Trousdale Turner Correctional Center and Bledsoe County Correctional Complex have two of the country's worst COVID-19 outbreaks
When a Tennessee woman named Susan spoke to the Scene in late March, she was not optimistic about Trousdale Turner Correctional Center’s ability to handle a potential COVID-19 outbreak. Susan has a loved one — a close friend — incarcerated at the facility, which is run by CoreCivic and is Tennessee’s largest prison. She’d seen how the prison operated under normal circumstances and feared what seemed inevitable, even though at the time there were no confirmed cases of the illness inside Trousdale.
“They can’t even handle a common cold, let alone a pandemic,” she said.
Now, a little more than a month later, the prison is home to one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country. On Friday, CoreCivic announced that a total of 1,299 inmates and 50 staff members have tested positive for the illness. The Tennessee Department of Correction announced on April 28 that all prisoners and staff at the facility would be tested in response to 93 prisoners there testing positive.
With 52 tests still pending as of Friday, the prison outbreak made Trousdale County one of the worst hot spots in the country — along with Bledsoe County, where 585 prisoners at the Bledsoe County Correctional Complex have tested positive. Trousdale tops a New York Times list of counties with the highest number of cases per resident.
As WPLN reports, family members of people incarcerated at Trousdale have been scrambling to get information about the status of their loved ones. A CoreCivic spokesperson tells the Scene that on Friday afternoon the company “established a hotline for family members that is operational 24/7 should they have questions or concerns, but it's important to note that our government partner policy prohibits the hotline operators from disclosing cohort/quarantine information and confirmation of location for where a particular inmate is incarcerated.”
The TDOC has also established its own information line.
Susan, who spoke to the Scene under the condition that her last name and the name of her loved one not be used for fear of retaliation, said her friend was moved out of his normal unit. She learned through another inmate's family that her friend had tested negative for COVID-19 but she has not been able to determine where in the prison he is.
“The mind can think of all kinds of possible scenarios,” she says.
In its announcement, CoreCivic said that “all of the inmates and staff were asymptomatic at the time of testing.” That’s consistent with what has been reported at other Tennessee prisons as well as prison systems in other states. But some advocates in Tennessee are skeptical.
Jeannie Alexander, who leads the No Exceptions Prison Collective and is in regular contact with prisoners and their loved ones all over the state, says that many incarcerated people do not trust prison officials and are reluctant to report symptoms if they have them.
Another person who spoke to the Scene has a family member who is incarcerated at Trousdale and tested positive for COVID-19. They say their family member started feeling “very sick” a week-and-a-half ago.
Although prisoners still have limited access to phones, family members have struggled to confirm the status of loved ones after the announcement on Friday. A CoreCivic spokesperson says that due to medical privacy laws “we are not permitted to discuss medical information such as confirm a diagnosis, virus test results and other information related to a person's treatment/health status. Only the inmate can reveal their status.”
After the announcement that more than 50 percent of the inmates at Trousdale had tested positive for COVID-19, Gov. Bill Lee announced that all Tennessee prisoners and correctional staff would be tested. Despite repeated calls for mass testing in the state’s prisons from advocates and medical experts, the state had only tested a small percentage of Tennessee's approximately 30,000-person prison population. Officials never provided a clear explanation as to why they hadn’t started testing all incarcerated people and prison staff.
With 50 staff members at Trousdale having tested positive and 39 still awaiting test results, staffing concerns are heightened at a facility that has faced staffing shortages since it opened in 2016.
In late April, Susan told the Scene that her friend at Trousdale was not sure whether his pod was locked down because of illness or because of how short-staffed the prison was.
Mass testing across the state will confirm how widely COVID-19 has spread through Tennessee’s prison system. But for now, testing less than 20 percent of the prison population has revealed two prisons with outbreaks that rank among the worst in the United States.
