Roy Exum
The Turney Center Industrial Complex, which is the politically-correct name for a medium-security state prison about an hour’s drive west of Nashville, is a very bad place to call home. There are more than 1,500 inmates in the lock-up and the prisoner-to-guard ratio is allegedly 128-to-1. To no one’s surprise, about 16 inmates jumped three guards there late Sunday afternoon and two were stabbed repeatedly. Both are in critical condition after being air-lifted to Vanderbilt Medical Center.
The third was taken hostage until a special team rescued the officers after about three hours. What is most disturbing is that the Tennessee Department of Corrections played the incident down, calling it – you guessed it – “a disturbance” when the true picture is Turney Center is almost as bad as the over-stuffed Hamilton County Jail. When two under-paid and over-worked guards are admitted to a hospital, both in critical condition, “a disturbance” is hardly a large enough wheelbarrow to adequately describe what really happened.
Sadly, just about every state and county prison in Tennessee is a smoldering time bomb and what is most maddening is the politicians who serve the people quickly turn their backs on those who need help the worst. It is believed that almost 40 percent of the male and female citizens incarcerated in Tennessee have some degree of mental illness. Psychotropic drugs will cost County Sheriff Jim Hammond OVER ONE AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS THIS YEAR.
So when County Mayor Jim Coppinger said during yesterday’s County Commission meeting that it costs Hamilton County taxpayers EIGHTY-TWO-THOUSAND-DOLLARS-A-DAY to house our county miscreants, let’s agree it is long overdue for both the state and the county to be proactive on the mentally ill and the homeless.
Jana Jahn, working closely with Sheriff Jim Hammond and his administrator, Gino Bennett, can tell us right now how we can save well over a million dollars a year in jail costs, how we can triple those savings in a common-sense approach in related costs, and how we can humanely help some who can’t help themselves. We act as though we are the ones who are mentally ill because the almost-immediate savings would be astronomical but … you know the rag … “that’s not my department.”
No, it is every human being’s duty to help his fellow man.
Moccasin Bend Hospital is a state-operated mental facility. It has 150 beds and serves 54 of Tennessee’s counties – that over half the state. Three beds per county, are you kidding me? Our opioid addictions are now epidemic yet somewhere there is an elected official(s) who thinks three beds for all of Hamilton County is satisfactory. The excuse? “We don’t have the money …” That’s bunk!
We read that most health insurance plans are balking at opioid addiction so what that means is those addicts will go to the only place that will accept them – the county jails. A disaster is unfolding right before our eyes and the Tennessee Department of Corrections calls the stabbing of two guards by inmates as a “disturbance.” We ain’t got a cut dog’s chance.
The Turney Center Industrial Complex – don’t you just love that “nice way” to call a 1,500-inmate prison – is a cauldron of problems. Nashville writer Amanda Haggard described it like this:
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“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.”
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In the last eight months it has been reported there have been 11 attacks on guards at “the Industrial Complex.” Closer to home, the Hamilton County Jail is critically understaffed. The sheriff freely admits he is now at 40 fewer guards than almost every study suggests. The gang altercations are atrocious. For example, when Jermichael Brooks was led into the federal courtroom for a hearing after allegedly killing another gang member in February, he had been beaten so badly by fellow inmates he was nearly blind and could barely stand without assistance at his court appearance.
Some feel the most dangerous places in the state are not the inner-city streets, but are now inside the jails. In Hamilton County there is at least one bad fight every day; ‘bad’ being determined by the fact one or more participants must be transported to the emergency room.
Hamilton County officials are still waiting for a proposal to build a new jail and workhouse in the county. Early estimates are $100 million and, if ground were broken today, completion time is about four years. Between now and then we’ve got no choice but to use the only facilities available – the same ones! It is a recipe for disaster and look no further than two critically-injured guards in Nashville.
Our county jails are this state’s biggest problem, it’s most aching need, and until we can change the mindset that three beds per county in a mental facility is adequate, we in Hamilton County are facing the worst five-year sentence you can imagine.
I believe some deaths are imminent without some quick solutions. No, I’ll guarantee it.
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As you should have expected, there was a call in the state legislature to restore a “Prison Oversight Committee” due to the very serious and very real problems that are obvious to anyone who looks. But since a Democrat, Mike Stewart of Nashville, voiced his concern, any action was immediately sent back to subcommittee by the Republicans. This is the truth!
Republicans said the Democrats were just playing politics and any effort toward prison oversight was shameful. "No amount of oversight would have prevented that attack," Rep. Bill Sanderson scoffed. The problem is that the “shameful” Sanderson is the chairman of the State Government subcommittee, which stripped out a provision in a bill from Rep. Matthew Hill, R-Jonesborough, that would re-establish oversight committees for three state departments — corrections, children's services and TennCare.
Like I say, we ain’t got a cut dog’s chance.
royexum@aol.com