ARE YOU AN INFORMANT? A QUESTION EVERY PRISONER TODAY MUST ASK THEMSELF (2024) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

It’s almost depressing how deeply snitch culture has become ingrained in today’s prison culture. Only a few decades ago, prisoners set specific limits on how we engaged with guards and refused to entertain conversations with officials about other prisoners or give credibility to negative rumors about any prisoner unless there was credible proof.

Today, however, the pigs can say most anything against a prisoner to other prisoners and the information is accepted and spread as fact without scrutiny or question. I can’t count how often I hear prisoners say, “Officer so-and-so said this or that about this prisoner so it must be true.” Since when did prisons officials become a credible source of information about or among us?

I now see and truly grasp the effects of the removal and isolation of conscious prisoners from the general prisoner populations that began in the 1970s and the purge of the old ‘convict code’ from among us. The result is that the pigs have successfully reeducated prisoners into adopting their own value system so that today a snitch culture predominates. Most prisoners are now informants and don’t even realize it. I should explain.

For those who don’t remember the divide and rule games that pigs play, and who somehow believe the pigs are their friends and peers, you need to understand foremost that there are TWO TYPES OF INFORMANTS – or people who peddle information for the pigs. One type is the person who GIVES INFORMATION TO THE PIGS about their peers, the other type is the person who SPREADS MISINFORMATION FOR THE PIGS among their peers.

Those who take things the pigs say and repeat/spread them to others are the latter type if informant.

The most common types of rumor the pigs create and have informants spread, is false character attacks on people they want to see targeted or discredited. Often the slander consists of the pigs falsely labelling someone as a snitch, or a pedophile or some other stigma that will undermine the person’s character and credibility and incite others against them with violence. It was because we knew that the pigs played these types of divide and conquer games that ‘conscious’ prisoners and convicts never accepted anything cops or prison officials said about any prisoner at face value, nor engaged in conversations with them about others. It’s common sense really.

Spreading this sort of pig slander was called “snitch jacketing” or “bad-jacketing” someone.

Professor and renowned AmerIndian political leader Ward Churchill broke the practice down in his study of the counterintelligence methods used by the FBI against the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement, which often included bad-jacketing leading members. He also observed that the method is often used by prison officials to sow violent division between and against prisoners they fear or dislike.

Here’s Ward:

“‘Snitch jacketing’ or ‘bad-jacketing’ refers to the practice of creating suspicion – through the spread of rumors, manufacture of evidence, etc, – that bona fide organizational members, usually in key positions, are FBI/police informers, guilty of such offenses as skimming organizations funds and the like. The purpose of this tactic was to ‘isolate and eliminate’ organizational leadership; such efforts were continued – and in some instances accelerated – when it became known that the likely outcome would be extreme physical violence visited upon the ‘jacketed’ individual(s). Bad-jacketing was a very commonly used technique [by the FBI and police].” (1)

Churchill went on to quote Jo Durden-Smith’s book “Who Killed George Jackson” on the frequent use of bad-jacketing by prison officials. Jo wrote:

“This ‘bad jacketing’ technique, [is] well known in prisons where guards are adept at turning members of a group against each other….”

So, for those prisoners who blindly embrace and repeat rumors and reputation attacks on other prisoners coming from officials, you are in fact an informant.

I have not only had prisoners, but even people on the outside, embrace and spread rumors created by prison officials against me, even when they recognized the bad-jacketing game to be a common ploy used by the pigs to attack, discredit and incite division and violence against those who oppose them. I talk a little about this occurring over the years in my first book Defying the Tomb.

Most recently I experienced this at Red Onion State Prison in Oct 2024 where numerous prisoners in a GP cellblock I was housed in witnessed to my attorneys that ranking guards were openly bad-jacketing me to them and even propositioning them to take out hits on me. Although none acted on these rumors, at least one prisoner, Dennis Webb, was successfully appealed to by Red Onion officials to give a statement to investigators that I had tried to procure weapons to use on staff who had been spreading such rumors, for which I was thrown in solitary confinement. This snitch not only gave this statement against me, but he went further to tell the investigators he was going to kill me so they’d keep us separate from one another going forward. As a result I was transferred to GP at Virginia’s Keen Mountain prison.

We need to reeducate today’s prisoners, who have no idea that most of them are outright informants and snitches for guards and police, and have the backward desire to impress and befriend the pigs instead of recognizing them as their oppressors and the real opposition.

As the slogan went a few decades ago, “STOP SNITCHING!”

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!
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Endnotes:

1. Ward Churchill, AGENTS OF REPRESSION: THE FBI’S SECRET WARS AGAINST THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, (South End Press; Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 49

2. Jo Durden-Smith, WHO KILLED GEORGE JACKSON? (Alfred A. Knopf; NY, 1976)