In September, Brenda Kay Spitzbarth traveled more than two hours from her home in Maryville to Lebanon to attend a town hall event focused on prison reform in Tennessee.
During the Q&A portion of the town hall, Spitzbarth approached the podium with a question.
“How do I keep my son safe?” she asked a panel of state lawmakers and corrections officials.
At the time, her 38-year old son Dustin Sims was incarcerated at Turney Center Industrial Complex, a state-run prison in Hickman County. “I’m here because my son is in immediate danger,” Spitzbarth told officials at the September meeting, outlining concerns over violence in the facility and illegal drugs being smuggled into the prison. She said when her son attempted to get involved in mental health and drug treatment programs, his requests were largely ignored. When she would try to contact the prison in an effort to get help for her son, she often also received no response.
“What do I do to get help for my boy?” she pleaded with the panel.
One month later, her son was killed while in protective custody at Turney Center. According to Sims’ autopsy report, he was stabbed in his head, neck, chest and torso multiple times and suffered blunt force injuries across his body.
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Spitzbarth’s worst fears were made reality. She tells the Scene she routinely received phone calls from Sims in which he expressed his fear inside Turney Center, which he said was wracked with violence and gang activity.
“He was terrified, and he said, ‘Mom, it’s just a matter of time till they bust through that door right there, they’ll kill me,’” Spitzbarth says. “And me being a mother sitting on the other side, I’m scared to death for him.”
Sims was killed while in protective custody, a period of confinement for incarcerated people who are in danger or under threat of being harmed. A few days after her son’s death, Spitzbarth received her final letter in the mail from him, in which he’d written that he wanted to remain in his single-cell unit for a little while longer. Several days later, he was placed in a cell with the man who killed him, she says.
“My full belief is that the staff at the Turney Center just displayed deliberate, malicious indifference to his situation, and they contributed to his murder by placing him in the cell with that man,” says Spitzbarth.
Since Sims’ death, many questions remain over what policies and procedures were taken by Tennessee Department of Correction staff that day — and what could have been done to prevent it. Spitzbarth continues to express frustration with TDOC and its lack of transparency and communication with families of those incarcerated in Tennessee prisons. When it comes to prison reform in the state, much of the chatter centers on mismanagement and violence reported inside facilities run by the massive private prison operator CoreCivic. But Spitzbarth and others contend that conditions in Tennessee’s state-run prisons are also becoming increasingly dangerous, and the lack of accountability persists.
“I just want Dustin’s life to mean something,” Spitzbarth says. “Yes, he needed to be in prison, but he also deserved to be safe and in a humane situation.”
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A recently filed piece of legislation, House Bill 2111/Senate Bill 2531, seeks to increase communication and support through the creation of a family advisory board within the Tennessee Department of Correction. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Clark Boyd (R-Lebanon) and Sen. Tom Hatcher (R-Maryville).
Spitzbarth says a board could be one step in the right direction.
“People don’t seem to care that those 20-something-thousand families have children and mothers and wives and daughters and sons out here that are affected by the way they treat them and the way things are handled inside,” she says.
Hatcher is also sponsoring a bill that could equip correctional officers with body cameras at the CoreCivic-run Trousdale Turner Correctional Center — one of the state’s most notoriously dangerous facilities. If passed, the bill would require TDOC to study the cost of running a pilot program using the cameras at the prison and report its findings to the General Assembly by July.
Tennessee’s top correction official is against the proposal of placing body cameras in all of the state’s prisons. In January, TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada told lawmakers at a Senate State and Local Government Corrections Subcommittee that it would cost millions of dollars in implementation, monitoring and public record requests. He argued instead in favor of expanding a central intelligence center that would use AI technology and drones in an attempt to stop contraband from making its way into the facilities.
TDOC declined to comment on pending legislation or allegations of lack of communication and transparency with families of incarcerated Tennesseans.
