A COVID-19 Outbreak in Tennessee’s Prisons and Jails Is No Longer Hypothetical

The Tennessee Department of Correction is updating this page with the results of ongoing COVID-19 testing in the state's prisons.

We don’t know when exactly the coronavirus breached the walls of Tennessee’s prisons and jails, but now the outbreak is on.

The first case of COVID-19 in a Tennessee prison was confirmed on March 28, when an employee at CoreCivic’s South Central Correctional Center in Clifton tested positive. Less than a month later, on April 20, the Tennessee Department of Correction announced that 170 prisoners at four prisons had tested positive for the virus, 162 of whom are incarcerated at Bledsoe County Correctional Complex. The department noted that the “vast majority” of the prisoners who tested positive were asymptomatic.  

Those numbers may change by the time you read them — and really, they only provide a partial picture due to the way the virus has raced ahead of testing. But they’re worth noting if only as proof that the hypothetical scenario reporters, lawyers, activists and public health experts warned of is now reality. 

On March 24, dozens of criminal justice and prison advocacy organizations filed a petition asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to take broad action to release vulnerable prisoners, including anyone who had been incarcerated for more than 25 years as well as those over the age of 50. The argument for releasing prisoners is essentially that reducing prison populations will mitigate potential outbreaks and make them easier to handle if and when they occur. Studies show older prisoners are at a higher risk of dying from COVID-19, and are less likely to reoffend if they are released. But the court declined to take any such action, and Gov. Bill Lee has not used his authority to commute any sentences or release a single prisoner. 

As of this writing, although the TDOC says that all inmates at the Bledsoe County prison are being tested, tens of thousands of prisoners statewide are still not being tested — even as the virus is now known to be largely spreading among asymptomatic people. 

The situation is just as dire at the local level. A new report from The Sycamore Institute — a nonpartisan Tennessee public policy research organization — shows that 46 of the state’s 116 active local jails had more inmates than beds at the end of February. On March 26, the Tennessee Supreme Court ordered local judges to come up with plans for reducing jail populations, but just how aggressive those plans are varies greatly. 

In Nashville, criminal justice officials have largely worked together to release vulnerable inmates. Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk and Metro Public Defender Martesha Johnson have worked out agreements to release dozens of inmates. After some public pressure from Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall, the Metro Nashville Police Department has shifted toward issuing citations in lieu of arrests for many misdemeanors. Hall has used his own authority to furlough inmates. Even so, Nashville judges rejected a request from Johnson to release large categories of local inmates. 

Hall told the Scene in late March that Nashville’s jail population was hovering right above 1,100 and that he hoped to get it below 1,000. As of April 19, the number sat at 1,006 according to the sheriff’s office. 

But Hall has also been saying for more than a month now that he fully expected the coronavirus to show up inside his jails. He was right. The first case was confirmed on April 1 when a sheriff’s office employee tested positive. The first inmate tested positive on April 6. As of April 20, 11 inmates and seven staff members have tested positive. (The first staff member has since recovered.) 

In Nashville, Rahim Buford — who manages the Nashville Community Bail Fund — has been putting on a mask and gloves and heading to the now mostly empty courthouse to bail people out. Buford says the Nashville bail fund has paid $40,000 to bail out 17 people in April so far. The bail amounts he’s paying have gone up, he says, but that’s actually a sign of the work other Metro officials have been doing. Inmates are typically referred to the bail fund by the public defender’s office, but with an increase in pretrial releases, most referrals now are coming from inside the jail or from family members whose loved ones are facing higher bail amounts. The pandemic, Buford says, has further exposed the injustice of the bail system.

“People shouldn’t be held in jail pretrial if they don’t have to be there,” Buford says. “To me that’s at the core of the issue. COVID-19 really has highlighted the problem that we have with money bail.”

Even with the system-wide effort to release vulnerable inmates, there are still troubling cases to be found. On the morning he speaks to the Scene, Buford has his eyes on a man who was arrested for criminal trespass and is being held on a $1,000 bond. Buford, who was formerly incarcerated, has already brought an urgency born of experience to his work. Amid the pandemic, that has only increased. 

“My fear is that somebody is going to end up dying.”