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The Centenary of the Tennessee Department of Correction
While the actual name has changed several times over the years, the Tennessee Department of Correction has had a storied history worth recounting on its hundredth anniversary.
Our prison system was created in 1829 under the leadership of Governor William Carroll, who long advocated the abolition of corporal punishment. Prisoners were instead to be placed in solitary confinement in large institutions and provided Bibles so they would be reformed by doing penitence for their crime.1 It is from the word “penitence” that we derived the word “penitentiary.”
In less than a month from the Governor’s proclamation declaring the penitentiary law in effect, one George Washington Cook had the dubious distinction of being the first inmate. Cook was not assigned culinary duties, as the name might suggest, but, because he was a tailor, was made to cut and make his own suit, the first work ever done at the penitentiary.
The first prison was administered by a five-person Board of Inspectors. It was located south of 7th Avenue and Broadway and was later replaced with another facility on Church Street. Prisoners were employed to build the state capital. During the Civil War, the Union army took over the penitentiary for use as a military prison and the state prisoners were moved to Brushy Mountain.2
The new prison – affectionally called “The Walls” – was constructed in 1898 in Cockrill Bend. Designed with 800 single-occupancy cells, 1,403 prisoners were admitted to the prison on opening day, creating immediate overcrowding.
The prisons were operated by numerous boards and commissions which were answerable primarily to the legislature. The frequent alteration in administrative authority prompted a host of lawsuits whereby supervisors would sue when their office was abolished by some new legislation. For example, in 1915, the legislature adopted a new system for the penal facilities under the direction of a “Board of Control.” The Chaplain at the Brushy Mountain branch of the penitentiary was now deprived of his office by the new legislation and challenged it as being unconstitutional. The Supreme Court rejected the claim and found that it was the Chaplain’s “misfortune that the Act on which his office hung stood in the way of a scheme for better government of the state’s institutions.”3
The government’s administrative problems were not limited to just the prison system. It 1922, there were at least 64 different departments and agencies, many of which operated outside of the governor’s control. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. The officials of various departments and agencies all had their tenure, compensation, duties, and responsibilities fixed by statutes and could not be removed except for cause.
Into this chaos entered Governor Austin Peay. His first task was to reorganize state government. In 1923, at Peay’s urging, the legislature passed the Administrative Reorganization Act, which reduced 60 different agencies into eight departments which would be run by a commissioner who reported directly to the Governor and would hold office “at the pleasure of the Governor.” Not surprisingly, this vast alternation prompted litigation which resulted in an extensive opinion by the Supreme Court upholding the new scheme.4 Under the 1923 law, the prison and other facilities were transferred to the Department of Institutions (renamed the Tennessee Department of Correction in 1955).5
While the prison system was undergoing change, the Parole Board had a parallel history. Parole was established in 1913 as part of the Indeterminate Sentencing Law. An Advisory Board of Pardons was created in 1929, which created a system for parole eligibility and procedures for release. The Board of Pardons and Paroles was created in 1937, and later became a formal, independent entity.
In 1974, as a young Assistant State Attorney General, I was assigned representation of the Department of Correction, and functionally served as the attorney for the Parole Board. It was customary that the newest member of the Attorney General’s Office would be given the responsibility for these agencies because nothing happened at the Department of Correction or the Parole Board. That is, until 1976, when the newly appointed Parole Board Chair, Marie Ragghianti, walked into my office and advised that Governor Blanton and his legal counsel, Eddie Sisk, might be selling clemency for cash. A few days later I found myself meeting with FBI Agent Hank Hillin and the rest, as they say, is history. 6
Because of the subsequent Blanton-pardon scandal, Lamar Alexander was sworn in as governor three days early to prevent the massive release of prisoners, some of whom may have paid for their pardons with cash.7 Once a backwater, prisons now became a major issue constantly in the media.
To reform our criminal justice system, Governor Alexander promoted new legislation, such as the Class X Felony Law of 1979 and the Tennessee Sentencing Reform Act of 1982, both of which I helped draft. While this legislation promoted “law and order,” not a nickel was appropriated for prison construction, resulting in massive overcrowding.
By 1983, the Department of Correction was under the effective control of a Master appointed by the Federal Court. Commissioners of Correction would come and go. In 1985, prison riots occurred throughout the system causing millions of dollars in damage.
Because of these problems, the General Assembly was called into an Extraordinary Session devoted exclusively to prisons. It was an arduous process. One consultant remarked that prison reform is like “flying a plane to Atlanta and building the plane as you fly.”
The legislature authorized additional prison facilities, changed the rules for parole and probation, and authorized a State Sentencing Commission – Chaired by Judge Barbara Haynes – to review state criminal laws and revise punishments. The legislature enacted the Tennessee Sentencing Reform Act of 1989, which created our current sentencing structure. It was my honor to have served on the Commission for the entire nine years of its existence.
The two new prison facilities came online, along with the implementation of private prisons.8 Finally, pursuant to a 1993 federal court order,9 the old Tennessee State Penitentiary – “The Walls” –closed forever except for the occasional movie or television show. There have been occasional attempts to reopen it in some other capacity, but the high cost of renovating the dilapidated structure has left little appetite for modification.
Things seemed to be on a positive track until 1995 when newly elected Governor Don Sundquist abolished the Sentencing Commission and permitted criminal legislation to go into free fall. Parole was abolished for many offenses, and the prison population increased exponentially.
By 2022, the General Assembly assumed the traditional role of the Governor by administering prisons by legislative enactments, such as the “Truth in Sentencing Law” which requires that most prisoners serve all their sentences. Credits for good behavior were abolished. We have yet to see the long-term consequences of this new legislation.
In 1903, Governor James Berih Frazier remarked that the “disposition and treatment of those who commit crimes is always a delicate and difficult question; it should be a source of genuine satisfac-
tion to the people of Tennessee that we have discovered and have in successful operation a system that comes as near solving that perplexing problem as any that has yet been tried.” Whether this system has been “successful” is debatable. Tennessee now incarcerates over 30,000 persons at a budget of over a billion dollars a year. Whatever success our Department of Correction has had over the last 100 years is due in no small measure to the dedicated men and women who helped protect us and rehabilitate those who violate the law. Perhaps the next 100 years will show greater support for these correctional officials and employees and find new ways of improving our criminal justice system.
Endnotes
1 Tenn. Code Ann § 41-21-211 still provides: “Each inmate shall be provided with a Bible, which the inmate may be permitted to peruse in the inmate’s cell at such times as the inmate is not required to perform prison labor.”
2 Among the prisoners held during this time was Mark Cockrill, a Confederate sympathizer whose West Nashville property would later be purchased for the construction of the new prison in 1898.
3 Quoted in House v. Creveling, 250 S.W. 357, 362 (Tenn 1923).
4 House v. Creveling, 250 S.W. 357 (Tenn 1923).
5 There were some other names in the interim. In 1937, the Department of Institutions became the Department of Institutions and Public Welfare, which had responsibility for the Confederate Soldier’s Home, School for the Blind, School for the Deaf, and certain regional psychiatric hospitals. In 1939, the Department of Institutions and Public Welfare was divided into a Department of Institutions and a separate Department of Public Welfare. In 1953, the responsibility over mental health facilities was separated to the Department of Mental Health, and in 1955 the Department of Institutions arrived at its present name: the Tennessee Department of Correction.
6 Marie Ragghianti’s story is recounted in the book Marie: The True Story and the film by the same name, staring Sissy Spacek. Marie’s trial attorney was Fred Thompson who began his acting by career portraying himself in the movie. TBI agent Hillin wrote his own book, FBI Codename TENNPAR
7 The final days of the Blanton administration are recounted in Keel Hunt’s excellent book: Coup, published in 2013.
8 See, W.J. Michael Cody and Andy D. Bennett, The Privatization of Correctional Institutions: The Tennessee Experience, 40 Vanderbilt Law Review 1987 (1987). Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol40/iss4/9
9 Grubbs v. Bradley, 821 F. Supp. 496 (1993).
