By Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio, and Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
The video clip lasted less than two minutes, but Tonya Webb remembers every second as heartbreaking.
The grainy surveillance footage, dated June 29, 2024, showed a teenager in an anti-suicide smock being dragged violently by other teens across the floor at Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center. As guards watched, the teens pulled the smock over the boy’s head, exposing his naked body. Then they stuffed him, limbs flailing, into a cell.
One guard pushed the door closed, locking him in, and the boy pressed his face against the sliver of a cell window. The guard flashed the teens a thumbs-up.
Webb, a medication supervisor at the facility, saw the video when a co-worker showed it to her and knew she was looking at a serious violation of state policy. An incident like this one, in which employees encouraged youths to restrain another youth, would require staff to notify both the state and the boy’s family within 24 hours.
Webb said she raised questions about the incident with the compliance director for the facility. The director said she’d handle it, but after weeks went by with no sign of a state investigation, Webb confronted the deputy to the facility’s executive director.
“I know you’ve seen the video,” Webb recalled telling her. “Nothing’s being done about it.”
WPLN and ProPublica obtained a recording of the video; Webb did not provide it. The state’s Department of Children’s Services confirmed it did not receive an incident report from the facility around the date of the attack. Webb later reported the incident to DCS.
A Tennessee businessman named Jason Crews was the executive director of the private company that ran Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center at that time. He’s also the CEO of Wayne Halfway House, a separate company that had employees overseeing the detention center and that contracts with the state to operate other juvenile facilities. Crews did not reply to written questions about this incident, nor did his deputy and compliance director.
Interviews with dozens of former staff and youth, along with a review of emergency call logs, company records and state documents, reveal how Wayne Halfway House’s leaders failed to report suspected physical and sexual abuse to state officials across Crews’ facilities and prevented the public from learning about violent attacks by reducing the number of 911 calls. The state is now investigating incidents uncovered by the reporting.
According to Wayne Halfway House and Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center employees who worked closely with corporate executives, there was an expectation that serious incidents be kept secret, and the directive came from Crews.
“You always call Jason and nothing gets reported without his permission — and that’s wrong,” said Kim Watts, the company’s former human resources director. She was fired in 2024 when “the company decided to go in a different direction,” according to her termination paperwork.
Liz Ryan, who oversaw juvenile justice programs for the Biden administration, reviewed a detailed summary of the incidents compiled by WPLN and ProPublica. “Wayne Halfway House Inc. and its leadership, including CEO Jason Crews, appear to have demonstrated a documented pattern of disregard for state law, federal law and professional standards,” she said. “They’re putting kids’ lives at risk.”
In a statement, Wayne Halfway House said the company follows state policy and law and “vehemently denies” that Crews or his company have ever discouraged staff from reporting serious or life-threatening incidents to the state or 911. It described its former employees as “untrustworthy sources” with a “clear bias” against the company.
Crews briefly spoke with the news organizations during a guided tour of one of his facilities but subsequently declined multiple requests for a formal interview. Wayne Halfway House provided detailed responses in writing to three rounds of questions.
Over much of the last decade, Tennessee has pushed to expand juvenile prison capacity — and to do so, it turned to Crews. Most youth in state custody for committing crimes are held in his facilities, which accommodate nearly 300. Crews now runs all three of Tennessee’s highest-security youth prisons.
The youth in the video, Thomas Jarvis, recently turned 20. He recalls the attack as the worst ordeal of his years bouncing between facilities in Tennessee. His mother, Crystal Smith, learned about the incident for the first time only when reporters showed her the footage. “That’s my baby that they did that to,” she said. “That’s not right.”
The company’s written policy, in effect in early 2020, stated that staff should call 911 “immediately” during a disturbance or riot, but multiple employees said leaders told them something different: Never call for outside help unless Crews or his deputies gave permission. Nine months after Crews took over the high-security Mountain View Academy, guard Heather Boyd called 911 during an attack on colleagues after waiting 20 minutes for a supervisor to respond. Days later, the company fired Boyd and at least two other guards.
“I thought I’d done something to save somebody’s life,” she told reporters. “You shouldn’t have to choose a person’s life over your job.” Wayne Halfway House denied firing anyone for calling 911.
WPLN and ProPublica spoke with more than three dozen former employees of Wayne Halfway House and former residents who said they knew of serious problems that endangered youth and staff inside the company’s facilities. More than a dozen said the company failed to report grave safety failures as required, preventing the state from learning about problems in its facilities. Nearly two dozen former employees and teens said they suspected sexual abuse was taking place in Crews’ facilities; five former staff members said they did not report it as required under state law because they feared retaliation from leadership.