Bipartisan oversight bill failed after prison contractor opposed it
Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services has budgeted $360 million for two new youth prisons that will together hold up to 256 beds, with construction scheduled to begin this fall and the facilities expected to open in 2028 and 2029. The expansion comes as state data shows arrests of juveniles for violent crime have fallen over the past decade and as federal data shows the number of highest-security youth facilities nationwide has dropped by more than 40% since 2000.
According to Tennessee officials, the state does not have enough space for children whom courts have found committed crimes. ProPublica and WPLN/Nashville Public Radio reported that in the last few years, Tennessee has held dozens of teens overnight in temporary places, including at one point office buildings. In an emailed response to the news organizations, DCS attributed the lack of bed space to several factors, including teens’ needs for specific mental health services and temporary staffing issues in its facilities. The agency said national trends “do not determine” whether Tennessee has enough youth beds available. DCS leaders said in a state hearing that the agency had reached maximum capacity and run out of beds in high-security facilities; the agency said in a recent statement that the number of youth needing space in a particular type of facility can remain high day to day even as overall arrests decline.
Josh Rovner with the nonprofit research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which seeks to reduce incarceration across the country, said the data contradicts the state’s framing. “The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control,” Rovner said. “The data doesn’t back that up.”
A state-commissioned study that DCS cites shows police reports of violent juvenile crimes in Tennessee — including murder, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft and crimes with firearms — have increased since 2013. But arrests of juveniles for those crimes have declined over the same period, according to the same study. Murder was the only violent crime for which arrests rose — from 15 cases in 2013 to 26 in 2024, still below the 2018 peak.
Unlike the adult system, the juvenile justice system is set up to rehabilitate, not punish, based on decades of research showing that youth are more capable of change. A 2024 lawsuit filed against DCS by an advocacy group and multiple unnamed youth alleges the department places young people in the highest-security facilities without adequate consideration for their mental health treatment needs. Because of juvenile privacy laws, no publicly available data shows what charges land youth in which setting. In court filings, DCS acknowledged that it sometimes places youth based on capacity but denied holding them improperly in the highest-security facilities.
The lawsuit also argues that the department places youth in facilities that are more punitive than rehabilitative, and that some teens placed in prison should not be there at all. The suit further alleges that Tennessee’s juvenile justice facilities keep youth from accessing education and mental health treatment. Two facilities run by Wayne Halfway House, according to the suit, had policies barring youth from attending school if they misbehave. One teen diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other mental health conditions did not receive needed individual therapy for months while in a Wayne Halfway House facility, the lawsuit stated, and received only a couple of hours of education each day. Several other contractors’ jails and treatment centers across the state are referenced by name in the lawsuit. DCS said in a legal filing that it did not have enough information to respond to all specific allegations about youth in the suit but pushed back against many claims, including that youth received inadequate education or mental health treatment. The department denied that the teen in the Wayne Halfway House facility was kept from therapy or education, but acknowledged some youth in the juvenile justice system may temporarily “receive minimal educational services.”
All three of Tennessee’s highest-security youth prisons are operated by Wayne Halfway House, a company owned by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews. The company is required by its contract and state policy to provide mental health treatment, education and other services to youth in its care. A separate WPLN/ProPublica investigation this year found that Wayne Halfway House facilities failed to report several serious incidents to the state as required. In a statement, the company “vehemently denies” that Crews or his company has ever discouraged staff from reporting serious or life-threatening incidents to the state. Wayne Halfway House said its programs “are compliant with state policies and law” and referred questions to “numerous state audits and/or reports” it said refute the allegations, though it declined to share the documents.
Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to reduce society’s reliance on incarceration, has worked in juvenile justice reform for more than 40 years. “These institutions are not humane places,” Macallair said, referring to large-scale youth facilities. “They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.” Macallair said research shows that facilities with more than 10 youth become unwieldy and shift toward correctional rather than rehabilitative models, with higher rates of sexual abuse and practices such as solitary confinement. One of the prisons DCS is planning would have up to 160 beds, making it the largest in the state. By contrast, the programs that have proven to help youth avoid future crimes are small and based in the communities they are from, he said.
DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it is designing the new facilities to provide care that addresses the trauma youth have experienced, including behavioral health treatment tailored to their individual needs. The design includes dedicated spaces for education, job training and recreation, as well as rooms for mental health staff to do their work, including “calming rooms” for youth.
Missouri has been nationally lauded as an alternative model, with small community-based facilities keeping youth close to home for therapeutic programs — including those who commit violent crimes. Research has shown these programs are more effective and affordable than large institutions and produce lower reoffending rates and higher high school graduation rates. DCS told the newsrooms it provides community-based services for youth who can safely remain at home, but Tennessee data shows the vast majority of youth in the system were not allowed to stay in their communities last year. State officials also acknowledged the state lacks a centralized way to track whether youth are rearrested after release, making it difficult to measure the rehabilitative success of youth prisons.
A bid process will determine who operates the new facilities. Currently, Wayne Halfway House and Youth Opportunity Investments, which runs lower-security facilities, are the only two providers of private youth prisons in the state. In response to questions about the new facilities, Wayne Halfway House said it would not comment about its business plans and noted that the facilities in which it holds youth in state custody for committing a crime are classified by the state as “residential treatment centers,” not youth prisons. Across the country, states use different terminology to refer to these facilities. By federal law, they are supposed to provide treatment, but they are also secure facilities, often with barbed-wire fences and cells that lock, that hold youth long-term after a court finds them responsible for a crime — similar to adult prisons.
Independent oversight of Tennessee’s juvenile facilities is limited. The state has one agency that helps families navigate the system but lacks enforcement power, and a new Juvenile Justice Review Commission is tasked with releasing its first set of recommendations in 2028. Michele Deitch, a criminal and juvenile justice expert at the University of Texas at Austin, said robust independent oversight is crucial to keep youth in juvenile justice facilities safe. “The main goal is to bring more transparency to what’s going on inside these facilities, to make that information public, to make recommendations about ways it can improve,” Deitch said. “You really need the external body that is independent.”
In 2024, a bipartisan group of Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill that would have given oversight and enforcement power to an independent organization rather than DCS. Under the proposal, DCS would have been required to suspend a facility’s license or stop placing youth there until violations were fixed. Lawmakers said DCS had a conflict of interest — responsible for both finding beds in the facilities and sanctioning providers for rule violations.
Wayne Halfway House, which pays a legislative lobbyist and makes political donations in the state, opposed the bill. One of the bill’s sponsors said a lobbyist for the company pushed to exempt privately run facilities from the bill, and the proposal made it into an amendment filed in the House. A Wayne Halfway House lobbyist said at the time that the company had concerns about how the bill would “affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee.” In a recent statement, the company said it supports the state’s policies and laws that “rigorously oversee organizations like ours and hold us to high standards for operational performance.” The bill ultimately failed.