Body-worn cameras are not used by guards inside Tennessee’s prisons but some made the case for them in a Tennessee Senate hearing Tuesday, though state corrections officials pushed back.
The hearing was prompted by several cases of inmate violence from the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Middle Tennessee. A major riot there in June injured one guard and three inmates. This brought broad attention to the facility and prompted Tuesday’s review by a Senate panel.
Prosecution of the riot is being handled by the office of Jason Lawson, District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 15th Judicial District. He told the Senate panel that the cameras in use at the facility make it hard to use their footage in court.
Cameras placed at the ends of the corridors, he said, can zoom in on incidents and people. But the more an image is zoomed, the more pixelated it becomes.
“As we get into the courtroom,” Lawson said, “common defenses we hear from defendants is, “That’s not me. You’ve got the wrong person. I’m not the guy with the knife. The other guy has the knife.”
Lawson said his team runs into the same troubles with video evidence in many prison cases. He showed lawmakers videos from an incident at Trousdale Turner in which inmates chased a guard. Once the guard was cornered, he said you could not identify the inmates nor could you tell which of them was armed.
Further, static cameras, Lawson said, present another issue. Inmates know the cameras’ locations and use the information to their advantage. In the video with the guard he showed, inmates pushed the guard into a cell because they knew the cameras could not see them. There, the guard was stabbed multiple times with ink pens.
A body-worn camera, Lawson said, would have given clear images of the attackers. They might also deter incidents, he said, if inmates knew they were being filmed and were easier to identify.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” Lawson said.
Those words do come at a cost. Lawson projected a pilot project for body-worn cameras at Trousdale Turner alone would cost $350,000.
Senators grasped the argument and found value in the evidence the cameras could generate. They debated, though, if the cameras were implemented whether they’d be turned off and on by guards at their discretion or remain on all the time. Discretion could lead to improper behavior but always-on cameras could generate too much information and become an administrative headache.
This was, basically, the argument of Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) Commissioner Frank Strada. He said that while the $6 million cost of the cameras themselves was straightforward, the cost to administer the program was not. Programs in other states cost millions of dollars, he said.
Maybe the biggest unknown dollar figure for body-worn cameras in Tennessee would be compliance with the state’s open record law. Strada said each request for body-worn camera footage would require extensive review and redaction, sometimes going frame by frame.
His team projected each prison would need at least two attorneys for this task.