Leaders of a board created by state lawmakers in the wake of the kidnapping and murder of Eliza Fletcher said Monday the disciplinary system it was created to oversee is broken and that they get little help from the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) to fix it.
Corrections were the focus of a state Senate hearing Monday. Senators heard from TDOC, the Tennessee District Attorneys Association, and the Inmate Disciplinary Oversight Board (IDOB).
That board was created by the Tennessee General Assembly in 2023 following the 2022 abduction and murder of Fletcher, a Memphis teacher. Her killer, Cleotha Abston, had been released in 2020 for a previous kidnapping conviction. He served 19 years of his 24-year sentence, receiving credits for good behavior.
Lawmakers created the autonomous board outside TDOC to independently review sentence-credit decisions. House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville), who sponsored the legislation, said the board was intended in part to help prevent another case like Fletcher’s.
Tennessee inmates can earn sentence credits that reduce the amount of time they serve. Those credits can also be taken away for disciplinary violations. The IDOB reviews those decisions to ensure the credits are properly awarded or removed. In 2025, it found that only 31 percent of the cases his board could review were accurate, the board’s vice chairman, Mike Dunn, told senators.
Since its inception, the IDOB has reviewed 35,521 Class A incidents, the most severe in the state’s 14 prisons. Those reviews have removed 718,258 days of good credit from offenders, about 1,967 years, Dunn said. It has also restored 43,845 days worth of good credits to offenders, about 120 years.
Of all the cases his board was able to review from TDOC, the IDOB identified 25 percent of them as deficient and were able to correct them. Dunn said 23 percent of these cases had been dismissed, usually with an unknown reason. Another 21 percent were classified as “other” or were incomplete.
Changes to inmates’ sentence-credit records, though, must still be made by TDOC staff, Dunn said. Until those are made in the state’s computer system, those changes and the job of the IDOB are “ineffective,” he said.
“As an Inmate Disciplinary Oversight Board, we cannot extend any sentences,” Dunn told senators. “We’re only removing or restoring the good credits that they’ve earned or that they haven’t earned when they should have and adjusting their sentence and keeping the bad guys that are still acting bad from getting out early to prevent another Eliza Fletcher from occurring.
“Our main focus is the safety of Tennesseans, period.”
The board’s oversight is limited to what they can see in the Tennessee Offender Management Information System (TOMIS), Dunn said. Reports of situations in prisons are usually brief, Dunn said, likely prone to human error and, “We don’t trust what we see.”
State Sen. Jeff Yarbro hoped the state could avoid a “garbage in, garbage out” data system that yields incorrect information, especially when people’s lives are dependent on this information.
IDOB member Dale Carr said his board is simply not receiving any cooperation from TDOC to carry out its work.
For example, a new version of TOMIS is slated to go online in October, TDOC officials said Monday. This “absolutely blew my mind,” Carr said.
The IDOB executive director was denied access to a training session for the new system. The board was told TOMIS was coming on board in January and then December. Carr said he had no idea the system was coming online in October or that they were scheduled for training until he heard it in the hearing room that day.
“Our main thing here today is cooperation,” Carr said. “I want to try to cooperate with (TDOC). But it has to come from both sides, front and back.”
State law requires TDOC officials and prison employees to “at all times cooperate with the board” and provide information necessary for it to perform its duties.
