TDOC official ‘satisfied' with CoreCivic contract, says TN is ‘holding them accountable'
A Senate committee on Tuesday approved a $7 million funding boost for private prison operator CoreCivic amid an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for alleged violations at the company's Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, and chronic state contract violations that have resulted in nearly $30 million in fines.
Members of the Senate State and Local Government Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved the Department of Corrections' budget request – including a $91.5 million spending increase this year.
Of the $91.5 million in new funding, $36.9 million will go toward boosting TDOC employee salaries, $21.7 million will go toward Hepatitis C treatments for inmates, and the remainder will go to contract inflators, including the $7 million boost for private prison operator CoreCivic.
CoreCivic, a publicly traded, for-profit company, runs four state prisons through a series of contracts with the state and local county governments. CoreCivic's Trousdale facility ― the largest state prison in Tennessee ― has come under scrutiny amid an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, launched last year.
While requesting the committee approve the contract increase for the private prison company, TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada touted the state's 'very strong relationship' with CoreCivic.
'We have a very good partnership with the privates. They help us with population management,' Strada said. 'When you have close to 20,000 inmates, they help us with those inmates that we can't house in the state facilities.'
CoreCivic's political action committee is among the biggest spenders in Tennessee politics, donating heavily to Republican leaders. The PAC contributed more than $100,000 to candidates in the 2022 and 2018 cycles. Gov. Bill Lee's campaign directly received at least $85,300 from CoreCivic Inc. and its partner PAC during the 2018 and 2022 cycles.
Advocates have called for an external oversight panel to uphold prison standards and bolster inmate and staff safety in light of the ongoing nationwide corrections staffing crisis. Strada has balked at the suggestion.
Tennessee routinely fines CoreCivic millions of dollars for failing to meet the requirements of its state prison contracts, often for insufficient staffing. While corrections systems nationwide are facing a staffing crisis, vacancies and turnover are pronounced at CoreCivic-run facilities in Tennessee, audits have repeatedly found.
Since 2022, the state has fined CoreCivic $29.5 million for contract violations across all four facilities, and at least $15 million since 2019 for contract violations at Trousdale alone.
Chronic understaffing at Trousdale has led to prisoner assaults, overdoses, lack of medical treatment, and families forced to pay extortion payments in hopes of keeping their loved ones safe from incarcerated gang members. Former inmates, guards and families have brought lawsuits, testified in legislative hearings, and spoken publicly about how short staffing at Trousdale have led to prisoner injuries and deaths.
More: Why former guard and others say CoreCivic understaffs this troubled small town prison
Despite persistent contract failures, Strada said the state is successfully requiring CoreCivic to deliver on its obligations to taxpayers.
'I think we're holding them accountable, yes,' Strada said. 'I think they are doing the best that they can, and I do think they're a partner for us in the state, especially when it comes to population management.'
Strada defended the state's system of fines as effectively holding CoreCivic accountable, but offered no evidence of progress the corporation has made toward fulfilling contractual staffing obligations.
'We have contract monitors at each location that enforce our contract,' Strada said. 'Where they're not meeting the contract, we do fine them.'
Since opening in 2016, CoreCivic's Trousdale facility has still never been in full compliance with its state contract. The company saw more than $2 billion in revenue last year.
'Costs go up – it's not a pay raise, it's an inflator,' Strada told reporters Tuesday. 'It's built in every contract, not just in the private prison contract.'
Incidentally, CoreCivic's contract inflator covers a significant portion of the cost of the state fines for contract violations.
Although the Justice Department's investigation into conditions at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center centers on TDOC, CoreCivic officials have said the company would work with TDOC and the DOJ to address areas of concern. Company spokespeople have noted staffing challenges in corrections across the nation and said it is taking steps to address understaffing at the prison, including hosting recruiting events in surrounding counties and raising pay in recent years.
Strada on Tuesday touted CoreCivic's work to reduce contraband and incidents over the last two years, despite persisting reports of drugs being delivered by drone into Trousdale, and at least 16 inmate deaths by overdose at Trousdale between January and November 2024, according to to Department of Health records.
'Their incidents have gone down. We've seen a reduction in contraband and other hard contraband issues,' Strada said Tuesday.
Committee Chair Richard Briggs, R-Knoxville, acknowledged the many challenges TDOC is facing, including the presence of contraband cell phones, and drugs being smuggled into prison facilities.
"We've got a new ... problem with drones flying over and dropping contraband in. I don't think we have even good suggestions yet on that," Briggs said, adding, with a chuckle, "I was wondering if get some good old boys with shotguns might help us. But they're doing it at night, and they may be hard to see."
Strada has previously told reporters that drones flying drugs and other contraband into state prison facilities is not in the department's purview.
"I have no authority with the drones. There's no authority that the Department of Corrections has on taking the drone down ― that would have to be at the federal level," Strada told reporters after an October hearing.
Inmates died of overdoses primarily from combinations of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and xylazine, an illicit drug made from horse tranquillizer and fentanyl. Inmate deaths occur disproportionately at CoreCivic-run facilities. Assignment between TDOC-run prisons and CoreCivic facilities is arbitrary ― essentially creating two systems of justice within Tennessee state prisons.
More: Two systems of justice: Families, audits say Tennessee's CoreCivic prisons underperform
Asked how he squares claims of progress reducing contraband with the overdose deaths, Strada said TDOC has been active in preventing incidents.
'We fine them. We go in there, we do a review of what happened, and we change whatever procedures we need to change to prevent that,' Strada told reporters after the hearing.
TDOC officials said Tuesday the current staff vacancy rate at Trousdale is 33.7% – compared to the statewide vacancy rate of 26.6% across all facilities, including those run by CoreCivic. In 2019, the department's vacancy rate was 20.2%.
When asked how many vacancies that would translate to, Strada's chief of staff Richard Muckle told Senators that vacancies would total a maximum of about 50 – 'top end.'
According to CoreCivic, there are 320 current employees at Trousdale. The current vacancy rate would indicate that at least 105 staff posts are currently empty.
When asked about the issue by The Tennessean after the hearing, Strada said he would "have to go back and look and see if your numbers are accurate."
TDOC later clarified to The Tennessean that there are 134 total staff vacancies at Trousdale as of January, including 60 vacant corrections officer positions. Non-officer positions would include other vital staff positions such as medical care, case worker, or other security staff.
'Just like us, they're doing everything that they can to decrease their vacancy rate," Strada said. "We'd like to have it lower, but we're managing with what we have right now.'
Reporter Evan Mealins contributed to this report.
Vivian Jones covers state government and politics for The Tennessean. Reach her at vjones@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee's Frank Strada defends CoreCivic's reduction of contraband
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump officials are vowing to end school desegregation orders. Some parents say they're still needed
FERRIDAY, La. — Even at a glance, the differences are obvious. The walls of Ferriday High School are old and worn, surrounded by barbed wire. Just a few miles away, Vidalia High School is clean and bright, with a new library and a crisp blue 'V' painted on orange brick. Ferriday High is 90% Black. Vidalia High is 62% white. For Black families, the contrast between the schools suggests 'we're not supposed to have the finer things,' said Brian Davis, a father in Ferriday. 'It's almost like our kids don't deserve it,' he said. The schools are part of Concordia Parish, which was ordered to desegregate 60 years ago and remains under a court-ordered plan to this day. Yet there's growing momentum to release the district — and dozens of others — from decades-old orders that some call obsolete. In a remarkable reversal, the Justice Department said it plans to start unwinding court-ordered desegregation plans dating to the Civil Rights Movement. Officials started in April, when they lifted a 1960s order in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department's civil rights division, has said others will 'bite the dust.' It comes amid pressure from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his attorney general, who have called for all the state's remaining orders to be lifted. They describe the orders as burdens on districts and relics of a time when Black students were still forbidden from some schools. The orders were always meant to be temporary — school systems can be released if they demonstrate they fully eradicated segregation. Decades later, that goal remains elusive, with stark racial imbalances persisting in many districts. Civil rights groups say the orders are important to keep as tools to address the legacy of forced segregation — including disparities in student discipline, academic programs and teacher hiring. They point to cases like Concordia, where the decades-old order was used to stop a charter school from favoring white students in admissions. 'Concordia is one where it's old, but a lot is happening there,' said Deuel Ross, deputy director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 'That's true for a lot of these cases. They're not just sitting silently.' Last year, before President Trump took office, Concordia Parish rejected a Justice Department plan that would have ended its case if the district combined several majority white and majority Black elementary and middle schools. At a town hall meeting, Vidalia residents vigorously opposed the plan, saying it would disrupt students' lives and expose their children to drugs and violence. An official from the Louisiana attorney general's office spoke against the proposal and said the Trump administration likely would change course on older orders. Accepting the plan would have been a 'death sentence' for the district, said Paul Nelson, a former Concordia superintendent. White families would have fled to private schools or other districts, said Nelson, who wants the court order removed. 'It's time to move on,' said Nelson, who left the district in 2016. 'Let's start looking to build for the future, not looking back to what our grandparents may have gone through.' At Ferriday High, athletic coach Derrick Davis supported combining schools in Ferriday and Vidalia. He said the district's disparities come into focus whenever his teams visit schools with newer sports facilities. 'It seems to me, if we'd all combine, we can all get what we need,' he said. Others oppose merging schools if it's done solely for the sake of achieving racial balance. 'Redistricting and going to different places they're not used to ... it would be a culture shock to some people,' said Ferriday's school resource officer, Marcus Martin, who, like Derrick Davis, is Black. The district's current superintendent and school board did not respond to requests for comment. Concordia is among more than 120 districts across the South that remain under desegregation orders from the 1960s and '70s, including about a dozen in Louisiana. Calling the orders historical relics is 'unequivocally false,' said Shaheena Simons, who until April led the Justice Department section that oversees school desegregation cases. 'Segregation and inequality persist in our schools, and they persist in districts that are still under desegregation orders,' she said. With court orders in place, families facing discrimination can reach out directly to the Justice Department or seek relief from the court. Otherwise, the only recourse is a lawsuit, which many families can't afford, Simons said. In Concordia, the order played into a battle over a charter school that opened in 2013 on the former campus of an all-white private school. To protect the area's progress on racial integration, a judge ordered Delta Charter School to build a student body that reflected the district's racial demographics. But in its first year, the school was just 15% Black. After a court challenge, Delta was ordered to give priority to Black students. Today, about 40% of its students are Black. Desegregation orders have been invoked recently in other cases around the state. One led to an order to address disproportionately high rates of discipline for Black students, and in another a predominantly Black elementary school was relocated from a site close to a chemical plant. The Trump administration was able to close the Plaquemines case with little resistance because the original plaintiffs were no longer involved — the Justice Department was litigating the case alone. Concordia and an unknown number of other districts are in the same situation, making them vulnerable to quick dismissals. Concordia's case dates to 1965, when the area was strictly segregated and home to a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. When Black families in Ferriday sued for access to all-white schools, the federal government intervened. As the district integrated its schools, white families fled Ferriday. The district's schools came to reflect the demographics of their surrounding areas. Ferriday is mostly Black and low-income, while Vidalia is mostly white and takes in tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant. A third town in the district, Monterey, has a high school that's 95% white. At the December town hall, Vidalia resident Ronnie Blackwell said the area 'feels like a Mayberry, which is great,' referring to the fictional Southern town from 'The Andy Griffith Show.' The federal government, he said, has 'probably destroyed more communities and school systems than it ever helped.' Under its court order, Concordia must allow students in majority Black schools to transfer to majority white schools. It also files reports on teacher demographics and student discipline. After failing to negotiate a resolution with the Justice Department, Concordia is scheduled to make its case that the judge should dismiss the order, according to court documents. Meanwhile, amid a wave of resignations in the federal government, all but two of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the case have left. Without court supervision, Brian Davis sees little hope for improvement. 'A lot of parents over here in Ferriday, they're stuck here because here they don't have the resources to move their kids from A to B,' he said. 'You'll find schools like Ferriday — the term is, to me, slipping into darkness.' Binkley and Lurye write for the Associated Press. T
3 hours ago
South Dakota is on track to spend $2 billion on prisons in the next decade
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. -- Two years after approving a tough-on-crime sentencing law, South Dakota is scrambling to deal with the price tag for that legislation: Housing thousands of additional inmates could require up to $2 billion to build new prisons in the next decade. That's a lot of money for a state with one of the lowest populations in the U.S., but a consultant said it's needed to keep pace with an anticipated 34% surge of new inmates in the next decade as a result of South Dakota's tough criminal justice laws. And while officials are grumbling about the cost, they don't seem concerned with the laws that are driving the need even as national crime rates are dropping. 'Crime has been falling everywhere in the country, with historic drops in crime in the last year or two,' said Bob Libal, senior campaign strategist at the criminal justice nonprofit The Sentencing Project. 'It's a particularly unusual time to be investing $2 billion in prisons.' Some Democratic-led states have worked to close prisons and enact changes to lower inmate populations, but that's a tough sell in Republican-majority states such as South Dakota that believe in a tough-on-crime approach, even if that leads to more inmates. For now, state lawmakers have set aside a $600 million fund to replace the overcrowded 144-year-old South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, making it one of the most expensive taxpayer-funded projects in South Dakota history. But South Dakota will likely need more prisons. Phoenix-based Arrington Watkins Architects, which the state hired as a consultant, has said South Dakota will need 3,300 additional beds in coming years, bringing the cost to $2 billion. Driving up costs is the need for facilities with different security levels to accommodate the inmate population. Concerns about South Dakota's prisons first arose four years ago, when the state was flush with COVID-19 relief funds. Lawmakers wanted to replace the penitentiary, but they couldn't agree on where to put the prison and how big it should be. A task force of state lawmakers assembled by Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden is expected to decide that in a plan for prison facilities this July. Many lawmakers have questioned the proposed cost, but few have called for criminal justice changes that would make such a large prison unnecessary. 'One thing I'm trying to do as the chairman of this task force is keep us very focused on our mission,' said Lieutenant Gov. Tony Venhuizen. 'There are people who want to talk about policies in the prisons or the administration or the criminal justice system more broadly, and that would be a much larger project than the fairly narrow scope that we have.' South Dakota's incarceration rate of 370 per 100,000 people is an outlier in the Upper Midwest. Neighbors Minnesota and North Dakota have rates of under 250 per 100,000 people, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy nonprofit. Nearly half of South Dakota's projected inmate population growth can be attributed to a law approved in 2023 that requires some violent offenders to serve the full-length of their sentences before parole, according to a report by Arrington Watkins. When South Dakota inmates are paroled, about 40% are ordered to return to prison, the majority of those due to technical violations such as failing a drug test or missing a meeting with a parole officer. Those returning inmates made up nearly half of prison admissions in 2024. Sioux Falls criminal justice attorney Ryan Kolbeck blamed the high number of parolees returning in part on the lack of services in prison for people with drug addictions. 'People are being sent to the penitentiary but there's no programs there for them. There's no way it's going to help them become better people,' he said. 'Essentially we're going to put them out there and house them for a little bit, leave them on parole and expect them to do well.' South Dakota also has the second-greatest disparity of Native Americans in its prisons. While Native Americans make up one-tenth of South Dakota's population, they make up 35% of those in state prisons, according to Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit public policy group. Though legislators in the state capital, Pierre, have been talking about prison overcrowding for years, they're reluctant to dial back on tough-on-crime laws. For example, it took repeated efforts over six years before South Dakota reduced a controlled substance ingestion law to a misdemeanor from a felony for the first offense, aligning with all other states. 'It was a huge, Herculean task to get ingestion to be a misdemeanor,' Kolbeck said. Former penitentiary warden Darin Young said the state needs to upgrade its prisons, but he also thinks it should spend up to $300 million on addiction and mental illness treatment. 'Until we fix the reasons why people come to prison and address that issue, the numbers are not going to stop,' he said. Without policy changes, the new prisons are sure to fill up, criminal justice experts agreed. 'We might be good for a few years, now that we've got more capacity, but in a couple years it'll be full again,' Kolbeck said. 'Under our policies, you're going to reach capacity again soon.'
3 hours ago
Trump officials are vowing to end school desegregation orders. Some parents say they're still needed
FERRIDAY, La. -- Even at a glance, the differences are obvious. The walls of Ferriday High School are old and worn, surrounded by barbed wire. Just a few miles away, Vidalia High School is clean and bright, with a new library and a crisp blue 'V' painted on orange brick. Ferriday High is 90% Black. Vidalia High is 62% white. For Black families, the contrast between the schools suggests 'we're not supposed to have the finer things,' said Brian Davis, a father in Ferriday. 'It's almost like our kids don't deserve it,' he said. The schools are part of Concordia Parish, which was ordered to desegregate 60 years ago and remains under a court-ordered plan to this day. Yet there's growing momentum to release the district — and dozens of others — from decades-old orders that some call obsolete. In a remarkable reversal, the Justice Department said it plans to start unwinding court-ordered desegregation plans dating to the Civil Rights Movement. Officials started in April, when they lifted a 1960s order in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department's civil rights division, has said others will 'bite the dust.' It comes amid pressure from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his attorney general, who have called for all the state's remaining orders to be lifted. They describe the orders as burdens on districts and relics of a time when Black students were still forbidden from some schools. The orders were always meant to be temporary — school systems can be released if they demonstrate they fully eradicated segregation. Decades later, that goal remains elusive, with stark racial imbalances persisting in many districts. Civil rights groups say the orders are important to keep as tools to address the legacy of forced segregation — including disparities in student discipline, academic programs and teacher hiring. They point to cases like Concordia, where the decades-old order was used to stop a charter school from favoring white students in admissions. 'Concordia is one where it's old, but a lot is happening there,' said Deuel Ross, deputy director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 'That's true for a lot of these cases. They're not just sitting silently.' Last year, before President Donald Trump took office, Concordia Parish rejected a Justice Department plan that would have ended its case if the district combined several majority white and majority Blac k elementary and middle schools. At a town hall meeting, Vidalia residents vigorously opposed the plan, saying it would disrupt students' lives and expose their children to drugs and violence. An official from the Louisiana attorney general's office spoke against the proposal and said the Trump administration likely would change course on older orders. Accepting the plan would have been a 'death sentence' for the district, said Paul Nelson, a former Concordia superintendent. White families would have fled to private schools or other districts, said Nelson, who wants the court order removed. 'It's time to move on,' said Nelson, who left the district in 2016. 'Let's start looking to build for the future, not looking back to what our grandparents may have gone through.' At Ferriday High, athletic coach Derrick Davis supported combining schools in Ferriday and Vidalia. He said the district's disparities come into focus whenever his teams visit schools with newer sports facilities. 'It seems to me, if we'd all combine, we can all get what we need,' he said. Others oppose merging schools if it's done solely for the sake of achieving racial balance. 'Redistricting and going to different places they're not used to ... it would be a culture shock to some people," said Ferriday's school resource officer, Marcus Martin, who, like Derrick Davis, is Black. The district's current superintendent and school board did not respond to requests for comment. Concordia is among more than 120 districts across the South that remain under desegregation orders from the 1960s and '70s, including about a dozen in Louisiana. Calling the orders historical relics is 'unequivocally false,' said Shaheena Simons, who until April led the Justice Department section that oversees school desegregation cases. 'Segregation and inequality persist in our schools, and they persist in districts that are still under desegregation orders,' she said. With court orders in place, families facing discrimination can reach out directly to the Justice Department or seek relief from the court. Otherwise, the only recourse is a lawsuit, which many families can't afford, Simons said. In Concordia, the order played into a battle over a charter school that opened in 2013 on the former campus of an all-white private school. To protect the area's progress on racial integration, a judge ordered Delta Charter School to build a student body that reflected the district's racial demographics. But in its first year, the school was just 15% Black. After a court challenge, Delta was ordered to give priority to Black students. Today, about 40% of its students are Black. Desegregation orders have been invoked recently in other cases around the state. One led to an order to address disproportionately high rates of discipline for Black students, and in another a predominantly Black elementary school was relocated from a site close to a chemical plant. The Trump administration was able to close the Plaquemines case with little resistance because the original plaintiffs were no longer involved — the Justice Department was litigating the case alone. Concordia and an unknown number of other districts are in the same situation, making them vulnerable to quick dismissals. Concordia's case dates to 1965, when the area was strictly segregated and home to a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. When Black families in Ferriday sued for access to all-white schools, the federal government intervened. As the district integrated its schools, white families fled Ferriday. The district's schools came to reflect the demographics of their surrounding areas. Ferriday is mostly Black and low-income, while Vidalia is mostly white and takes in tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant. A third town in the district, Monterey, has a high school that's 95% white. At the December town hall, Vidalia resident Ronnie Blackwell said the area 'feels like a Mayberry, which is great,' referring to the fictional Southern town from 'The Andy Griffith Show.' The federal government, he said, has 'probably destroyed more communities and school systems than it ever helped.' Under its court order, Concordia must allow students in majority Black schools to transfer to majority white schools. It also files reports on teacher demographics and student discipline. After failing to negotiate a resolution with the Justice Department, Concordia is scheduled to make its case that the judge should dismiss the order, according to court documents. Meanwhile, amid a wave of resignations in the federal government, all but two of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the case have left. Without court supervision, Brian Davis sees little hope for improvement. 'A lot of parents over here in Ferriday, they're stuck here because here they don't have the resources to move their kids from A to B," he said. 'You'll find schools like Ferriday — the term is, to me, slipping into darkness."
