PRISONERS TREATED WORSE THAN DOGS (2024) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

On Apr 2, 2024, at Virginia’s Sussex 1 State Prison, Rivan, a prison attack dog, was killed. He was allegedly stabbed to death by a Latino prisoner who the dog had been sicced on by guards.

In the days that followed the animal’s demise, the local news media frequently bemoaned him, and even featured the Director of Virginia’s prison system, Chadwick Dotson, giving a eulogy to the dog.

As I witnessed all of this, I couldn’t help reflecting on the narratives enslaved Blacks who frequently protested that the dogs that were used to terrorize, maul and often kill them were treated better than they were. Hence the term, “Treated worse than a dog.”

The comparison is apt.

Since not even a year before Rivan’s death, Sussex guards had beaten a prisoner to death, but there was no mention of the event in the media even once.

And who can count the number of Va prisoners unjustifiably mauled by prison attack dogs like Rivan, who received no sympathy from officials or any mention to the public? Prisoners such as Curtis Garrett, who put up no resistance but was mauled by two dogs and beaten by guards at the same Sussex 1 prison on Christmas day in 2018, losing the use of an arm and leg as a result. Or Walter Kissee who is now crippled and confined to a wheelchair from having a huge chunk of his leg ripped out by an attack dog at Va’s River North prison on Apr 13, 2024, (only eleven days after Riven died), as he lay on the floor in handcuffs and shackles, blinded by mace, and not resisting. Not a word was heard in the media about Walter’s barbaric treatment and suffering, however.

Yet one sees routine television commercials where donations and sympathetic appeals are sought and made on behalf of neglected and abused animals, like those of the ASPCA. What about the neglected and abused humans in Va prisons? We’re not even worthy of the consideration of a dog.

The sordid history of the use of hounds to carry out the genocidal extermination of the Native peoples of this region like the Tianos, and to terrorize, maim and kill enslaved Blacks across the Amerikan South is all but forgotten.

The U.S. public has become so desensitized to state violence against people of color that using carnivorous animals to bite and rip through human muscle, tendons, nerves and bone doesn’t even raise alarm. Yet, hundreds of years ago during the slave era, the exact same acts were deemed barbaric and prompted writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe to write books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her later books, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, that more deeply explored the use of hounds to terrorize enslaved Blacks and hunt fugitive slaves, and their ingenious resistance against these animals. In fact the wide scale repulsion against using dogs on enslaved and escaped Blacks was a huge motive force behind white support for Abolition. (1)

Indeed such famous slave hymns as “Wade in the Water,” were songs crafted to instruct escaped slaves to use waterways to conceal their scents from hounds sent to hunt them down.

Images of police dogs set on Black protestors in 1960s Montgomery, Alabama elicited international support for the Civil Rights Movement. And prompted Malcolm X to remark that the white hoods and attack hounds of the old South were traded in for blue uniforms and police dogs. This is still true today, especially in Va’s remote prisons where rural segregated whites in guard uniforms allow attack dogs to maul prisoners of color for fun. As Malcolm X counseled the victims of such barbarity:

“If a dog is biting a Black man the Black man should kill the dog. Whether the dog is a police dog or any kind of dog. If a dog is sicced on a Black man when that Black man is doing nothing but trying to take advantage of what the government says is supposed to be his, then that Black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sics the dog on him.”

Perhaps Rivan’s fate came in response to the Latino man’s heeding Malcolm’s advice or remembering how dogs had been historically used to exterminate Brown people of this region just like himself. But of course any such idea of fending off attacks by dogs is unspeakable, as people of color have never enjoyed the right to defend ourselves, not even against being attack by carnivorous animals, and we are expected to accept that we are not worthy of being treated any better than a dog.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!

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Endnotes:

1. Larry H. Spruill, “Slave Patrols, ‘Packs of Negro Dogs’ and Policing Black Communities,” Pylon 53 (1)