Senate committee pushes forward with body-worn cameras in Tennessee prisons

Despite objections from the Department of Correction, a Senate subcommitee voted Tuesday to move forward on considering a potential pilot program to equip all prison security guards with body cameras in the state’s privately managed prison in Trousdale County northeast of Nashville.

The troubled prison, run by CoreCivic, has been the site of frequent violence and assaults among inmates and against staff, multiple deaths, including deaths related to drug overdoses, and a riot in June 2025 when inmates left their housing units, damaged cameras and set fires. The prison has had frequent staffing shortages and has been the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation.

As Sen Ed. Jackson put it: “Body cameras would keep everyone honest. No more ‘he said, she said.'”

District Attorney Jason Lawson, whose district includes the Trousdale County prison and who has advocated for body cameras there to provide better evidence for prosecutions, gave the subcommittee a slide presentation showing the gaps in video evidence collected by the prison’s stationary surveillance cameras.

He used an example from a case he handled in which surveillance video showed two inmates chasing a guard. The inmates attacked the guard and stabbed him with pens before he escaped. The surveillance camera video was too pixelated to clearly identify the faces of the inmates. The actual assault was not shown on video because the inmates had pushed the guard into a cell, outside the view of the cameras.

Lawson showed how if the guard had been wearing a body camera, all of the assault would have been captured as well as the faces of the inmates and who did what.

Several states already have deployed body cameras in prison, including Florida, Ohio and Arizona, and others have pilot programs. One key issue that might be in play are policies around when the cameras must be on and when they could be turned off.

Benefits of prison guard body cameras

A bill is likely forthcoming from Sen. Tom Hatcher, who chaired the Tuesday meeting of the Senate State and Local Government Corrections Subcommittee meeting.

Hatcher said he saw seven key benefits of guards using body cameras:

• Deterrence of violence and aggression, as inmates will know that cameras will record more actions.
• Enhanced accountability and transparency for the prison.
• Protection of inmates and of staff.
• Improved evidence gathering when a crime has occurred.
• Generation of video that can be used as training.
• Reduced liability and cost to the state.
• Better coverage in the blind spots of existing surveillance cameras.

However, Frank Strada, commissioner of the Department of Correction, told the subcommittee that he did not support body cameras because they could be too expensive and the department is taking other measures, such as improving its current camera systems and starting a drone program outside the prison. He said the body cameras would produce a vast amount of footage that would need to be reviewed and noted that the footage could be subject to public records requests, which would be expensive to fulfill.

Strada said it would cost $2 million to $3 million annually in personnel and legal costs to handle public records requests, and $6 million to equip its guards throughout the prison system with cameras. Hatcher asked Strada for a cost estimate for only a pilot program at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center — not the entire prison system — but Strada said he did not yet have that information.

“I recognize that many of you approach this issue with a strong belief that body worn cameras could improve accountability and transparency in Tennessee prisons,” Strada told the subcommittee. “Our responsibility, however, is to ensure that any technology we deploy in our prisons is not only well intentioned, but workable in a correctional environment, legally defensible… and fiscally sustainable over time.”

“Our position is not opposition to accountability,” Strada said. “It is a commitment to choosing the safety and security measures that deliver the greatest benefit for all staff, inmates and taxpayers.”

Producing video for public records requests

Frank Strada, commissioner for the Tennessee Department of Correction, opposed putting body cameras on security guards in prisons, telling lawmakers at a Senate subcommittee meeting that they would cost too much and not be the best way to improve accountability and transparency.

Jen Brenner, the general counsel for the Department of Correction, told the subcommittee that the department currently gets public records requests for video from its surveillance cameras inside the prison, but these are usually of incidents related to ongoing criminal investigations or internal investigations by its Office of Investigations and Conduct. In both of those situations, the department can deny those requests without having to review the video because of exemptions in state law, she said.

However, she said her legal team thought that to handle public records requests for presumably other material, two attorneys would need to be assigned to each prison facility.

“When we do get a public records request, we are required to review that frame by frame. And so if we have an individual who says, ‘Look, I’ve been harassed by an officer, I’d like the first week of January, all of that footage where I had an interaction with that officer,’ we’ve got to have somebody who has the technical capability of going back to pull that footage.

“When we are reviewing that for disclosure under the Public Records Act, we have to determine whether there is — frame by frame — any exception that’s available to us.”

She said each facility would need someone who is trained on the IT side to make video redactions. And after the redactions, the attorney would have to look through the redacted video again to “make sure that we have redacted whether we have some sort of medical episode occurring in the video, whether we’ve got an inmate who’s under some protective status, whether we’ve got a juvenile that’s depicted in that video…”

Senators on the subcommittee seemed skeptical of the costs presented by the department and asked for more detail.

Hatcher also pointed out that if someone asks for video, the state already has an ability to recoup some of the costs.

State law provides that if someone asks for copies of records, a government entity can charge reasonable fees for the actual costs necessary to produce the records according to the Office of Open Records Counsel’s Schedule of Reasonable Charges.

CoreCivic’s viewpoint

CoreCivic’s CEO Patrick Swindle also addressed the committee. CoreCivic operates prisons in several states, including Ohio, which adopted body cameras in prisons.

Swindle said that the video produced by the body-worn cameras has had a positive impact in Ohio where the cameras have been operational since 2021. He said it has positively influenced officer safety, incident documentation and accountability. He also said 98% of grievances by inmates against officers are being dismissed due to camera evidence.

He said correction officers themselves had mixed feelings about the cameras, with some officers feeling they were being monitored too much and others appreciating the ability to record confrontational interactions. He said it was important to have a policy that ensures officers turned on their cameras when necessary. Ohio initially required the cameras to be recording at all times but later changed to partial recording due to the volume of the video created.

Swindle estimate that it would cost $350,000 to deploy cameras at the Trousdale facility.