TOPIC: TENNESSEE PRISON CONDITIONS
by Sharon Rondeau
(Nov. 9, 2017) — The Post & Email’s editor will be a guest on the “Nooganomics” radio show hosted by David Tulis on Thursday at 9:30 AM EST on NoogaRadio. The show is broadcast daily from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. on “Nooga Radio” found at 92.7 FM and 95.3 FM – HD 4.
The topic of discussion will be conditions within Tennessee’s prisons and the reported violation by the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) of its own policies and procedures in recently placing a gang member in close proximity to an inmate he threatened in late July, Grenda Ray Harmer.
For nearly three years, inmates from virtually all of Tennessee’s 14 prisons have written to The Post & Email describing horrendous living conditions and uncontrolled gang activity which threaten their safety on a daily basis, particularly in the prisons operated by private corporation CoreCivic.
Although TDOC spokeswoman Neysa Taylor claims that all of the reports we have received are “inaccurate,” she intimated in an email to Tulis on November 4 that the department may be investigating the relocation of the Crips gang member to the nearby cell of inmate Grenda Ray Harmer, #88710.
As Taylor is aware, Harmer has been the source of a substantial amount of information about activity within Tennessee’s prisons, having been housed at four different institutions over the last 16 months and been incarcerated since 1998. Two of the institutions in which Harmer has resided recently are CoreCivic’s TTCC and SCCF, where access to medical care is reported to be substandard to the point of becoming life-threatening.
Over the last three weeks, The Post & Email has noted a sharp drop in correspondence from Harmer from his customary 3-4 letters a week to just two letters during that time.