ProPublica investigation reveals Jason Crews' Wayne Halfway House concealed abuse, skipped required reports at Tennessee youth prisons

On August 12, 2026, ProPublica and WPLN published an investigation finding that Tennessee businessman Jason Crews and his company, Wayne Halfway House, repeatedly failed to report documented abuse and serious incidents at the juvenile-detention facilities Crews operates, as Tennessee law requires. The reporting centers on a June 29, 2024 incident at Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center in Columbia, in which surveillance video showed other teens dragging, stripping and caging a boy in an anti-suicide smock while guards watched; one guard locked him in and gave the attackers a thumbs-up. State law required staff to notify the Department of Children's Services and the boy's family within 24 hours. Tennessee's DCS told the reporters, on the record, that it never received an incident report for that date. A former medication supervisor who raised the incident internally was later fired by the company.

Former staff said the expectation to keep serious incidents from the state came from Crews himself; former human resources director Kim Watts said, "You always call Jason and nothing gets reported without his permission — and that's wrong." Company policy documents obtained by the reporters directed staff to route emergencies through Crews or his deputies before calling police, and nearly two dozen former employees and youth separately told the reporters they suspected abuse went unreported across Crews' facilities, including a 2024 incident in which a facility administrator was recorded putting a teenage girl in a headlock. Wayne Halfway House denied discouraging staff from reporting or calling 911 in life-threatening situations, calling former employees "untrustworthy sources."

Crews operates all three of Tennessee's highest-security youth prisons plus two other facilities, holding close to 300 youth under state contracts. About six weeks after the unreported June 2024 incident, the state awarded Wayne Halfway House a more lucrative contract to convert Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center into a higher-security prison. DCS said it is now comparing the reporting it received against its own and the company's records to determine whether required incident and abuse reports were made, but said the results of that review will not be made public.