After the hearing, Farmer said he was unfamiliar with WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting on the Bean Center that bill sponsors said inspired the legislation. He said he opposed the original legislation because of how much state oversight it introduced, and he criticized the sponsors for not clearly explaining the reasons for the bill.
“I think there was a failure to communicate the issue that they seek to address and establish a reason why they went from a county-run facility in Knoxville to try to have this sort of intrusion all over the state,” Farmer said.
State Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat and sponsor of the original bill, said she believes part of the reason the bill failed was the influence of Jason Crews, who runs privately operated juvenile detention and residential treatment centers in Tennessee. Campbell and others working on the bill said a lobbyist for Crews’ business spoke to them about removing privately run facilities from the bill. One amendment filed in the House would have done just that.
“It really does feel like this is about the lobbying influence that Jason Crews has in the legislature,” Campbell said.
Crews is the executive director of Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center as well as Wayne Halfway House, a company that also operates residential treatment centers for kids in Tennessee and Florida.
WPLN and ProPublica reached out to Crews for comment. His spokesperson emailed a statement from Nicole Polk, the government affairs director with Wayne Halfway House.
Polk said the company had concerns about the bill giving regulatory power to an independent agency “without more extensive consideration about whether it’s a good idea and how such a step would affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee. The legislature clearly agrees with that concern.”
In addition to lobbying against the bill, Crews has donated to the campaigns of the lawmakers who sunk the bill’s chances. Rep. William Lamberth, a Sumner County Republican who sent the bill to “summer study,” has received $13,000 from Crews’ super PAC, Focus PAC, since 2021. Farmer received $4,500 from the PAC since 2021. One of Crews’ facilities, Mountain View Academy, is in Farmer’s district.
“Like many individuals and businesses, we participate in the electoral and policy arena,” Polk said. “We support strong leaders to serve our state, and do so through donations that are fully disclosed, within legal requirements.”
Lamberth did not respond to requests for comment. “No contribution I have accepted will ever influence my vote on a piece of legislation,” Farmer said in an emailed statement.
Farmer was one of the sponsors of the 2021 bill that limited the time children could be kept in seclusion in juvenile detention centers and put in place some of the state rules that the Bean Center was violating. Despite that, after that House hearing in March, he told WPLN that he thought that law should be repealed altogether, saying that in retrospect, he thinks facilities should have more discretion.
“Frankly, if it was up to me, I would reverse the seclusion law that we passed and be sure that youth that are violent, that attack guards, that attack other children, can be put into a place by themselves until they calm down,” Farmer said.
Richard Bean, superintendent of the center that bears his name, did not respond to requests for comment.
Research over the past decade has shown that isolating children doesn’t improve their behavior — if anything, it could worsen it. Solitary confinement can cause psychological impacts like depression, anxiety or psychosis, and young people are especially vulnerable to those effects. The majority of suicides inside juvenile correction facilities in the United States happen when a child is isolated.
State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican from Springfield who chairs the government operations committee, was one of the reform bill’s sponsors. He said that in his years in the Senate, he has never seen a lawmaker who wasn’t involved in the original bill introduce an amendment that completely gutted it — let alone a member of his own party.
“Anytime you have a supermajority, you know, you’re going to have factions develop,” Roberts said. “That’s just part of the dynamic of where we are in Tennessee today.”
Roberts said he’s both surprised and disappointed that it got killed, and he doesn’t understand why.
But Roberts said the bill’s failure this year is not going to stop him from reforming the system.
“I’m just going to take the lemons and try and make some lemonade,” he said. “And we’ll see if we can’t come up with an even better, more robust inspection program than what we proposed.”