Tennessee sheriff faces 22 charges, accused in inmate work program

Lina Portman3 weeks ago

0 2 minutes read

Paul Thomas, the sheriff of Gibson County in northwest Tennessee since 2014, has been indicted by Gibson County Sheriff Paul Thomas is accused of illegally profiting from inmate labor.
Thomas was booked into the Gibson and Davidson county jails.

A Tennessee sheriff faces 22 charges in two counties after a state investigation found he allegedly participated in a scheme to profit from inmate labor.

Gibson County Sheriff Paul Thomas was indicted this week by separate grand juries in Gibson and Davidson counties, according to the Tennessee Treasury Comptroller's Office.

Gibson County is about 145 miles from Nashville in northwest Tennessee. It is home to around 50,000 people, according to figures from the latest census.

Thomas has served as Gibson County sheriff since 2014. Efforts to reach him for comment on this story Thursday were unsuccessful.

Thomas is charged in Gibson County with 18 counts of official misconduct, according to an investigative report from the comptroller's office. He was booked and released from the Gibson County Jail Tuesday on $25,000 bail, jail staff said.

Thomas faces four charges in Davidson County because they involve inmates of the Tennessee Department of Corrections, according to John Dunn, a spokesman for the comptroller's office. The Davidson County charges include one count of theft of property over $60,000, two counts of computer crimes over $60,000 and one count of forgery over $60,000.

Thomas was booked into the Davidson County Jail on Wednesday and released on $25,000 bail shortly after 5 p.m. the same day, according to the Davidson County Sheriff's Office.

The investigation was limited to the period between July 1, 2019 and October. 31, 2022.

The allegations detailed in the comptroller's office investigation report include:

In 2020, Thomas and a group of local investors created three for-profit companies known collectively as Alliance Group.
The three companies staffed local businesses, housed current and former inmates in a halfway house called Orchard House, and provided transportation for work release inmates and former inmates to and from work.
Thomas spent just over $1.4 million in inmate payroll costs and deductions to benefit the Alliance Group between February 2020 and October 2022, and at least 170 inmates in Thomas' custody were employed by the Alliance recruitment agency during the investigation.
Thomas, who owned a 20 percent stake in Alliance, received more than $181,000 in compensation, benefits and legal representation services from the companies, which the investigation found came from the inmates' labor.
Thomas allowed 74 Tennessee Department of Corrections inmates held in the Gibson County Jail to reside at Orchard House without proper approval from a judge. The sheriff is accused of continuing to list the jail as a place of detention in the state's offender management system, which allowed the county to collect $507,273 in reimbursements from the state Department of Corrections that been paid to Orchard House without the knowledge or consent of the state agency.
Thomas ordered that $448,637.09 in wages earned by inmates working for Alliance be deposited into a private account owned and controlled by the Alliance Group instead of having their wages deposited into an inmate trust account.

Lina Portman

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