The Tennessee board created to prevent another case like the 2022 kidnapping and murder of Memphis teacher Eliza Fletcher has told state senators that the prison disciplinary system it oversees is still broken. The board, created in 2023 about three years after Cleotha Abston walked free having served 19 years of a 24-year sentence thanks to good-behavior credits, says it found problems in 69 percent of the cases it reviewed.
The board's vice chairman, Mike Dunn, delivered the findings during a Tennessee Senate Corrections Subcommittee hearing convened in late September, according to the Memphis Flyer. Dunn told senators that only 31 percent of the cases the board could review in 2025 were found to be accurate. Separately, the board has examined 35,521 Class A incidents across Tennessee's 14 prisons since it began — the most severe category of institutional infractions. The board removed 718,258 days of good-behavior credit from offenders, equal to roughly 1,967 years, while restoring 43,845 days, or about 120 years, to inmates whose credits had been wrongly revoked.
A System Still Sorting Fact From Error
Of the cases reviewed, the board identified 25 percent as deficient and corrected them, the Memphis Flyer's report notes. Another 23 percent were dismissed for what the paper describes as usually unknown reasons, and 21 percent were classified as other or incomplete. Dunn explained that the board itself cannot extend an inmate's sentence — it can only remove or restore good-behavior credits and adjust sentence calculations accordingly.
Under Tennessee Code Annotated § 41-21-1002, the board is codified as a full-time, nine-member autonomous body outside the Tennessee Department of Correction, authorized specifically to review wardens' decisions on sentence credits tied to Class A disciplinary offenses, according to Justia Law. State law under Tennessee Code Annotated § 41-21-236 allows inmates to earn between one and 16 days per month in sentence-reduction credits, split between institutional behavior and program participation, per FindLaw. Statutory changes now bar those credits from altering sentence expiration dates for offenses committed on or after July 1, 2024.
Dunn Says the Board Cannot Trust What It Sees
Dunn told senators the board's oversight is limited to whatever information is visible in the Tennessee Offender Management Information System, and that prison situation reports feeding that system are usually brief and prone to human error. “We don't trust what we see,” Dunn said, per the same report. Sentence-credit changes ordered by the board are not effective until Department of Correction staff manually enter them into the state system, creating another point where records can lag or go missing.
State Senator Jeff Yarbro said he hoped Tennessee could avoid becoming a garbage-in, garbage-out data system, according to the Flyer's account of the hearing. Board member Dale Carr told senators the board was not receiving cooperation from the Department of Correction. Carr added that the board's executive director was denied access to training for the new offender-management system, which is slated to go online in October.
The Case That Created the Board
The oversight board traces directly back to Abston's criminal history. His original 2000 kidnapping conviction stemmed from forcing Memphis attorney Kemper Durand into a car trunk at gunpoint; after a few hours, Abston took Durand out of the trunk and forced him to drive them to a Mapco gas station, where Durand alerted a Memphis Housing Authority officer who entered the station and the kidnappers ran away, according to the Memphis Flyer's 2001 account. Abston was released in 2020 after serving 19 years of that 24-year sentence, having earned credits for good behavior.
After his release, Abston was convicted in April 2024 and sentenced the following month to 80 years for the September 2021 aggravated rape and kidnapping of Memphis resident Alicia Franklin, according to localmemphis.com. Delayed rape kit testing in that case drew significant public scrutiny before Fletcher's abduction. Abston was found guilty by a jury in the Franklin case; in a different case, he pleaded guilty, according to the Tennessee Bar Association's law blog.
Lawmakers' Broader Push on Sentencing
House Speaker Cameron Sexton sponsored the legislation creating the Inmate Disciplinary Oversight Board, which the Tennessee General Assembly established in 2023 following the public outcry over Fletcher's killing. Sexton also sponsored a separate, broader Truth in Sentencing statute enacted in May 2022 that requires defendants convicted of eight major violent felony categories, including especially aggravated kidnapping, to serve 100 percent of their sentences without early release credits, according to the Lincoln Memorial University Law Review. Governor Bill Lee allowed that measure to become law without his signature, citing prison cost concerns.
Tennessee Department of Correction officials and prison employees are required at all times to cooperate with the board and to provide the information necessary for it to carry out its duties, per the board's underlying statute.
Prison Oversight Hearing
The Senate Corrections Subcommittee's late-September hearing brought together representatives from the Department of Correction, the Tennessee District Attorneys General Association, and the oversight board itself to address concerns about prison operations and inmate credit accuracy.
