States of Incarceration is coming to the University of North Carolina Wilmington! Stay tuned for more information and a new local story!
The Trousdale Turner Correctional Center is a private prison built in 2015 at the foot of a mothballed nuclear reactor in rural Tennessee. It is owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, whose headquarters are in a wealthy Nashville suburb. The story of the prison begins in 1984, when the Tennessee Valley Authority canceled plans for the Hartsville Nuclear Complex due to public protest and economic miscalculation. The Four Lake Regional Industrial Development Authority created an industrial park called PowerCom on the former nuclear site, but many warehouses sat empty until 2008, when CCA bought part of PowerCom for a 2,552 bed prison. The recession delayed construction for six years, leaving Trousdale County’s economic future hanging in the balance. As the site now shifts from warehousing things to warehousing people, the question remains: What impact will the prison have on the people incarcerated there and on the local community?
Our Point of View
We are undergraduate students at different stages of our education—freshmen through seniors—and from different regions of the US—across the South, the Northeast, and the Midwest—as well as different nations of origin, including China and Switzerland. Together, we explored the layers of history in a prison construction site, as well as the connections between prison profiteering in rural Tennessee, in the city of Nashville where we live, and at our own university.
I’m like a kid in a candy store. I believe with all my heart that CCA will be an excellent neighbor.
— Trousdale County Mayor Carroll Carman, Oct. 3, 2014, ground-breaking ceremony for Trousdale Turner Correctional Center
