Last week, Gov. Bill Haslam’s office announced that the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction would leave his post at the end of June to join Florida-based private prison company GEO Group. After five years leading the state’s 14 prisons, Derrick Schofield — a Haslam appointee — leaves the prison system in the lurch. GEO Group is one of the country’s largest for-profit prison corporations — second to Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America. And like CCA, it has been at the center of controversy regarding how its prisons are run.
Luckily for the 55-year-old Schofield, he’s grown accustomed to controversy. In his time leading the department, especially throughout 2015, the safety of state prisons has been called into question — not only by anti-prison activists, but also by guards, as well as legislators in both parties.
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.
When Schofield left his job as deputy commissioner of the prison system in Georgia for the gig managing Tennessee’s 21,000-plus inmates, the system there was in similar disarray. Georgia has since launched one of the biggest (and arguably most successful) prison reform projects in the nation.
Through all of TDOC’s troubles, Haslam has never waned in his support of Schofield. When Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey said last fall that the legislature should look at making TDOC answer questions and complaints raised by staff, inmates and inmate family members, Haslam basically waved the idea away.
But after consistent grilling from the legislature (continue reading at NashvilleScene)