For years, there have been tensions, usually more latent than obvious but continually escalating, between the two most important elected officials in Shelby County, Mayor Lee Harris and Sheriff Floyd Bonner. Now those tensions have exploded into open warfare, with salvoes unloosed last week by both men against the other.
First came, arguably, the most overt criticism yet of Bonner by Harris, delivered on the WKNO television program Behind the Headlines: “There have been too many prisoners’ deaths, and we don’t see any urgency or any activity toward reform by the sheriff or his administration,” Harris maintained.
The solution for that alleged negligence, said the mayor — the same mayor who has been in active litigation with the state over its legal interventions in the streets of Memphis — should be a co-optation of local jail supervision by the state. “I think the state has to get more involved,” Harris said, advocating a takeover of training of jail staff from the sheriff’s office, and he suggested further that operation of the jail be outsourced to a private for-profit company.
In the brief interval between the first news reports of the mayor’s remarks and the show’s broadcasting, Bonner responded with the issuance of a highly detailed open letter to Harris, lambasting the mayor with the declaration that “once again … your lack of communication and engagement with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office has led you to provide misinformation to the community.”
The sheriff called Harris’ suggestion for privatizing the jails “the most reckless you have made.”
The sheriff reminded Harris that the responsibility of the sheriff’s office for operating the jail was a matter of existing state law and asserted that Harris had ignored not only his (Bonner’s) proposals for joint local action to improve jail conditions but specific reports on both the jail and Jail East (a women’s facility) from the Tennessee Corrections Institute (TCI).
“I learned this week that you did not even know what TCI is or what it does,” wrote Bonner. “I learned this because you were required to sign off on my plan for overcrowding, which involves relocating inmates to other facilities and working with the state to pick up convicted prisoners.” Bonner suggested: “You delayed signing my plan because you were upset over the pending litigation over my funding.”
Said the sheriff: “When you made changes in my office’s budget, which is the subject of ongoing litigation, your office told me not to worry, that whatever money was needed would be made available. Sadly, this is not the case.”
Bonner contrasted his own practice of owning up to exact figures on jail deaths with what he said was Harris’ lack of transparency regarding those at the corrections center, overseen by the mayor. And he made the case that responsibility for mental health and medical conditions in general at the jail was not his, per se.
“Your office provides medical care to all inmates. Your office selects the provider. After the last bid process, your office selected Wellpath because its services were cheaper than [those of] the company that received the highest scores by the selection committee.”
The Bonner letter addresses a plethora of other issues as well, and notes the most obvious difference between the two: the sheriff’s insistence that a new jail facility is needed versus Harris’ reluctance on the point.
Underlying this most recent exchange between the two is the fact — and the irony — that both of them will be leaving office in less than a year, and the circumstances they contend with will undoubtedly still be unresolved and the argument’s pro and con left to their successors.