The U.S. Department of Justice recently announced its own investigation into CoreCivic’s practices following years of “reports of physical assaults, sexual assaults, murders and [an] unchecked flow of contraband and severe staffing shortages.”
A Tennessee family has filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic, the for-profit operator of the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center and among the most controversial private-prison companies in the United States.
According to FOX17-Nashville, the lawsuit was filed on behalf of the parents of Kylan Leeper. The 25-year-old man was imprisoned at Trousdale on an arson-related conviction when he ingested a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Attorneys for the family say that Leeper should have not been able to obtain fentanyl in prison—and likely wouldn’t have managed to do so, had CoreCivic maintained an appropriate staff-to-inmate ratio.
Tim Leeper, Kylan’s father, told FOX17-Nashville that he “felt something was wrong” with Trousdale from the beginning. Kylan was, for instance, stabbed by another inmate within days of his arrival.
“A lot of the people that are incarcerated are, by and large—they don’t have the means or the fund [sic] to go hire lawyers and to go fight wrongful death lawsuits,” Leeper said. “I put both my hands on [Kylan’s] coffin and I told him, ‘Son, I will do what I can for the people that are left behind.’”
Attorneys for the Leeper family note in court documents that the Trousdale facility has been the source of over 400 overdose-related calls in the past three years.
CoreCivic has since issued a statement in response to the Leeper family’s lawsuit, portions of which were reprinted by FOX17-Nashville.
“As a general policy and out of respect for the legal process, we do not comment on active or pending litigation. More broadly, we take the safety and health of every individual in our care seriously,” CoreCivic said in a statement. “To that end, we have a zero-tolerance policy for the introduction of contraband. The introduction of contraband, including harmful substances, is a nationwide challenge for all correctional facilities. We work closely with our government partners and law enforcement officials to detect, prevent, and investigate the introduction of contraband into our facilities.”
But ABC News notes that allegations of understaffing and violence at the Trousdale facility are longstanding. The U.S. Department of Justice recently announced its own investigation into CoreCivic’s practices following years of “reports of physical assaults, sexual assaults, murders and [an] unchecked flow of contraband and severe staffing shortages.”
Mary Price, general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums and an advocate for the Department of Justice’s investigation into Trousdale, told ABC News that CoreCivic likely accounts for litigation in its budget.
“It does certainly appear as though settling lawsuits is a cost of doing business, rather than an alarm, a wake-up call, a siren,” Price told ABC News.
But most of CoreCivic’s settlements have been for small amounts of money—and have not included any admission of wrongdoing on the company’s behalf.
“In a lot of these cases, unfortunately, victims and family members of victims are in this position to choose between some amount of money, which is probably more than they’ve seen in a long time, or speaking their ruth and sharing their stories and really being able to do something that brings this to an end,” said whistleblower and former Trousdale corrections officer Ashley Dixon.
Sources
Lawsuit filed against CoreCivic and others after inmate’s death at Trousdale
Prison operator under federal scrutiny spent millions settling Tennessee mistreatment claims
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