Majority of Kansas inmates housed in Arizona have COVID-19

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A majority of the inmates Kansas is housing in a privately run Arizona prison have coronavirus.

The Kansas Department of Corrections said Thursday there were 77 active coronavirus cases among the inmates housed out-of-state as of Monday. The department said it is housing 118 offenders at the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona. It has moved inmates there to prevent crowding in Kansas state prisons.

The Saguaro prison is operated by CoreCivic, a large private corrections company based in the Nashville area. The company also designed and built a new prison for the state in Lansing to replace an aging facility there that had first opened in the 1860s.

Department spokeswoman Carol Pitts said the numbers of cases among Kansas inmates at the Arizona prison appears consistent with numbers for outbreaks in Kansas prisons. Since the pandemic reached Kansas in early March, the department has reported more than 4,800 cases and 11 deaths among inmates and nearly 800 cases and three deaths among staff at its prisons for adult offenders.

The state health department has reported more than 162,000 confirmed and probable coronavirus cases and 1,679 deaths in Kansas since the pandemic began.