My Thanks to All Supporters (2018)

This is my second attempt to send out a message thanking all the many thousands of supporters, friends, and comrades for adding your voices to the recent online (Roots Action) petition against my being held in isolated solitary confinement on death row at Virginia’s Sussex 1 State Prison (S1SP). Also for joining the protest against designs of Virginia prison officials to subject me to yet another retaliatory interstate transfer for my involvement in publicizing and challenging abuses in Virginia prisons.
And although I was transferred on October 17th to Sussex 2 State Prison (Sussex 2 State Prison) the intent of officials was to make my living conditions decidedly worse, which I’ll discuss elsewhere.

I initially sent this message out several weeks before my transfer from S1SP, but discovered several days before the move that it was intercepted along with various other articles I’d sent out. Not only this but they’d been rejecting a lot of my incoming mail without notifying the senders and were also intercepting most of my outgoing mail.

Still I received mail from many people with messages of support and encouragement, which I greatly appreciate. I wrote many of you in response but apparently much of that mail never left the prison – correspondents consistently reported by phone that they were not receiving my mail.

It seems that while my mail was being stopped and increasing efforts were being made to stop me from communicating with folks on the outside by phone, (because of my conducting several radio interviews and discussion forums with prisoner advocates concerning prison conditions and protests), prison officials were busy behind-the-scenes manufacturing a violent profile of me to use to speciously justify my protested mistreatment and further abuses to come, which will be addressed in a separate article.

My purpose here is simply to thank everyone who supported and reached out to me in response to my work and the designs of officials to suppress and act out reprisals for that work. Thank you!

Panther love!
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Since this message was sent out by Rashid, VADOC transferred him yet again, first back to Sussex 1 State Prison, and then from there to Indiana, where he is currently being held at the Reception-Diagnostic Center in Plainfield.  He is currently in a cell with no property. He has no extra underwear to change into. The cell is, of course, dirty. He’s in solitary confinement. They are refusing him his stationary and stamps, so he can’t write out. We will provide updates as we receive more information.