One of the first things Ashley Dixon learned when she was training to be a correctional officer at CoreCivic’s Trousdale Turner Correctional Center was that you never slam an inmate to the ground. At least not when you’re writing up the incident report. She was told that, in writing, it’s better to describe “using balance misplacement techniques to ‘assist’ an inmate to the ground.” A captain would help new officers get the hang of it.
“You don’t want to have to explain to the judge why you ‘slammed’ someone to the ground,” Dixon recalls being told by an instructor.
Dixon lasted seven months working at the notoriously troubled prison, leaving after what she has called the hardest period of her life. That was in 2017, and she has been speaking out about what she experienced and witnessed there ever since. Dixon testified at a state legislative hearing months after resigning from the prison, describing, among other things, how she witnessed two inmates die due to medical neglect. Earlier this month, she testified again at the legislature in the wake of a highly critical state audit of Tennessee’s state-run and CoreCivic-run prisons. The audit calls for increased oversight of the state’s prison system and finds that the Tennessee Department of Correction and Nashville-based for-profit prison giant CoreCivic mishandled sexual abuse investigations as well as inmate deaths. Along with those were findings related to issues that have been constant at CoreCivic prisons, and Trousdale in particular: inadequate staffing and insufficient medical and mental health care.
Three years ago, when she was a new correctional officer at Trousdale, Dixon took detailed notes during her training. Those notes describe a culture in which prisoners are dehumanized and guards are rarely held accountable for their actions. The picture painted by Dixon’s descriptions of training sessions and discussions with instructors makes the recent audit’s findings seem inevitable.
The report concludes that prison leaders failed to “ensure that state and CoreCivic facilities staff collected and reported complete, accurate, and valid information” about inmate deaths and violent incidents. The findings make these practices look less like oversights than intentional results. Along with the advice about how to describe physical confrontations, Dixon notes how one instructor told her and her fellow officers-in-training: “We don’t have riots, we have major disturbances. That’s the term we use.”
But beyond the education in Orwellian euphemisms, trainees were explicitly told, Dixon notes, that their well-being depended on viewing inmates not as humans but as dangerous animals.
“You have to be aggressive,” one officer told her, as recorded in her notes. “That’s why I have to separate my religion from my job. Because my behavior may not be the most godly. Once they get in here, they behave like animals. Like caged animals.”
That attitude was combined with a notion that guards could act with relative impunity.
“I have never fired an officer over a grievance and I never will,” said one instructor, according to Dixon’s notes.
In an interview with the Scene, Dixon recalls the staffing issues that have been associated with Trousdale since it opened in early 2016. During her time at the prison, she was one of numerous employees commuting more than an hour to and from Nashville for long shifts and getting little sleep in between. Sometimes after working six days straight, she says, she would be called in to work on the seventh day because of staffing shortages.
In her fellow trainees, Dixon saw the effects of the prison’s culture.
“As the months went by, they either quit their jobs or they learned to accept it, and they were OK with it and they became part of it,” she says. “It was sort of like those were the only two options — to either walk away or to become part of this system that’s hurting people.”
CoreCivic spokesperson Amanda Gilchrist tells the Scene by email the company has taken steps to address the staffing issues plaguing Trousdale, and has recently “significantly increased pay to attract and retain employees.” The starting wage at Trousdale is now more than $16.50 per hour, she says.
“As we’ve acknowledged previously, there were challenges with bringing the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center up to full speed after its opening,” Gilchrist says. “We’ve worked hard to address the challenges we’ve faced, and while we still have work to do, we are making progress.”
In response to the recently released audit, Gilchrist says CoreCivic “will continue to work closely with our partners at the Tennessee Department of Correction to ensure our administrative processes are fully compliant and provide total transparency into our operations.” In spite of the audit’s findings, Gilchrist says “all allegations of sexual misconduct are promptly, thoroughly and objectively investigated” and tracked.
As for Dixon’s allegations, Gilchrist says CoreCivic investigated her claims after she first made them in 2017. The company acknowledged staffing issues at Trousdale, but Gilchrist says an investigator “was generally unable to find sufficient evidence to validate Ms. Dixon’s other allegations.”
But troubling accounts continue to emerge from Trousdale. Earlier this month, a person with a loved one incarcerated there wrote to the Scene to relay the ongoing issues at the facility and the danger their loved one was facing. They described numerous assaults and gang violence, as well as “needed medical treatment and medication never received, rapes, stabbings, assaults, extortion, drugs by the pound, packages thrown over the fence, hundreds of cell phones, butcher knives, etc.”
Meanwhile, in Nashville earlier this week a bill was introduced at the Metro Council by Councilmember Emily Benedict that would end the city’s contract with CoreCivic to run a local prison.
What the state’s audit made clear, though, is that problems persist in prisons run by CoreCivic as well as those run by the Tennessee Department of Correction. And what legislators made clear — Republican legislators, anyway — is that they will mostly continue to trust the department to figure things out while providing limited oversight. After the damning testimony earlier this month, a committee of state lawmakers voted to approve the department’s continued operation, refusing even to delay the authorization so that the audit’s findings could be reviewed more closely.
