KY prison official resigned over sexual messages to inmate. TN made her a warden
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- KY prison official resigned in 2023 amid probe into explicit inmate messages.
- TN corrections department hired her without checking KY disciplinary record.
- Official now oversees Nashville prison and earns $136,800 annual salary.
A Kentucky prison official who resigned in 2023 during an investigation into sexually explicit messages she allegedly sent an inmate was hired four months later by the Tennessee Department of Corrections, where she has since become a warden making twice the salary, according to public records obtained by the Lexington Herald-Leader under the Kentucky Open Records Act.
Taylor Rae Kapusta, originally of Scott County, served at several prisons in the Kentucky Department of Corrections from 2016 to 2023, working her way up from correctional officer to corrections unit administrator.
By May 2023, Kapusta was making $67,693 a year at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in Oldham County as the prison’s Prison Rape Elimination Act Compliance Manager, responsible for tracking incidents of sexual abuse and harassment.
That month, the Kentucky Department of Corrections’ internal affairs office investigated an allegation that a male inmate at Luther Luckett was getting sexually explicit messages through the prison’s JPay inmate mail system from someone using the account name “Thuggg Numberone,” according to agency reports.
Investigators determined that Thuggg Numberone and the inmate exchanged more than 600 messages over the previous 60 days, with at least 16 messages being sexually explicit, according to their Oct. 6, 2023, final report on the case.
And they concluded that Kapusta — during her off-duty hours from Luther Luckett — created the Thuggg Numberone account at 9:29 p.m. on March 8, 2023, according to their report.
In an interview with investigators, Kapusta acknowledged creating the account but said she “did not mean anything by the messages that she sent,” they wrote in their report. “She wanted to see them do good.”
The inmate would only identify Thuggg Numberone as “a friend that he knew from living in Lexington,” investigators wrote.
The Department of Corrections redacted the name of the inmate and the contents of the explicit messages before releasing them under the Open Records Act, citing privacy exemptions in the law for PREA investigations.
Kapusta submitted a polite handwritten letter of resignation on May 23, 2023, to her warden, Amy Robey. Robey accepted it “with prejudice” because Kapusta was “under investigation for allegations of misconduct” at the time, Robey wrote in a formal reply.
Kentucky state employees who resign with prejudice generally can’t be rehired by the state government.
However, four months later, in September 2023, the Tennessee Department of Corrections hired Kapusta to work at their state prisons.
There is no record of the state of Tennessee checking Kapusta’s background with the state of Kentucky, said Morgan Hall, spokeswoman for the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, which oversees the Kentucky Department of Corrections.
Kapusta went on to work as superintendent of the Mark Luttrell Transition Center, a Memphis prison, and then became warden of the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, a Nashville prison, where she gets a salary of $136,800, according to a Tennessee state payroll database.
Kapusta did not return several calls seeking comment at her Nashville office.
A spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Corrections, Dorinda Carter, said this week that she has no explanation at this time for Kapusta’s hiring following her resignation in Kentucky during an internal investigation.
“The Tennessee Department of Correction is reviewing the information you shared,” Carter told the Herald-Leader on Monday.
In a Facebook post in March 2024, the Tennessee Department of Corrections celebrated Kapusta as part of women’s history month, noting that both of her parents worked for the agency in the 1980s, so “she is following in their footsteps.”
“For younger women starting in corrections, it’s important that you learn about all areas of the department and take yourself out of your comfort zone,” Kapusta is quoted as saying in the Facebook post. “If you put in the hard work, effort, and make sacrifices, anything is possible.”
The Herald-Leader has previously reported on Kentucky state prison employees who were fired or resigned amid internal investigations who soon resurfaced in other Kentucky state jobs.
For example, the newspaper reported last year on at least five Kentucky prison employees who moved to the Department of Juvenile Justice or elsewhere in state government after they were disciplined for wrongdoing at the Department of Corrections.
One of them had resigned as a prison guard in the middle of an investigation for taking indecent pictures of his genitals and sending them to a woman while he was supposed to be on duty. Another had been fired as a prison guard for failing to report an inmate’s $10,000 bribe offer to smuggle drugs.
State officials acknowledged to the newspaper they sometimes failed to perform adequate background checks before rehiring people who had left another state agency under troubled circumstances.
