquire the skills needed to
take care of themselves.

Though a controversial stance at the time, Washington’s invitation
encapsulated the mission of Tuskegee and came to serve as a model for
other Black vocational schools, including KTI. In fact, the school’s
founders, Lizzie Riddick and Edward Stephens, would successfully
enlist the support of Washington when establishing KTI and former
Tuskegee professors and directors would go on to hold prominent
positions there. As only the second historically Black college
established west of the Mississippi River, the Topeka-based school
would come to be known locally as “the Tuskegee of the West.”

KTI’s closure in 1955, while unexpected for its students and alumni,
would prove part of a wave of similar shutdowns in the wake of the
Supreme Court’s _Brown v. Board of Education _decision that ruled
segregation unconstitutional. But while closings like that of the
Manual Training and Industrial School in New Jersey were explicitly
tied to that ruling, the cause of KTI’s remains murkier. Formally,
state legislators shuttered the institution because Kansas already had
another technical institute providing similar training, but Pitts
wonders whether it wasn’t actually a form of local white retaliation
for the _Brown _ruling.

What’s clear is that, by 1961, the state had transferred control of
the former campus to the Department of Corrections and, by 2001, the
space would, grimly enough, become home to Kansas’s first and only
women’s prison.

THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE

KTI’s last class graduated more than half a century ago. Still,
Pitts finds that some Black Topekans he speaks to about it have
distant, often unexpected, ties to it.

“At this stage, you’re dealing with a lot more of ‘my dad or
grandpa went there,’” said Pitts. “But most people I have to
tell what it was. They’re going ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was
there’ or ‘I was in prison there and I never knew that.’”

Barely five years after KTI’s closure, the Kansas legislature
authorized the director of penal institutions to oversee the
conversion of the campus into a center performing evaluations on
individuals sentenced to the Kansas state penitentiary. Work crews of
men incarcerated at the local penitentiary were hired to help renovate
the school campus. In 1990, that center, combined with three other
correctional institutions, would become the Topeka Correctional
Facility and, in 2001, would transition from co-ed to all-female.

Still, even if a new generation of Topekans largely grew up without
knowledge of the school’s existence, remnants of it are still there
in plain sight, scattered across the prison grounds. Pitts, for
instance, recalls giving a presentation at the facility while it was
still a co-ed prison and stumbling across a school bench dedicated to
a KTI sorority.

In its devolution, alumni and admirers like Pitts have pointed out how
the site’s transformation brings to mind the school-to-prison
pipeline
[[link removed]].
Consider that an effective metaphor, tying the story of the Kansas
Technical Institute’s devolution to a concept the public is familiar
with, while also expanding its potential meaning. Education, racial
justice, and criminal legal reform advocates have used the term as a
shorthand way to describe how young people — often Black students
— are criminalized in school in ways that directly funnel them into
the carceral system.

Instead of serving as spaces of opportunity, intellectual growth, and
belonging, some schools have become all too literal conduits into the
prison system and increasingly are even designed to look ever more
like carceral facilities. But the reshaping of KTI’s campus into an
actual prison offers both a metaphor for and a perspective on that
pipeline and what it means when, over time, whole populations are
functionally criminalized and state investment shifts from educational
training to incarceration.

While, as an image, the school-to-prison pipeline typically focuses
attention on the fate of individual students as they are punished with
zero-tolerance disciplinary policies and the like, the story of KTI
focuses on a larger picture: the movement of funds, priorities, and
investment from a successful school to the incarceration of Kansans of
color and, most recently, Kansan women of color.

Over the past three decades, the incarceration of women has exploded
nationwide, growing at twice the pace of male imprisonment, even if
all too little attention has been paid to the phenomenon. According to
the Prison Policy Initiative
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the United States is among the top female incarcerators in the world
with 172,700 women and girls living in some form of correctional
confinement. While 72,000 of them are indeed detained in state prisons
like the Topeka Correctional Facility, women are disproportionately
incarcerated in local jails, which creates a unique set of harmful
consequences that those held in state or federal prisons are less
likely to contend with.

As a start, local jails provide even worse healthcare and fewer kinds
of programming that might connect the imprisoned to academic or job
training which might, in turn, reduce their risk of recidivism. In
addition, communication with the outside world — friends, family,
and loved ones — is often more difficult in jails where a phone call
may be at least three times as expensive as calls from prison and
where receiving mail, even postcards, is sometimes prohibited. Given
that 80% of women in jails are mothers and often the primary
caretakers for their families, the ripple effect beyond the walls is
profound.

And yet even state prisons like Topeka Correctional offer their own
versions of such devastation. For one thing, the sexual violence that
pervades incarcerated women’s lives in prisons (as well as jails
nationwide) is all too obvious at Topeka Correctional. In 2009,
the _Topeka Capital-Journal_ exposed
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“complex black market” of contraband and bribes as well as a sex
trade that women incarcerated at the facility were coerced into
participating in.

Still, the state’s incarcerated women’s population continues to
balloon. From 2000 to 2018 it rose by 60% — a dramatic increase,
especially compared to the 14% increase in the men’s population in
those years. No wonder, then, that, as the state’s sole women’s
prison, Topeka Correctional has faced challenges with overcrowding in
recent years that have only led to a further deterioration in living
conditions and less access to crucial programming.

In 2019, 77% of the women who entered prison in Kansas did so as a
result of a probation or parole violation, compared to 65% of men. The
Kansas Sentencing Commission argued
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this rise in recidivism among women can be attributed in large part to
a 2013 law that “reformed” probation across the state. In
actuality, it stripped judges of the possibility of using personal
discretion when sanctioning individuals who violated probation or
parole. Instead, it required that they stick to a prescribed flowchart
of punishments that ranged from a couple of days in jail to the full
length of their original sentences. Judges could no longer make
exceptions or take into account any unique factors in prisoners’
lives that might have caused them to breach probation or parole
requirements in the first place.

In a 2020 article
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George Ebo Browne, a senior research analyst at the Kansas Sentencing
Commission, noted that the law “changed practice for everyone. But
how it was applied on the bench greatly impacted women.”

A SENSE OF HEALING

Questions about the Kansas Technical Institute have plagued Curtis
Pitts since the moment he first learned about it. Who really owned the
land the school had been built on? Why did it actually close? Who
ceded control of it to the Department of Corrections? One day, while
sifting through the Shawnee County Office of the Register of Deeds, he
finally located the deed to KTI and made a discovery that would
startle local historians and provide new fuel for his mission to
reopen the school.

A corporation warranty deed for it dated November 1910 stated that
“the said property lands and appropriation should be perpetually
used exclusively and solely for the industrial and educational
training and development of Negro youth.” In essence, whether the
school existed or not, the state was — or at least should have been
— bound to continue using the land for the teaching and training of
Black youth.

“Whoever wrote that document,” Pitts told me, “they knew, at the
time, that Black people had no recourse and no ability to fight, but
they knew that there would come a time when their children (and people
who were concerned for their children of all races) would be able to
stand up and fight and find this document. So, when I found that
document it shocked me.”

Pitts took it to lawyers who affirmed its validity, helping advance
his plans to launch the East Topeka Learning Center, a new
post-secondary education facility, as KTI’s legacy. In 2018, Kansas
lawmakers finally incorporated his proposal into the development
of Washburn Tech East
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a training facility for adults specializing in healthcare,
construction, and commercial truck driving.

Despite that success, Pitts still feels that KTI itself should be
reopened, describing the school as an heirloom that has yet to be
returned to its rightful owner: the city’s Black community of the
past, present, and future.

Pitts says that, while he’s received little pushback from
legislators on his efforts, there has been a great deal of silence.
Still, he insists, it’s essential not to be deterred or controlled
by the whims of lawmakers and that establishing such a school
independently through community efforts would be a demonstration in
self-sufficiency.

“This is my philosophy,” he said, “with which I’m pressing
everybody: you don’t wait for them to define the success or failure
of your community. We must go through the process through the regents
and educational-approving and ability-granting entities to open those
schools ourselves. That’s what our children are waiting to see. They
want to see us make a commitment to their future.”

Pitts notes that while there’s a clear connection between KTI’s
success, the way it went down, and its conversion into a prison, the
movement to reopen the school still seems strangely siloed from those
focused more squarely on criminal justice reform and decarceration. If
KTI were to reopen, it should be with a full reckoning of its history,
lest the past be repeated yet again.

“That beautiful institution that our ancestors built with their own
hands is sitting out there as a prison,” Pitts told me. “I
understand why the state made that $300 million investment because
it’s the only women’s prison in the state of Kansas, but there are
other things that we could do that would allow us to create a sense of
healing and curing on this issue.”

Every space and piece of infrastructure in our world, no matter how we
engage with it — a converted building, an abandoned plot of land, a
defunct railway, a closed school — has its own past. And sometimes
the way it’s evolved, or devolved, illuminates something so much
larger than what just the physical borders of that space can hold. In
Pitts’s case, the history of the Kansas Technical Institute is just
the beginning of a tale that led to Topeka Correctional, the
school-to-prison pipeline, a community’s loss, and a distinctly
unnerving world.

_Tamar Sarai is a writer and staff reporter at Prism
[[link removed]] where she covers the criminal legal
system. Her work has been published
in Essence, Shadowproof, Capital B, and other publications._

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* Mass Incarceration
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