This Week's Violent Incident at a Tennessee Prison Was No Surprise

The violent incident this week at Turney Center Industrial Complex — a euphemized state prison in Only, Tenn. — is newsworthy, but it's certainly not shocking. Nor is the change that is likely to come as a result of it — that is, likely, not much at all.

Tennessee Department of Correction officials say the violent altercation began as a verbal confrontation between an officer and a prisoner and escalated into a riot involving 16 inmates and three prison officers, two of whom were stabbed multiple times. A third officer, Jesse Shockley, was held hostage for some three hours. TDOC says its Special Operations Unit "responded and regained control of the unit without force." All three officers survived.

For a prison guard to be held hostage for several hours is extraordinary, but violent unrest — and unsafe conditions in general — at a Tennessee prison is anything but.

Upon Derrick Schofield's departure from TDOC last year, after five years as commissioner — to take a job at private prison corporation GEO Group — the Scene's Amanda Haggard summed up the disarray he left behind:

The department has been understaffed, a hepatitis C epidemic in the prisons is on its way to becoming a class-action lawsuit, inmates and their families claim gangs have taken over units in prisons, and assaults on guards have become the subject of legislative inquiry. Correctional officers questioned the department's two-category incident classification, which didn't consider an incident to be assault unless it resulted in injury. A 2012 Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury report first flagged a need to alter classifications of incidents. Those concerns were echoed in a 2014 comptroller report. They weren't looked at until 2015. When the department moved to change how it categorized assaults on guards at the start of 2016, the number of reported assaults nearly doubled.

Turney Center is a state-run facility and the violence there this week proves such prisons are by no means immune to the types of challenges — to borrow TDOC's obfuscating parlance — seen in facilities run by Nashville-based CoreCivic, the for-profit prison giant formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America. Still, the recent record of Tennessee's private prisons, overseen by TDOC, is ugly:

The CCA-run South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tenn., was the site of a violent attack on a guard last year, and the killing of an inmate in 2013 and another in 2014. Earlier this year, the Scene reported on a lawsuit filed by an inmate alleging terrible conditions and rampant gang activity inside prison walls.

Three women who had gone to visit the Clifton facility are currently suing the company, claiming that guards forced them to undergo strip searches and expose their genitals to prove they were menstruating after they tried to bring in sanitary napkins or tampons. The Associated Press reported this month that CCA is fighting to seal the documents in the lawsuit.

After receiving a five-year, $276 million contract to operate the Trousdale Turner Correctional Facility, CCA briefly stopped accepting new inmates at the prison earlier this year amid concerns about inadequate staffing and allegations of excessive use of force and solitary confinement. 

There have also been persistent concerns about overcrowding and understaffing.

that the Turney Center incident took place "in a general population unit of the medium-security facility, where the staffing ratio is one guard to every 128 offenders." Aside from safety problems at CoreCivic's troubled Trousdale facility, understaffing has led to insufficient care for diabetic inmates according to a lawsuit filed earlier this year.

Just this past month, the chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, Justice Jeff Bivens, raised concerns about overcrowding in Tennessee prisons and the need for sentencing reform. His warning shouldn't take anyone in state government by surprise. Data obtained by The Tennessean in 2015 showed the state's prison system was at a capacity level that would have allowed Gov. Bill Haslam to declare an overcrowding emergency. But Haslam and TDOC shrugged it off, insisting that no emergency existed. 

That is the standard response, after all. Faced with criticism, scrutiny or politely-worded questions about the state's prisons, TDOC's response has often been to deflect and to minimize access and transparency. This, among other reasons, is why Heather Ann Thompson — who won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday for her book on the Attica prison uprising of 1971 — has cautioned against swallowing the narratives spun out by correction officials after violent incidents in prisons. 

A press conference held by state House Democrats and prison reform advocates Monday lent credence to such skepticism. Led by Nashville Rep. Mike Stewart, the event was mainly focused on calls for the resurrection of a legislative oversight committee for prisons, a body that existed until it was abolished in 2012 — a move the sponsor of which has since called a "mistake."

But as notable was testimony by Stewart and others about the history of violent incidents at Turney Center. Stewart said he was aware of assaults on 11 officers over eight months at the facility and that only included incidents brought to his attention by people working at the facility.

“This is not something where our prison officials had this under control, where nobody knew this was going to be a problem. To the contrary there’s a long history of violence in this facility,” he said.

Alex Friedmann, a prominent prison activist who was formerly incarcerated in a then-CCA facility, noted that the recent incident took place in a unit largely comprised of gang members. Housing gang members together, he said, is “a very dangerous practice, because it allows gang members to concentrate their numbers and thus their power base” and “it puts other inmates who are not gang affiliated at risk and it makes much more difficult for correctional staff to oversee and monitor that unit.”

The incident, Friedmann said, "did not occur in a vacuum.” Nor will the next one. But change seems unlikely because TDOC, with help from CoreCivic, runs the prisons and they will tell you there's not much to see here.

Shortly after the press conference, a Senate committee referred a bill to bring back the Prison Oversight Committee to subcommittee, effectively killing it for the year.