The portrayal of this information is false and misleading, and presenting it in a way that suggests it is valid or a reliable research-based comparison presents our company and our people in a false light. It’s being pushed by Alex Friedmann, who served time for attempted murder, assault and armed robbery, and who now makes his living as a paid, professional critic of partnership corrections. This stunt, like the majority of Friedmann’s actions, is nothing more than a callous effort to draw attention to himself rather than having a genuine discussion of the facts.

Here are the glaring errors in his calculations:

First, a true apples-to-apples comparison would compare facilities by charge data. For example, a facility that holds a higher concentration of inmates convicted of murder or other violent crimes — as is the case with CoreCivic’s Tennessee facilities — would be expected to have a higher homicide rate than those housing non-violent offenders.

Second, CoreCivic holds about one-third of the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) inmate population, and nearly the entirety of the population that CoreCivic holds is medium-security custody and above (i.e., populations with a higher propensity toward violent incidents). However, a substantial portion of TDOC’s sites hold minimum-security, non-violent offenders.

Third, it’s statistically questionable to rely on a rate-per-10,000 calculation for a population that’s smaller than 10,000 people. CoreCivic doesn’t even hold 10,000 inmates for TDOC.

Finally, Friedmann fails to take into account male vs. female populations. CoreCivic holds only male populations for TDOC, which statistically are more disposed toward violent incidents than female populations.

The bottom line is that even one death in our facilities is too many, and we're always working to improve. However, including Friedmann’s politically biased interpretation of cherry-picked statistics in your reporting would be totally misleading since they ignore all the factors that contribute to elevated levels of violence.