Decommissioned in 2020 after housing inmates for more than 160 years, the Kansas State Penitentiary remains a powerful symbol of Kansas’s complex legacy of crime and punishment. While no longer housing the incarcerated, the facility is far from silent. The Kansas Department of Corrections continues to utilize the historic administration building for training and operational purposes. Most notably, the fourth floor still houses the state’s lethal injection chamber—often referred to as the “death chamber”—which remains intact and operational. Because of this, the penitentiary has not been fully decommissioned.
What makes this site unlike any other in the country is that public tours are conducted within the walls of a facility that is still bordered on all four sides by an active, working maximum-security prison. These rare and powerful tours are led by the Lansing Historical Society Museum, featuring guides who served as wardens, assistant wardens, and correctional officers—offering firsthand accounts and behind-the-scenes insight into one of America’s oldest and most formidable institutions.
This is not a re-creation. This is not a simulation. This is real history, surrounded by real prison operations, unfolding in real time.