Behind the Bars

The Wilson County Jail is on the high ground at the edge of downtown Lebanon, four blocks from the town square. It faces south, sandwiched on a 5.1-acre lot between Route 70 and a cluster of one-story brick houses, the kind with air-conditioning units hanging off the side and wash lines in the front yard.

The jail itself is part of a larger complex of connected buildings that include courtrooms, a county clerk office and the sheriff’s department headquarters. From the street, the series of brown and white, flat-roofed buildings could be mistaken for a middle school. But the razor wire on the back of the facility gives away the martial nature of the place, hinting at the business carried out within.

Exactly what that business is has been the subject of federal and state investigations, newspaper editorials and political arguments. About 8,000 prisoners go through the jail each year. Within those walls a man died at the hands of his jailers, a woman was beaten, and many have had their legal and human rights abrogated.

In 2004, a renovation project began to transform much of the prison, though it will leave a large chunk of the original, nearly two-decade-old facility in place. The man who presides over this place is Sheriff Terry Ashe, who has held the job since 1982 and has been in Wilson County law enforcement since 1974. His career straddles the old and the new in the sheriff’s office. What troubles some in Wilson County is that the problems the jail has faced in the past may also be carried into the future.

Ashe hasn’t lost an election in 25 years. On a recent morning, as he conducts a tour of his jail, the charm and intelligence that has endeared Ashe to a generation of Wilson County voters are on full display. The sheriff backslaps inmates and guards alike, calling them all by name.

His magnificent ability to pass the buck with a straight face also is evident. To hear Ashe tell it, his guards savagely beat inmates because of a county commission that under-funded his department. He didn’t learn of these beatings, he says, because those same guards falsified reports. Never mind that the whole thing went down a few hundred yards from his office.

Of course, false reports work both ways in Ashe’s world. Told of a young woman who accused jail officers of beating and macing her repeatedly, Ashe responds with disbelief, saying essentially that anyone can file a report for anything; it doesn’t mean it’s true. When an inmate died of a drug overdose while in the jail’s custody and in the presence of its nurse, Ashe chalked it up to the fact that no competent medical professional will work in a jail when they could get paid more to work in a hospital. And a mentally ill inmate who attempted to hang herself with her own underwear? That’s the fault of a society that expects jails to deal with its homeless problem.

Indeed, listening to Sheriff Terry Ashe, it seems as if all these things happened on somebody else’s watch. The deficiencies in his department are many and glaring, but in the end Ashe always seems to use his charisma, political acumen and power to rise above controversy unscathed.

Last August, many of these deficiencies came to light in the form of a Department of Justice investigation. The investigation was conducted in the summer of 2006, pursuant to the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law that allows the U.S. attorney general to investigate conditions at state or local prisons.

The report is a devastating indictment, describing the Wilson County Jail as a house of horrors where constitutional rights are routinely ignored and jail keepers use excessive force to keep prisoners in line. Inspectors found that the guards’ use of force went uninvestigated and that staff members determine disciplinary procedure as they go along. A diabetic inmate was put on “lockdown” for 72 hours for nothing more than “mouthing off” to an officer who refused to check her blood sugar levels, the report says.

Investigators also described the place as a disorganized mess, with cans of chemical spray, handcuffs and kitchen knives left unsecured, unguarded and within reach of prisoners.

The jail’s basic medical facilities were just as disorganized, according to the report. It describes how inmates with chronic, life-threatening illnesses such as HIV and diabetes go months without routine medical supervision. An outbreak of a contagious skin infection wasn’t properly isolated because of a complete lack of protocols to deal with such crises. Inmates weren’t being tested for communicable diseases like TB despite overcrowding that makes the jail a tinderbox for airborne respiratory ailments.

Compounding these problems is a medical staff that the Justice Department described as inadequately trained and in some cases unqualified.

The report outlined 29 measures that the county would have to take to bring the jail up to federal standards or face the possibility of a lawsuit from the attorney general. Ashe says the county responded to the investigation by meeting all 29 recommendations and that federal inspectors have not been back since.