SPOTLIGHT ON VIRGINIA PRISONS: WHY VIRGINIA’S REMOTE PRISONS NEED TO BE PUBLICLY EXPOSED AND CLOSED (2024) by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

CULTIVATING SECRECY IN VA PRISONS

Virginia officials have always tried to hide what happens inside their prisons from the public. Especially the abuse. 50 years ago in a lawsuit against inhumane conditions at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, Va, a Va Federal court observed and critiqued this practice. The court noted that Va prisons officials demonstrated:

“a lack of recognition that a prison administration is not a fief unto itself. Coupled with this antiquated notion that a prison unit is not even peripherally a part of the community is the practice over the years, that has been shown to the court in this and other prisons cases, to envelop the system with a massive veil of secrecy. More concern seems to have been given to the image of the prison’s administration than to granting to its inmates not only such constitutional rights as they are entitled to in spite of incarceration, but also the basic tenets of conduct which simple fairness, interpreted by even the most uneducated be accorded them as well.” (1)

Nothing has improved in the half century since this ruling. Actually since then Va has constructed and opened several prisons in the most remote regions of the state, in small segregated towns where cultures of localism and secrecy are strong so that predictably these prisons create an island of abuse and concealment. Facilities like Red Onion State Prison (ROSP) and Wallens Ridge State Prison (WRSP).

When ROSP and WRSP first opened in 1998 and 1999 respectively, the expenses of their construction and operation were justified by false information fed to the public. Information the Virginia Department of Corrections (sic!) [VDOC] did not want publicly contradicted. But, it was. And this only because outside human rights organizations and concerned local groups dared to peer inside these places.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) exposed these lies in a scathing report issued in 1999 about ROSP and the racist abuses occurring there (2), and a local radio group made a documentary about similar conditions at WRSP called “Up the Ridge.”

This public exposure forced the VDOC to repeatedly change and justify its reasons for continuing to operate these two expensive and unneeded prisons. At each stage they maneuvered to hide the continued abuses occurring in them. And these have been no small abuses. It’s important to give readers a sense of the gravity of the abuses occurring in the dark in these remote prisons for you to understand how serious is the need for the greatest exposure and transparency of these prisons and to guide a movement demanding that they be closed down.

I want to give just 3 examples out of multitudes of hidden abuses that have happened in these remote prisons to make my point: one involves two guard-prompted racial killings committed by a now deceased white supremacist inmate who wanted to expose what he had been used to do, the second is how officials at these prisons manufactured a massive gang presence and gang conflict within VDOC to create justification for continuing to keep ROSP and WRSP running, which actually had no gangs before 2004; and how these prisons continue to secretly implement tortuous solitary confinement statuses in defiance of state law barring the same.

ROBERT GLEASON KILLS FOR PRISON OFFICIALS

Robert Gleason, who was executed in 2013, was a mercurial man I met while at ROSP. He was an admitted white supremacist and my neighbor in solitary confinement for several months during 2010, where he had been planted by ROSP administrators in hopes that we would “kill each other.” We were told as much by ranking ROSP guards, including Dwayne Turner, who is now assistant warden here at ROSP. This actually had the opposite result of leading us to communicate, to Robert reading some of my writings, and his asking me to write an expose of how officials at WRSP had prompted him to kill a mentally ill prisoner, which I did. (3) He also asked me to write his full biography, which I declined to do.

The first killing was of his cellmate Harvey Watson for which he was charged with capital murder and pled guilty. In the criminal case he implicated WRSP staff as responsible and complicit in the killing, and actually tried to use the case to expose what they did. To no avail. Several guards were fired but only because autopsies showed that Harvey had been dead for half a day before they reported the death, and they had falsified records of making routine checks on the prisoners. The staff who actually caused the killing were passed over however.

Robert told me repeatedly that he only realized after the fact that WRSP officials had used him too and set him up to kill Harvey to remove a thorn from their side. Just as ROSP officials were trying to do by placing us next to each other – he was now a thorn because he persisted in trying to expose what they’d done and I was a thorn for resisting abuses at the prison and exposing them to the public.

In that case WRSP staff wanted to silence Harvey because he kept protesting that officials had knowingly transported him from Sussex 1 state prison (SX1) to WRSP with a dead prisoner sitting in the van with him. The man had apparently been complaining of needing emergency medical attention which went ignored. He and Harvey were loaded into the transport vehicle where he died shortly after. Harvey kept telling guards he was dead, yet they continued the 8 hour trip to WRSP refusing to stop.

Harvey had just set his cell on fire the night before his transfer and had recently tried to set another prisoner on fire. He had outstanding disciplinary sentences. He was not supposed to be released to general population (GP). Even in GP he was supposed to have been housed in cells alone due to his mental health status. However, ranking WRSP officials and a counselor Gallihar put him in GP in Robert’s cell.

Robert was known to have been convicted, suspected and charged with numerous killings. They felt he was the man for the job.

In the cell, Robert complained to everyone – to his counselor Gallihar, the warden, ranking staff, even outside officials – that Harvey  was sick and needed to be moved out of his cell before he was forced to do something drastic.

Harvey would drink urine, masturbate in the open, talk to himself loudly throughout the night, and so on. Lieutenant Gallihar and his wife and others told Robert, “you know how to deal with it,” and refused to move Harvey. Robert admittedly snapped and killed Harvey. The next day Gallihar fabricated an incident report on his wife’s behalf to cover for her.

Robert vowed that he would bring attention to WRSP if he had to keep killing to do it. I reasoned with him that killing our peers was unjustified and worked against us, but persisted that this was his chosen path. He even told me how he planned to kill the next person. That he would strangle them to death on the solitary confinement exercise yard even though we are locked inside single man fenced-in pens.

He said he would trick the intended victim into believing he was fitting him with a homemade necklace through the fence, then pull a rope around his neck and strangle the victim to death as he sat hopeless on the ground with his back against the fence. The rope would be hidden and attached to the necklace. He was confident guards would let him take the rope outside if they knew his intentions and if he targeted someone they disliked. He proved to be correct. He said he would then expose how officials let him kill another prisoner knowing his intentions.

In fact everyone knew what Robert planned to do. He told everyone for months beforehand that he was going to keep killing until he exposed what happened at WRSP. He’d written numerous letters to administrators throughout the prison and VDOC, to the governor even, stating his intentions. Telling officials his intentions became something of an obsession. No one moved to prevent it. In fact I heard numerous ranking guards encourage him to do it.

After officials saw that me and Robert weren’t at each other’s necks as they’d hoped they moved him to another cellblock. A few weeks later I heard guards call an alert across their radios that there was an emergency situation on the exercise yard for the cellblock that Robert had been moved to. I also heard a female guard’s voice come across the radio yelling, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” I knew what happened.

On that day Robert strangled a young Black man, Aaron Cooper, to death on the exercise yard.

Several prisoners who witnessed the incident from other exercise cages described how guards let it happen. How they could see that Robert had something bulky under his clothes when guards escorted him, in handcuffs to the exercise yard after supposedly strip searching him. And a ranking guard, Sergeant Tracey Gilmore, who was sitting on the yard watching everything, (even Aaron kicking as he was strangled to death), waited until he was dead before she called an emergency alert.

I would also later hear repeatedly about Robert and numerous guards of all ranks sitting for hours in the medical department, where he was moved after the incident, laughing about Aaron’s death and killing more “niggers.” I wrote about one witness account in a 2010 report on abuse at ROSP. This prisoner, a Black man named Ernst Darcus, was threatened by guards with a similar death because he filed complaints against abuses at ROSP. He was also housed in the medical department for 3 days where he witnessed exchanges between Robert and the racist guards. Ernest remarked, “it was a real KKK rally.” (4)

There has always been a close relationship and collaborations between white supremacists and law enforcement officials, not to mention that historically they were one and the same. Placing prisons like ROSP and WRSP in remote white segregated regions is a recipe for this sort of racist conniving and abuse.

Ultimately Robert’s personal crusade to use killings of other prisoners as a means of exposing ROSP and WRSP became a circus.

With no legal knowledge or experience he declined to be represented by an attorney in his capital murder case for Harvey’s death . He declined plea offers and pled guilty, and tried to use the sentencing phase of the death penalty case to put both WRSP and ROSP on trial, which was prevented by the judge. Robert was sentenced to die and declined all appeals. He was also charged with capital murder for the killings of Aaron Cooper and pled guilty to those charges as well. This case was a repeat of the former one in his failed efforts to put the prison on trial. Robert was sentenced to die and declined all appeals on the Aaron Cooper charges as well. He was executed in 2013.

The media reported his only statement when he died was that he accepted the punishment to set an example of accountability for one’s wrongdoing. Robert was actually dying of advanced colon cancer, which officials had left untreated until it spread and he was suffering heavy chronic bleeding. He’d told me several times he preferred to be executed than die from cancer.

Abuses and the use of white supremacist prisoners by prison officials to kill mentally ill and black prisoners is definitely a matter of public concern, and cause for not only keeping these remote prisoners under close public scrutiny but closing them down.

VA PRISONER OFFICIALS AND MANUFACTURE GANG WARS

With the prevalence of youth lumpen organizations (so called street gangs) in Va, it’s hard to believe that there were actually no gangs (especially no black ones) in Va prisons prior to 2004. The culture never took root because Va’s own culture of prisoners bonding based upon the cities they were from prevented it. The few gang members who did surface were mocked as bringing alien cultures into Va’s own local culture. Va had always had a highly territorial culture against those from other states.

I witnessed this birth and clash of gangs in Va prisons and how officials at ROSP and WRSP actually manufactured the entire situation almost overnight beginning in 2005.

This all happened for a reason.

I’ve already touched on how the public was fed a steady stream of lies to justify the expensive construction and continued operations of these two unneeded and inefficiently operated prisons. But I need to be more specific now to explain how and why the gangs were created and played against each other by these officials.

It boiled down to Va needing to yet again create justification for ROSP and WRSP to remain open in light of both being repeatedly exposed as unneeded and previous justifications proving to be lies. Particularly where the expensive construction and operation of these prisons contributed to a state recession. When ROSP and WRSP opened in 1998 and 1999, the then VDOC director Ronald Angelone fed the public the lie that these two 1200-bed supermaxes were needed to safely house Va’s huge number of chronically violent and dangerous prisoners and those never going home.

HRW’s 1999 investigation and report exposed this lie. HRW found the vast majority of prisoners assigned to these facilities were soon to be released back to society, while very few met the VDOC’s criteria for supermax housing, and the VDOC never had enough chronically disruptive prisoners to fill even a fraction of one let alone two 1200 bed supermax facilities. Officials then repeatedly rewrote VDOC classification policies attempting to make more prisoners qualify for housing at ROSP and WRSP, yet failed miserably.

They ended up having to transfer most ROSP and WRSP prisoners to lower security facilities. Then began an unprecedented move of the VDOC contracting to hold waves of prisoners from other states.

Large groups of prisoners were suddenly brought to ROSP and WRSP from Washington, DC, Connecticut, New Mexico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Wyoming, and many other states in efforts to fill beds that Va prisoners couldn’t. This scheme quickly backfired as these out-of-state prisoners experienced the same racist abuses as had Va prisoners at the hands of WRSP and ROSP staff, and reported these mistreatments to loved ones, the media and organizations in their home states, where they had strong advocacy networks and support groups, unlike Va prisoners.

Prisoners from Connecticut were being murdered by WRSP officials like Lawrence Frazier, a Black man who died from being repeatedly electrocuted by multiple guards while he was strapped down to a steel bed frame. There was the attempted murder (staged to look like a suicide) of another Connecticut prisoner, Michael Austin, a white man who WRSP guards disliked because he grew up around and embraced Black urban culture and clashed with WRSP’s rural white guards who ridiculed him and tried to influence him with racist white values. Dozens of New Mexico prisoners were systematically beaten upon intake at WRSP, as were the Connecticut prisoners. The killing of Lawrence Frazier was also featured in the documentary “Up the Ridge” and an Amnesty International report on the abuses of electric weapons in U.S. Prisons. (5)

The pushback from advocates in their states was immediate! Large assemblies of families and groups from New Mexico and Connecticut protested in the WRSP parking lot and nearby town of Big Stone Gap, Va. Pressure was brought to bear on officials in these prisoners’ home states, who came to Va and toured WRSP. Lawsuits were filed and the media was awash with critical reports, especially about the abuses of New Mexico and Connecticut prisoners at WRSP.

One by one these states terminated their contracts to house their prisoners at ROSP and WRSP and again Va was left with huge numbers of empty beds at these supermaxes.

With no one to fill them and the need to give public justification for these prisons’ continued expensive operations while facing waves of bad publicity, VDOC once again had to change the security classifications of these prisons.

In 2005 WRSP was downgraded from a supermax (level 6) to a maximum security (level 5) prison, and for the first time WRSP became a predominantly GP prison. Meantime, ROSP’s population was cut in half from 1200 to a little over 600 prisoners. A large number of minimum security prisoners were then moved to ROSP ostensibly as custodial maintenance and other workers (called “cadre workers”), they were really just bed fillers. But still other measures had to be taken to fill the beds and justify these prisons.

This is where the gang situation arises.

At ROSP the newly appointed warden Tracey Ray promoted a sergeant Tony Adams who previously worked in the prison’s dog kennel to the position of lead investigator and gang specialist (Adams was ROSP’s first “gang” officer). Ray became warden in latter 2004 and appointed Adams as investigator/gang specialist in early 2005. A low ranking guard, J. Bentley, who still works as an investigator and gang specialist at ROSP today, was selected as Adams’ assistant.

This new gang-busting duo hit the ground running alongside their WRSP counterparts Sergeants Steele and King. These men from rural white America with no prior exposure to Blacks or Browns became self-proclaimed experts in urban Black and Brown culture and street organizations overnight. Everywhere they went and looked they saw gang activity. And this wasn’t accidental. They set out to deliberately create an organized gang problem and culture at these prisons where none existed before. This to validate their own jobs as gang-busters and the continued operations of these prisons.

Before this period the VDOC had no gang officials, no so-called gang/STG (Security Threat Group) units, no task forces, no policies on controlling gangs or gang activity, and so on, because there were no gangs in Virginia’s prisons.

At both ROSP and WRSP they created cellblocks in progressive housing (double celled solitary confinement) and solitary confinement exclusively for gang members unofficially called “gang pods.” Those assigned to these pods were people they documented and labeled as gang members. In most cases they targeted people who were in fact not in gangs. There had developed a small but significant gang presence at ROSP and WRSP under the influence of prisoners from other states like Connecticut and New York. But by placing prisoners who weren’t gang members in blocks and cells with those who were, this led to waves of prisoners joining gangs for protection against those in the blocks who were actual members. It also created an isolated environment in which the gang culture could take root and proliferate in Va’s prisons without resistance from local culture. Most who weren’t gang members when they entered these pods were active members when they left. It was a steady cycle of non-members entering the pod, and leaving as active members so that the gang presence in these prisons multiplied overnight.

There were also members of some Central American gangs in the prisons (a result of large Salvadorian migrant communities in Alexandria, Va),  who had traditional rivalries with certain Black gangs. Initially these Browns stayed to themselves, but in the gang pods they clashed with those Blacks who had been profiled members of the rival gangs. This also prompted Blacks who were not initially in gangs to join them for protection or support-in-numbers against these Brown gangs.

In violation of VDOC policy which required screening for gang affiliations and forbade housing documented rivals in cells together, Adams and his WRSP counterparts also deliberately put rivals in the same cells, especially Blacks and Browns, which predictably led to fights and stabbings that were used as ‘proof’ of organized gang violence. In fact at WRSP administrators created a GP gang pod in a 44 cell cellblock, then moved documented rivals into cells together. An hour later a large group of guards invaded the block and had all the prisoners stand outside their cells as they inspected their faces and hands for signs of fights. Those with marks on their faces and hands were written disciplinary infractions for being involved in “gang-related” fights – fights that officials had themselves engineered. These and similar documentations were then used as “evidence” of a “problem with organized gang violence in Va Prisons,” for which WRSP and ROSP were now said to be needed to contain and control.

In an effort to isolate me since I’m not in any gangs and it was presumed the gangs wouldn’t interact with me, I was put in A-3, one of the solitary confinement gang pods at ROSP, where I witnessed the whole scheme play out. I watched the rivalries fester in that block, often under direct instigation of guards who played sides with the gangs, then Adams and others would release rivals to the progressive housing gang pods, where they were put in cells together and violence immediately erupted. Guards were openly amused by the stabbings and fights they were setting up.

I pointed out to those in the gang pod with me what was being done to them and  how they were being used to justify the continued operations of ROSP and WRSP. Most agreed with what I pointed out and some refused to play into it. In 2010 I wrote an article, “Kill Yourself or Liberate Yourself,” documenting the history of the U.S. government instigating and manipulating rivalries and wars between street gangs in just this manner, and calling on them to unite and return to many of their original missions of serving our communities instead of preying on them. (6) I also discussed the uses of gang pods in ROSP in that article.

My efforts began paying off as many of them embraced the views I shared with them and joined in the historic 2011 and 2013 hunger strikes led to thousands of California prisoners protesting solitary confinement. I was transferred out of state in early 2012  followed the next year by several who participated in the 2013 strike.

One of the gang leaders, Kofi Donkur aka L.I., who was a victim of the ROSP gang pods and out-of-state transfer, wrote an article in 2022, “Blood in the Clenched Fist Alliance” (to which I wrote an introduction) where he bore witness to all of this. He opened the article stating:

“I’ve read Rashid’s 2010 article, ‘Kill yourself or Liberate yourself,’ and found it to contain perspectives that I also share. It also gives a true account of the scheme employed by Virginia officials at Red Onion State Prison (ROSP) to manufacture rival gang conflicts to create new justification for continuing to operate VA – ROSP and Wallens Ridge State Prison, after both had been repeatedly discredited for racist abuse by their almost totally white staff against a predominately black prison population and exposed as unneeded. I was one of numerous prisoners housed in ROSP’s so-called gang pods where these rivalries were manipulated by VA officials. I am an identified East Coast Blood leader.” (7)

While in the ‘gang pod’ in 2010 I circulated a random survey to which 18 of the 22 prisoners housed in the cell block immediately responded. The responses were telling, especially concerning the systemic false labeling of prisoners as gang members by “gang specialist” Sgt. Adams and others at ROSP, and his role in putting rival gang members in progressive housing cells together. I wrote an article discussing that survey and what it revealed about ROSP in the victims’ own words. (8) Victims who mostly didn’t even communicate or get along with each other, but who spoke with one voice about conditions and mistreatments at ROSP.

As the gang wars became more deeply entrenched at WRSP and ROSP, many were transferred between other VDOC prisons across the state where the gang presence and conflicts followed and grew. From this process I and others witnessed the literal creation of huge gang presence and rivalries in Va prisons, where none had previously existed, which also spread to the streets. All manufactured by officials at ROSP and WRSP, some of whom still work at these prisons, like J. Bentley.

If the public could have seen and known that prison officials caused the development and proliferation of this situation, and the consequent violence and suffering endured by those in these prisons and our communities, there would definitely have been massive push back against these prisons. And there still should be push back now demanding that these places be closely scrutinized by the public and closed down.

ROSP AND WRSP SECRET SOLITARY CONFINEMENT PROGRAM

In 2011 the United Nations declared that solitary confinement is torture and should not be applied for more than two weeks – a position adopted into international standards designated as the Mandela Rules.

WRSP and ROSP were both designed as 1200 bed solitary confinement prisons – meaning Va officials in their inhumanity intended to keep 2400 people in permanent isolation, and repeatedly lied to the public to accomplish this. Because of their design these prisons have not been able to efficiently operate as anything else. Efforts to modify and run them as lower security prisons have proven cumbersome and wasteful of resources.

The VDOC has always used solitary confinement leaving prisoners in isolation for decades on end, which was the designed purpose of ROSP and WRSP. Va officials just change the name of the confinement every few years but it remains solitary confinement. 2011 marked my own 17th year in solitary in VA – thirteen of which I’d spent at ROSP and WRSP. At that time Va was coming under sustained public challenge for its abuse of solitary including against Virgin Island prisoners who were being held in isolation indefinitely at WRSP for merely growing dreadlocks as part of their religious practice.

The next year during Feb, I was transferred out of state where I remained in “domestic exile” for nearly 10 years. That Sept. the VDOC created a newly named solitary confinement program at ROSP and WRSP called the “segregation step-down program.” This program was created and enforced under a secret policy written by ROSP officials not the VDOC director. And while this program still exists, VDOC officials have persisted to the public that they no longer have solitary confinement in their prisons.

This lie was exposed in a federal class action lawsuit brought in 2019 by several Va prisoners who had been held under the ROSP/WRSP step-down program, which the federal court found to be both solitary confinement and unconstitutional. (9) Va officials have persisted that the program isn’t solitary because they now call it by the euphemism “restorative housing,” as if changing the name changes its conditions.

Thing is the Va legislature passed a new law on March 23, 2023 setting limits on the conditions and uses of solitary confinement (restorative housing) in Va prisons. (10) In defiance of this law the ROSP/WRSP step down program continues just as it was designed in 2012 – eleven years before the new law was passed. The illegal program sets solitary at a minimum of 1-2 years and can be extended arbitrarily with all privileges denied by minor staff for decades.

The ROSP/WRSP program was created by a secret ROSP policy unavailable to the public. (11) However the new Va solitary law requires that all policies governing restorative housing be written by VDOC director and requires facility wardens to transition prisoners directly back to GP from solitary “as soon as safely possible,” with weekly reviews. As said the conditions of the step down program have already been found inhumane and unconstitutional by VA federal courts.  These conditions exist specifically because the public denied access to the ROSP/WRSP step down policy and have been led to believe that VA prisons no longer practice solitary.

The public has already been protesting solitary in Va for years, which is why the VDOC has been hiding the fact that they continue to impose solitary at these two remote prisons that were designed to inflict this inhumane condition permanently on 2400 Va prisoners. The VDOC must be compelled to close down these wasteful and unneeded prisons by the public – prisons which have been used for 25 years to torture and kill us, inflict systemic racist terror and abuse, and create havoc in our lives and communities hidden from public view. I have only given a sampling of the extreme corruption and abuse that plague these prisons. It is they not us who are beyond rehabilitation and without motivation to change.

OFFICIALS ATTEMPT TO SILENCE ME

Much of the abuse I have met with and efforts to isolate me at the hands of Va officials, including my decade in domestic exile, have been in efforts to silence me; to stop me from publicly exposing abuses which officials wish to keep secret. Secrecy and lack of public response is how these abuses are able to exist. Abuses that end up impacting the public negatively like the gang proliferation and gang wars manufactured at the ROSP and WRSP and spread far beyond, even to the streets, and the millions in taxpayer money wasted every year in continuing to operate these unjustified and unneeded solitary confinement – designed prisons.

When I temporarily returned to the VDOC in 2018 from domestic exile I was first held in a completely empty cellblock at ROSP then moved to death row at Sussex 1 State Prison although I never had a death sentence. The three prisoners then remaining on death row were told by the warden not to interact with me. This was to isolate me from others in efforts to stop me from publicizing abuses suffered by them at the hands of VDOC officials. They have always tried to isolate and silence me.

Since my recent transfer back to ROSP on Oct. 30, 2023, I have been held in the notorious B-3 cellblock where I have no access to a kiosk so I cannot correspond using messages on the JPay tablets as all other VDOC and ROSP prisoners are allowed to do on a daily basis. My telephone access has been cut off (on my present solitary confinement status I’m allowed two 20 minute calls per month), and several fabricated disciplinary charges have been written against me for purposes of imposing lengthy telephone restrictions whereby I will be banned for months on end from using the telephone altogether.

When I arrived at ROSP on Oct. 30th, the warden Rick White came to my cell and told me in so many words that if I don’t generate negative publicity against ROSP he would have me released to GP, otherwise I’d remain in solitary and they would make life difficult for me. I never had an easy time in prison. I rebuked him and walked away from the cell door. The next day the assistant warden Dwayne Turner came to my cell with this own version of the same proposition, which received the same response from me. I was promptly flooded with fabricated disciplinary charges and put in for placement in the illegal ROSP/WRSP long term solitary confinement step down program.

When I recently sent out two articles about prisoners being abused here at ROSP, (these articles went out on Nov 26th and 29th) that were promptly published, (12) the two main prisoners who I wrote about, Charles Coleman and Randy Lassiter, were both immediately moved to other cellblocks away from me, not to stop their continued abuse but to stop me from publicizing it.

ROSP officials have gone so far as to deny me legal calls and placed signs on my cell door forbidding me from being given the telephone. They just did the same to the prisoner next to me because he made calls to publishers with whom I work with messages from me.

The objective of all this is clear, ROSP officials want to keep what happens in these dens of racism and corruption secret and go to every extreme to silence those who I aim to expose them. As the federal court stated in the opinion quoted at the beginning of this article, Va officials have long refused to recognize that prisons are part of the community and their administrations are not fiefs unto themselves. It is the public’s right to know what officials are doing and to protest and hold them accountable for their wrongs. These are basic principles of democratic government. ROSP and WRSP have been located and operated for 25 years in the most remote regions of Va for the very purpose of keeping the public ignorant of abuses going on inside them. Abuses that rival and exceed things done by history’s worst tyrants and butchers.

These inhumane prisons must be exposed and shut down as soon as humanly possible!

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

__________________________

Endnotes:

1. Landmon v. Royster, 354 F. Supp. 1292, 1299 (E.D. Va. 1973).

2. Jamie Fellner, “Red Onion State Prison: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Virginia” (N.Y.: Human Rights Watch, 1999) Http:// www.hrw.org/reports/1999redonion/

3. I discussed Robert Gleason in two articles: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Under New Administration Torture Unit Closes Down and Reopens at Red Onion State Prison. And Prisons Abuses on the Rise” (2011) Http:// rashidmod.com/?p=317
   Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “From Bad to Worse: Transferred from Red Onion to Wallens Ridge State Prison”  (2012) http:// rashidmod.com/?p=334

4. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson. “When Given a Voice the Voiceless Speak as One: A Random Survey Confirms Pervasive Racism, Abuse and Corruption at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison” (2010) Http:// rashidmod.com/?p=435

5. Amnesty International, “Cruelty in Control? The Stun Belt and Other Electroshock Weapons In Law Enforcement” (2002) http:// totse2.com/totse/end/law/justice_for_all/gtrsform.html

6. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Kill Yourself or Liberate Yourself: The REAL U.S. Imperialist Policy on Gang Violence Versus the Revolutionary Alternative” (2010) http:// rashidmod.com/?p=626

7. Kofi Donker a.k.a. L.I., “Blood in the Clenched Fist Alliance” (2022) http:// rashidmod.com/?p=3195

8. See article cited in note 4, above

9. See, Thorpe v. Va Dept of Corr., 2021 U.S. Dist LEXIS 112204 (June 15, 2021), affirmed, Thorpe v Clarke , 2022 U.S. App. Lexis 16351 (4th Cir. VA, Sept 4, 2022)

10. See, Code of Virginia section 53.1-39.2 (restorative housing; limitations on use)

11. ROSP Local Operating Procedure 830.A (Restorative Housing Reduction Step-Down Program)

12. See, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Another Virginia Prisoner Suffering Life-Threatening Medical Neglect” (2023); and Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Beating Time: Racist Abuse Continues at Red Onion State Prison” (2023). Both available at rashidmod.com