CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (CN) — Thirty-six years ago, international attention rested on a county jail that sat alongside a narrow road in the northeast corner of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Journalists from Switzerland and Canada toured the prison. The CBS Show “60 Minutes” featured it in an episode, according to newspaper clippings found at the Chattanooga Public Library.
The Hamilton County Commission voted to hand over operation of the facility to Corrections Corporation of America, known today as CoreCivic, and the company took over the penal farm on Oct. 15, 1984.
Silverdale was a step up. Before it, CoreCivic had only begun managing an immigration detention center in Texas and a juvenile facility in Memphis. This was one of the first times a private company in recent history, riding the idea of privatization, would take over an adult facility. Today, it is one of the largest private prison companies in the nation.
It caught the attention of the world.
“Silverdale is the place where everyone will decide if a private company can or should operate a prison,” then-Warden Bob Landon told the Chattanooga Times in 1985.
But this summer, CoreCivic sent a letter to the county saying it was exercising a clause that allowed it to withdraw from the facility within 180 days. The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office is now quickly attempting to take over the aging facility.
And then there was news back in mid-February that two federal judges directed all 52 federal inmates who were housed in the facility to be transferred out and housed in neighboring facilities. They did so, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, for the prisoners’ safety, and the sheriff’s office launched a criminal investigation.
“There was a general understanding, not just among the judges, federal judges, but also the state judges that Silverdale was not being repaired the way it needed to, there was too much laxness in the way that the private company was dealing with the issues,” Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond said in an interview with Courthouse News.
At the request of the judges, Hammond launched an investigation – which included an undercover component – that found many repairs in the facility were left unaddressed. Hammond handed the results over to the county’s Security and Corrections Committee.
For several years, at least one criminal court judge in Hamilton County expressed concern over the access to medical care at Silverdale. While Judge Tom Greenholtz declined a request for an interview, he pointed out several court records where, for instance, he suspended a man’s sentence because when the man developed a “shoulder condition,” the facility gave him Tylenol instead of administering an x-ray; the facility also said the man “refused” treatment for a “cancerous condition,” according to the 2017 order.
In February, federal judges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee had “suggested strongly” Hammond move federal prisoners from Silverdale but did not issue an order, the sheriff said.
Federal judges Sandy Mattice and Travis McDonough did not respond to requests for interviews.
The county’s Security and Corrections Committee met June 19 to consider letting the contract with CoreCivic expire when it was up for renewal in two years.
Reports of the conditions at Silverdale, Hammond said, “reinforced a lot of people's thinking that you need to get rid of a privatization and take it back under government.”
“Because it may be a little more costly in the front end, but with government you're assured these people's rights are being protected, which are just the basic rights like proper ventilation, proper lights coming in, proper food schedule,” he said. “The things that are just human rights.”